Attempting Redress: Fungibility, Ethics, and Redressive Practice in the Work of Saidiya Hartman

This paper explores Saidiya Hartman's undertheorized account of 'redress' in conversation with the extensive uptake of her work on Black fungibility, subjection, and critiques of emancipation. Although Hartman uses the term in nearly all of her writing, little work has been done to clarify how Hartman conceptualizes redress as a response to the constitution of Black lives as abstract, exchangeable, and disposable. This paper offers an account of how Hartman theorizes redress, showing how it both resists, and acts as a mechanism for, the constitution of Blackness as fungible. Consequently, I argue that Hartman's readers fundamentally skew her thinking in divorcing redress from her other key concepts.