Saidiya Hartman and Sheetal Chhabria maneuver their respective archives in very different ways. Where Hartman chooses photographs of Black American life, and writes of their subjects like one would write of an old friend, Chhabria shows us a table, Bombay census data from around the same time Hartman’s photographs were taken, she asks what doesn’t it say? And what does that reveal about shifting typologies of “the city,” “the economy,” and “the house?” While Hartman excavates the image in search of a subject, Chhabria lifts data from the archive in search of the gaps, and what they reveal.
While their approaches to (very different) archival materials diverge, Chhabria and Hartman both are working through—to varying extents—the codifications of this historic material, and their impacts on the archive’s subject/object. Saidiya Hartman writes, “[…] captions index the life of the poor. The words police and divide: Negro quarter. Announce the vertical order of life: Damaged Goods. Make domestic space available for scrutiny and punishment: One-room moral hazard. Declaim the crime of promiscuous social arrangements: Eight Persons Occupy One Bedroom…” (20). In this excerpt Hartman exposes the descriptive categories of Black life in the interwar period, categories enforced by words typed on the picture of an empty room. These descriptive categories are epistemic tools (and ontological ones) sketching out ways of reading and measuring “wayward lives.”
Chhabria analyzes at length the constitution of “the city,” “the economy,” and finally of “housing” —as opposed to “shelter.” The genealogy of these typologies is useful in understanding the interdependence of these terms as practices. Perhaps comparing Hartman’s captions to Chhabria’s genealogy is a false equivalence… However, I do think that the caption and the categorization of space both enable a type of taxonomic measurement which, according to Chhabria, “provide[s] a register through which life in the city c[an] be rendered technical and become officially legible and governable” (112). Chhabria, in her second and third chapters particularly, analyzes the ways famines in the 1830s and 1870s and the plague in 1896 provided opportunities for Bombay to re-invent itself; she writes: “Projects of city making are undertaken again and again, making the city anew at each turn. Shifting rationales of exclusion, inclusion, and problematization serve the needs of city making. Conceiving of the city in this way, as an effect, provides a genealogy of urban modernity with ‘the slum’ as its internal counterpart” (179). What new categories emerge in the twenty first century? What “rationales of exclusion” are being produced by the current pandemic? This crisis is certainly being instrumentalized to invent “new cities.” What will they look like? Who will they be for?
Sources:
Chhabria, Sheetal. Making the Modern Slum the Power of Capital in Colonial Bombay. Seattle, WA: University of Washington Press, 2019.
Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals. London: Serpent’s Tail, 2021.
