An Insurgent Ecology of Gestures: Saidiya Hartman’s Critical Fabulation as Ecopoetics

Abstract

The article explores the work of Saidiya Hartman, and in particular her staging of Black queer desires in Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, from the point of view of ecocritical and new materialist epistemologies, suggesting how Hartman’s method of writing and research can be considered part of an “ecopoetics” – that is, of practices of knowing and dwelling that oppose the essentialist, economic, and sociological determinations of the “environments” and “natures” that participate in the articulation of structural racism. Habits and pleasures appear in Hartman’s work as something else than a determinable product of their regulation and form instead a broader texture of resistant and lively relations and dependencies that breaks with the sanctioned and the expected – a queer, insurgent, ecology of gestures. In this way, the lives of Black queer women in early 20th Century US slums and ghettoes Hartman writes about can be proposed as a paradigm of what Catriona Mortimer-Sandilands calls “eco-sexual resistance,” where what is stressed through the ecocritical framework is the radical interdependency and the common and contingent, material and sensuous, dimension of every political act.