… was a big deal as a novel (which I haven’t read), and they made a mini-series out of it, which I watched on Netflix, and it was good. But. There was a character, Stephen Black – and I imagine he must also have been in the book, because he is key to the narrative – who is a free black servant. And – toward the end of episode 3 – The Gentleman (bad guy) is beguiling Stephen into his service by reminding him of the misery into which he was  born, in the hold of a slave ship. What I am fixated on here is the portrayal of the slave-ship scene, which – I don’t have language for this. It is about the visuals. In many ways the show turns on its art direction: the lighting, the colours, the use of chiaroscuro. And one consistent aspect of that art direction is the costuming: it’s a period piece, and most of the characters are at least middle class, and so there’s a great deal of splendor, in dress and in the sets. And then, in the alternative world to which people are spirited away (the Faerie kingdom of Lost-Hope), the visuals become even more extravagant: everything is white, everyone is very pale, the costumes are glorious, the hairstyles are extravagant. It’s excessively decorative, and suffused with a cold light. And in the middle of all of that, dropped down like a descent into some kind of hell, is this scene from the dark hold of a slave ship in which not only the labouring woman, but everyone, is naked. There is, visually, nothing else like it in the show, at any other point. Here are black people, reduced to bare life, and to a spectacle of misery, but misery at such a level that they’re not even really figured as human; they cannot be made or seen as equivalent to the other humans in the show. Their misery and their naked suffering bodies are no more than spectacle. The scene ends with the dead, naked body of the woman who has given birth (to Stephen, we are told) being dragged out on a sheet, eyes open, staring and fixed.

I would need Hartman, and Agamben, and probably Christina Sharpe’s In the Wake, were I try to write something longer on this. Which might not be worth it – it’s not that this hasn’t been said before. It was just so jarring, because I was enjoying the show. And Stephen Black is a distinguished character – a man of considerable dignity and a clear sense of self. And the only one treated to this kind of carnivalesque, voyeuristic stripping down. And I – who had been summoned into the show as a viewer, any viewer, my disbelief happily suspended – was suddenly and violently cast out of it by the reminder, yet again, of how easily, how casually our bodies are reduced to and for the aesthetic or symbolic purposes of white culture-makers, however profound or trivial.