Depressing narratives, agency and morality - Session 13

Let me begin by saying that it is extremely difficult to write anything about this piece; what does one say about it? Nothing would do justice to it and everything one would say will be inadequate. But I suppose one way to think about it is to recognize that we read these narratives not to offer anything back but to learn something ourselves and judging by the book she writes, I imagine she would not have a problem with us using her work for our own selfish reasons. That is the thing that strikes me about this book, the immense generosity of it. When talking about the character of her 'master' and his wife, she writes; "Had it not been for slavery, he would have been a better man, and his wife a happier woman." This ability to look beyond her own pain and bring attention to the oppressiveness of the system on both the oppressed and the oppressor is perhaps the greatest part about this book. I'm reminded of that phrase in Pedagogy of the Oppressed by Friere; "This, then, is the great humanistic and historical task of the oppressed: to liberate themselves and their oppressors as well".

On the issue of agency;
I constantly reflected back to previous sessions and our discussions on the issue of agency and compared them with how agency manifested itself in this narrative. We see how agency is not something absolute and can almost never been without recognition of the context in which it is practiced. For me, Jacobs choosing to have a relationship with one man over Dr. Flint is the limit of her agency. Her agency, being stuck between a rock and a hard place is limited to choosing who she gets 'disgraced' by. I think this allows us to think through the issue of agency. This isn't just limited to that particular choice but throughout her narrative. Her choosing to leave her children (which means that they end up in jail) is another exercise of agency. The point being, if we are to engage in an ethical history writing and representation, the attention to context is supremely important. It goes back to the issue that we discussed when reading Spivak and Saba Mehmood. There are obviously special contexts in which people make special decisions. For a historian, and especially a 'subaltern historian', paying attention to these issues is supremely important but because only then can we truly re-present the actions and choices that individuals make.

Related to the issue of agency is the idea of Morality. At one point in the narrative, Jacobs herself writes about how being able to live a virtuous life is a luxury granted only to the free. In many ways, what this forced me to think about, more than anything else, was how we can expand the notion of 'privilege' itself. While not arguing for some idealized notion of a 'subaltern', it is supremely important to note that the ability to exercise 'moral' actions is severely hampered by the choices available to us. On a second level, it is worth pondering over the idea Jacobs presents that slaves (subalterns in general?) have a rubric of morality of their own. At the outset, this idea makes sense. That ethics need to be seen on a subjective plain makes sense but then, what do we do with some form of universal ethics? One way perhaps of making sense of it is to see the domain of ethical action as not being being defined in strict categories and actions but being on a spectrum and certain extraordinary conditions, such as that of slavery (or of subalternity?) might expand the domain of ethical actions. This is important because this goes back to the issues we discussed in Saba Mehmood; I'm merely drawing a comparison to think through the idea of ethics; the situations are obviously not comparable.