Document Type

Article

Publication Title

Harvard Journal of Law & Gender

Abstract

Historians have struggled to overcome the limitations of archives that record the presence, but rarely capture the voices, of marginalized people. In her prize-winning book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Saidiya Hartman offers histories of African American women at the turn of the 20th century. Hartman works from archives that contain sparse and primarily bureaucratic information about her subjects, and few, if any, of their own words and thoughts. She therefore fills in unknowable experiences and subjective states to imagine lives lost to history. Conventionally verifiable facts and preserved photographic images are chord progressions upon which Hartman improvises plausibly harmonious lived melodies. Similarly, Marisa Fuentes has written of the difficulties of "narrating ephemeral archival presences" while meeting a scholarly obligation "to construct unbiased accounts. "Working with a "desire[ ] ... to recover what might never be recoverable and to allow for uncertainty, unresolvable narratives, and contradictions," Fuentes recounts the lives of enslaved women in 18th century Barbados in a prize-winning book that takes deliberate account of the silencing and distortion that result from reliance on archives generated and preserved by dominant others. We, too, have looked for lost voices and the stories they might tell. We want to uncover, and understand, the human stories behind significant Supreme Court cases. Moreover, we seek to clarify the relationship between a court's appreciation of the lived stories that give rise to a case and the doctrinal narratives or legal interpretations with which a court responds to the human experience. In particular, we have been pondering a Supreme Court opinion from the late 19th century: United States v. Harris, 106 U.S. 629 (1883).

First Page

217

Volume

44

Publication Date

2021

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