Sarah Levin-Richardson, University of Washington
How can scholars overcome the omissions and misrepresentations that characterize historical evidence in general, and especially evidence about enslaved individuals and other groups on the margins of societies? In this talk, I offer Saidiya Hartman’s methodology of critical fabulation—used by her to re-animate the silenced voices of captives on the trans-Atlantic slave route and of Black women in early 20th-century New York and Philadelphia (2007, 2008, 2019)—as one way forward (see also Kamen and Levin-Richardson 2022). I apply it to the case of a 1st-century CE enslaved woman named Eutychis whose sexual services were advertised in the entranceway to the House of the Vettii at Pompeii (VI.15.1; Eutychis / vern<a> a(ssibus) II / moribus bellis, “Eutychis, homeborn slave with charming ways, for 2 asses” [CIL 4.4592 Add. p. 1841]). The resulting set of archive-based short stories exposes the complex affective landscape that enslaved individuals faced, shows the personal consequences that an empire built on slavery had for those held in servitude, and demands that scholars acknowledge and reckon with the daily horrors of ancient slavery.
I begin with an overview of Hartman’s approach, which involves “listening for the unsaid, translating misconstrued words, and refashioning disfigured lives” while “respect[ing] the limits of what cannot be known” (Hartman 2008 2, 4). In practice, this methodology involves narrating a historically-attested moment from multiple perspectives. Each re-telling reframes the same set of archival details to explore the physical and emotional points of view of those involved. I then offer selections of critical fabulations written from the perspective of Eutychis, of an enslaved doorman, of an enslaved cook, of a freeborn daughter, and of a mater familias, building from the abundant material archive of the house itself (see, e.g., Mau 1896, Clarke
1991, Fredrick 1995, Clarke 1998, Severy-Hoven 2012). Through these narratives, I explore multiple potential authors of the graffito and their possible motivations; multiple potential life histories of Eutychis; and, most importantly, the emotional implications of Eutychis having been
born into slavery and then being prostituted (cf. Rawson 2010 and Sigismund-Nielsen 2013 on the “privileged” statue of vernae).
In the process, I discuss the potential ethical issues with using this methodology, including ventriloquizing the dead, replicating the viewpoint of slaveholders, focusing voyeuristically on violence or trauma, or, in Édouard Glissant’s words, reducing the subject of our inquiry “to a truth [they] would not have generated on [their] own” (1997: 194). In response, I advocate for not using the first-person perspective; including moments of play, supportive relationships in the enslaved community, romantic love (including queer love), and hope; and thinking deeply about what our subjects might want known about their lives, and what “opacity” (à la Glissant) they might demand if they could speak to us from the past. Ultimately, this methodology provides a way to test out scholarly hypotheses using even the smallest evidentiary traces in the historical archive, while making vivid and impactful the lives of those we study.