Saidiya Hartman

I read it for a study group (with a focus on Deleuze of all things!) and wasn’t fond of it. The politicization of the lived experience of her subjects is off-putting to me. The group was mostly academics and seemed to share the sentiment. People behaving in an “anarchic” way due to circumstance don’t need Wesleyan/Yale educated academics writing papers positioning them in this manner for political reasons.

I have mixed feelings about this text. I really liked what it tried to achieve. There is undoubtedly a distinct lack of these kinds of narratives. As someone who prefers an apolitical, non-organisational approach to anarchy, I'd definitely like to see more of these.

But this 'speculative history'/'critical fabulation' is in my ignorant opinion a terribly terrible approach. The first third was so cringe! The swerfy-ness of it ('She was no prostitute!'). The seemingly self-unaware use -- and worse, the fetishisation -- of the flaneur trope was so lazy and so icky. Can we (and by 'we' I really mean the academia), for once, not look at everything slightly bohemian through the frames of 1870s Paris?? How is this not a form of colonialism? And all those fucking projections and idealisations -- UGH. And then, suddenly, Esther Brown disappears and we get a whole new set of characters to make this messy piece of writing even more confusing.

Anyway, to answer OP's question, no I don't think one needs to explicitly identify as an anarchist and support that by brandishing an appropriate flag, slogans and a club card. Anti-work, relationship anarchy and a revolt against one's subjugation are as anarchist as capitalism/state allows them to be.

I share these previous criticisms.

"Do people have to explicitly call themselves anarchist to be considered anarchic?"

People can call themselves anything they want; what they are doesn't change because of words, or understanding. What people are can never be accurately described or known, in total, by another. Just think about how hard it is to accurately describe or know yourself!

Only a misreading of the key texts of anarchism could ever imagine a place for wayward colored girls.

as Saidiya Hartman says at the start of this essay. 

i saw the essay referred to elsewhere & recognized it as from "Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments" but then realized, upon reading, it was slightly different from the book. so, after seeing the criticism here, i reread it. 

i will quote the full paragraph where Hartman says 'she was no prostitute' because i think Flyx has misread the intent here. 

Esther Brown hated to work, the conditions of work as much as the very idea of work. Her reasons for quitting said as much. Housework: Wages too small. Laundry work: Too hard. Ran away. General Housework: Tired of work. Laundress: Too hard. Sewing buttons on shirts: Tired of work. Dishwasher: Tired of work. Housework: Man too cross. Live-in-service: I might as well be a slave. At age fifteen, when she left school, she experienced the violence endemic to domestic work and tired quickly of the demand to care for others who didn’t care for you. She ran the streets because nowhere else in the world was there anything for her. She stayed in the streets to escape the suffocation of her mother’s small apartment, which was packed with lodgers, men who took up too much space and who were too easy with their hands. She had been going around and mixing it up for a few years, but only because she liked doing it. She never went with men only for money. She was no prostitute. After the disappointment of a short-lived marriage to a man who wasn’t her baby’s father (he had offered to marry her but she rejected him), she went to live with her sister and grandmother and they helped her raise her son. She had several lovers to whom she was bound by need and want, not by the law.

this doesn't seem swerf-y to me at all, but an acknowledgement that Esther Brown did sleep with men other than her husband, as part of the enjoyment of life and as a survival tactic. it also sets us up to understand the mindset of the times (100 years ago) and the petty things that police & law used against Black people to keep them subservient. 

as Hartman says here

What the law designated as crime were the forms of life created by young black women in the city. The modes of intimacy and affiliation being fashioned in the ghetto, the refusal to labor, the forms of gathering and assembly, the practices of subsistence and getting over were under surveillance and targeted by the police as well as the sociologists and the reformers who gathered the information and made the case against them, forging their lives into tragic biographies of poverty, crime, and pathology. 

as to the flaneur-ish bits, i would say Hartman is entirely aware of what she is doing with this. is it out of the realm of possibility that wandering is a thing idle people do no matter where they are? 

as to Hartman's methods of speculative history and critical fabulation, these tools are entirely appropriate, useful and necessary given the lack of, really the suppression of, the absolute undesirability (to officialdom) of 'official' history of people such as Esther Brown. 

the speculation Hartman deploys is not just a story made up whole cloth, i don't think. She is using the bare bones of official documentation to illuminate that the State, police, social workers have always lied and made up law (the part on vagrancy) to keep them powerful and the other powerless. 

personally, her exposition of mutual aid is the best part of this essay - 

 Collaboration, reciprocity, and shared creation defined the practice of mutual aid. It was and remains a collective practice of survival for those bereft of the notion that life and land, human and earth could be owned, traded, and made the private property of anyone, those who would never be self-possessed, or envision themselves as acquisitive self-interested proprietors, or measure their life and worth by the ledger or the rent book, or long to be the settler or the master. Mutual aid did not traffic in the belief that the self existed distinct and apart from others or revere the ideas of individuality and sovereignty, as much as it did singularity and freedom. The mutual aid society survived the Middle Passage and its origins might be traced to traditions of collectivity, which flourished in the stateless societies that preceded the breach of the Atlantic and perdured in its wake. This form of mutual assistance was remade in the hold of the slave ship, the plantation, and the ghetto. It made good the ideals of the commons, the collective, the ensemble, the always-more-than-one of existing in the world. The mutual aid society was a resource of black survival. The ongoing and open-ended creation of new conditions of existence and the improvisation of life-enhancing and free association was a practice crafted in social clubs, tenements, taverns, dance halls, disorderly houses, and the streets.

Esther Brown, btw, does not disappear from the story, she enters Bedford Hills and there the story includes the other young women she was locked up with.

what Saidiya Hartman is doing in her work in speculative history / critical fabulation is filling in the gaps the archival record has a vested interest in keeping. she is trying to write from the perspective of the one's dismissed in official documentation. she is aiming to paint a picture of the lives of people not otherwise seen and her approach means sometimes the voice is hers, sometimes it is who she is writing about, mostly it is a seamless blend of perspectives, giving voice to those written out of history. 

one can say this method is not appropriate or flawed in some way, but what one cannot do is dismiss that this is the stated method. the shifting use of vernacular gives hints about whose perspective is at the forefront. Hartman is on the side of the 'wayward' that much is clear. so, when it reads 'she was no prostitute' my reading ear hears that in the voice of Esther, and i hear it as being anti-work as well as Esther knowing she is not outside the law. because as the rest of the text makes clear, often it did not matter to social workers or police if one was or was not a prostitute, as poor Black girls were already seen that way by officialdom.