“The Thing that Lies at the Other End of Time” is an accompanying essay to Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts.” Looking at Hartman’s writing as a liminal form, exploring the potential ways in which an archive can testify to the intimacy and violence of slavery, the essay positions Hartman alongside other black thinkers – Christina Sharpe and Achille Mbembe – who mark acts of archival work and memory work as different kinds of existing alongside and inside death, particularly that of black lives in the aftermath of slavery. The essay understands Hartman’s and others’ narration and fabulation as ones that have at their heart a fervent undermining of traditional concepts of temporality and historical linearity, and therefore a sense of defiance and refusal with regards to previous disciplinary conventions.

https://doi.org/10.70959/tac.59.2024.241247