Saidiya Hartman

Saidiya Hartman (born 1961) is an American

academic and writer focusing on African-American Saidiya Hartman
studies. She is currently a professor at Columbia
University in their English department.[1][2] Her work
focuses on African-American literature, cultural
history, photography and ethics, and the intersections
of law and literature.

Early life
Hartman was born in 1961[3] and grew up in Brooklyn,
New York. She earned a B.A. from Wesleyan
University and Ph.D. from Yale University.[4]

Career Hartman in 2020

Born 1961 (age 62–63)
Hartman worked at the University of California, Nationality American
Berkeley, from 1992 to 2006 in the Department of
Education Wesleyan University (BA)
English and African American Studies.[3] In 2007
Yale University (PhD)
Hartman joined the faculty of Columbia University,
specializing in African-American literature and Occupation(s) Writer, academic
history.[5] In 2020 she was promoted to University Known for MacArthur Fellow
Professor at Columbia.[6]

Hartman has been a Fulbright, Rockefeller, Whitney Oates, and University of California President's
Fellow and was awarded the 2007 Narrative Prize from Narrative Magazine and the Gustav Myers Award
for Human Rights.[7][8] Hartman won a MacArthur "genius grant" in 2019.[9]

She was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022.[10] Also in 2022, she
was elected a Royal Society of Literature International Writer[11]

Fields of interest
Hartman's major fields of interest are African-American and American literature and cultural history,
slavery, law and literature, gender studies, and performance studies.[12] She is on the editorial board of
the journal Callaloo.
She is the author of the influential Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-
Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997), Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave
Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories
of Social Upheaval (W. W. Norton, 2019).[13] Hartman's "essays have been widely published and
anthologized."[4][14]

Theoretical concepts
Hartman introduces the idea of "critical fabulation" in her article "Venus in Two Acts," although she
could be said to be engaged in the practice in both of her previously published full-length books, Scenes
of Subjection and Lose Your Mother.[15] The term "critical fabulation" signifies a writing methodology
that combines historical and archival research with critical theory and fictional narrative. Critical
fabulation is a tool that Hartman uses in her scholarly practice to make productive sense of the gaps and
silences in the archive of trans-Atlantic slavery that absent the voices of enslaved women. Hartman
writes: "I think of my work as bridging theory and narrative. I am very committed to a storied articulation
of ideas, but working with concepts as building blocks enables me to think about situation and character
as well as my own key terms."[16]

Hartman also theorizes the "afterlife of slavery"[17] in Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic
Slave Route. The "afterlife of slavery" can be characterized by the enduring presence of slavery's
racialized violence still present in contemporary society. Hartman outlines slavery's imprint on all sectors
of society as evidenced in historical archives that may or may not exist. Hence, the archive lives on
through the social structure of the society and its citizens. Hartman describes this process in detail in Lose
Your Mother: "I wanted to engage the past, knowing that its perils and dangers still threatened and that
even now lives hung in the balance. Slavery had established a measure of man and a ranking of life and
worth that has yet to be undone. If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is
not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but
because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that
were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to
health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of
slavery."[17] Hartman went back to Africa to learn more about slavery and came back having learned
more about herself.

Hartman further fleshes out the afterlives of slavery through the ways in which photographic capture and
enclosure spills into domestic spaces. Hartman exposes the limits of such capture as she describes the
hallway as a regulative, yet intimate space. She writes, "It is inside but public...The hallway is a space
uneasy with expectation and tense with force of unmet desire. It is the liminal zone between the inside
and outside for the one who stays in the ghetto; the reformer documenting the habitat of the poor passes
through without noticing it, failing to see what can be created in cramped space, if not an overture, a
desecration, or to regard our beautiful flaws and terrible ornaments."[13]

Contributions to the understanding of slavery

Hartman has made literary and theoretical contributions to the understanding of slavery.[18] Her first
book, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, is an
examination of, among other topics, the intersection of slavery, gender, and the development of
progressivism in the United States through the exploration of blank genealogies, memory, and the
lingering effects of racism. Working through a variety of cultural materials –- diaries, journals, legal texts,
slave and other narratives, and historical song and dance—Hartman explores the precarious institution of
slave power. Her second book, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007),
confronts the troubled relationships among memory, narratives, and representation. She concentrates on
the "non-history" of the slave, the manner in which slavery "erased any conventional modality for writing
an intelligible past".[5] By weaving her own biography into a historical construction, "she [also] explores
and evokes the non-spaces of black experience—the experience through which the African captive
became a slave, became a non-person, became alienated from personhood.[5] Through these experiences,
came the title: "Because of the slave trade you lose your mother, if you know your history, you know
where you come from. To lose your mother was to be denied your kin, country and identity. To lose your
mother was to forget your past" (85).[19]

Hartman's contributions to understanding slavery caught the attention of UC Irvine's Frank B. Wilderson
III, well known for setting groundwork and coining the phrase "Afro-pessimism". This criticism
examines unflinching paradigmatic analysis on the structures of modernity produced by slavery and
genocide. While he considers her Scenes of Subjection as Afro-pessimist scholarship,[20] Hartman herself
has not called it so.[21]

Contributions to historical archiving

Hartman has contributed insight into the forms and functions of the historical archive, providing both
pointed critiques of and methodological guides to approaching the archive in scholarly work. In both
Scenes of Subjection and Lose Your Mother, Hartman accesses and critically interrogates the historical
archive. In the case of the latter, much of this is done through the combined re-reading of historical
narratives of slavery and through the connection of these narratives to the physical location of Ghana.
Hartman, who centers much of her interrogation of slavery's archive on Elmina Castle, inserts her own
voice as one way to counter the silences surrounding forgotten slaves.[22]

The difficulty of this excavation process is revealed partly in the continued tension between Hartman's
interest in slavery and the rejection of this interest on the part of Ghanaians, who are depicted as
ostracizing Hartman in a number of instances in the text.[17] In addition, and though she draws from
"plantation journals and documents, newspaper accounts, missionary tracts, travel writing ... government
reports, et cetera," Hartman recognizes that "these documents are 'not free from barbarism.'"[23] Arguably
all of Hartman's work is guided by "the impossibility of fully recovering the experience of the enslaved
and the emancipated" from these written accounts, and she reads them "against the grain", knowing that
in her use of these "official" records, she runs "the risk of reinforcing the authority of these documents
even as I try to use them for contrary purposes".[23]

Hartman introduces the concept of narrative restraint in her article "Venus in Two Acts" to delay an
archival impulse to continually register as "a death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body". In
this article, she returns to the slaver Recovery for an exploration that began in Lose Your Mother. Unable
to write about the girl named Venus owing to her brief appearance in the archive, Hartman's attempts to
resuscitate possible narratives for her ultimately lead to failure. She explains, "But in the end I was forced
to admit that I wanted to console myself and to escape the slave hold with a vision of something other
than the bodies of two girls settling on the floor of the Atlantic." Hartman ultimately restrains her desire
to imaginatively recreate Venus's final days, her passages in Lose Your Mother only briefly mentioning
Venus's fate. Her inclusion in "Venus" of the narratives omitted in Lose Your Mother, with the caveat that
such narratives push beyond the boundaries of the archive, leads to the concept of narrative restraint, "the
refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure." While she excavates the historical archive in her attempt to
understand the possibilities for subjectivity for the black slave (in Scenes of Subjection), the possibilities
for African Diasporic community (in Lose Your Mother), a question she in her article "Venus in Two
Acts" serves as a guiding principle and a lesson on archival method: "If it is no longer sufficient to expose
the scandal, then how might it be possible to generate a different set of descriptions from this
archive?"[24]

For example, she quotes John Weskett who opined:

"The insurer takes upon him the risk of loss, capture and death of slaves, or any other
unavoidable accident to them; but natural death is always understood to be expected: by
natural death is meant, not only when it happens by disease or sickness, but also when
the captive destroys himself through despair, which often happens: but when slaves were
killed or thrown into the sea in order to quell an insurrection on their part, then the insurers
must answer."[25]

The Promised Lands

Black people in the Diaspora, with no knowledge of a past, try to imagine a past that is nothing like the
harsh present entangled with murder, humiliation, and incarceration. Such imaginations include the pre-
colonial era of Kings and Queens. Rastafarians envision a sort of replica of such a past into the future
with calls of the downfall of Babylon and a return to the Promised Land. Hartman explains: "The heirs of
slaves wanted a past of which they could be proud, so they conveniently forgot the distinctions between
the rulers and the ruled and closed eyes to slavery in Africa. They pretended that their ancestors had once
worn the king's vestments and assumed grand civilization of Asante as their own."[26] This, coupled with
a longing for belonging only achievable by escaping the brutality of the West's racism and returning to
Africa the homeland, led to disbelief and shock when encountering Ghanaians who favored migrating to
the U.S. to escape the impoverishment of the present. Hartman notes: "African Americans entertained
fantasies of return and Ghanaians of departure. From where we each were standing, we did not see the
same past, nor did we share a common vision of the Promised Land."[27] To the Ghanaians, the Promised
Land is America, the images heavily circulated in movies, music videos, and more, that tell one story of
wealth and prosperity even for Black Americans.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Hartman's work Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls,
Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (2019) explores the lives of various Black women in Harlem
and Philadelphia during the 1890s. Hartman describes the boundaries of Black life and womanhood
through both interracial and intra-racial relationships and examines how Black women's sexuality was
policed and constructed within an ideology of criminality at the turn of the twentieth century. These
"deviant" behaviors are referred to as "wayward" and illustrate how Black women navigate society under
surveillance, violence, and partial or conditional citizenship. The social life of Black women under
surveillance results in these wayward movements being characterized as "illegal". These movements
serve as an act of resistance against not only the state, but the examination of Black life under the guise of
policy researchers, sociologists, and reformers aiming to improve Black women in New York and
Philadelphia. Hartman asks how to imagine Black womanhood outside of the archive and "the
sociological imagination that could only ever recognize her as a problem," invoking Du Bois's famed
question in The Souls of Black Folk: "How does it feel to be a problem?" Wayward Lives, Beautiful
Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval critiques the pathologization of Black women's lives
by constructing a social space of freedom and "waywardness" as acts of world-making and possibility.[28]

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments narrates how the state functioned as a criminalizing force through
laws and regulations that reproduced logics of chattel slavery and patriarchy (e.g. the Tenement House
Act,[29] wayward minor laws and requirements for female performers to apply for a license in order to
perform in men's clothing). Figures including Gladys Bentley, an out butch lesbian performer, regularly
subverted and challenged written and unwritten laws meant to criminalize sexual and gender expression.
In 1952, Bentley published an article[30] in Ebony Magazine detailing her return to womanhood and
marriage to a man in part to continue her career as a performer and as a result of the struggles she
endured as an out-of-the-closet lesbian. Living outside the boundaries of heterosexuality and what passed
as woman, if not directly criminalized by the state, was still considered deviant and punishable outside the
limited spaces created by and for queer folks.

Hartman also writes about the minor lives that easily slip in the archive into oblivion and are
overshadowed by large figures, white and famous men. Photograph 308 in Thomas Eakins' photographic
collection is of a nude African American girl, posed as Venus. Hartman contemplates on the girl's
anonymity, which becomes "a placeholder for all the possibilities and the dangers awaiting young black
women in the first decades of the twentieth century. In being denied a name or, perhaps, in refusing to
give one, she represents all the other girls who follow in her path. Anonymity enables her to stand in for
all the others. The minor figure yields to the chorus. All the hurt and the promise of the wayward are hers
to bear."[31]

Fred Moten also discusses the photograph in an essay titled, "Catalogue Number 308 (The Black
Apparatus Is a Little Girl)," which is in his book Black and Blur.[32] It won the 2019 National Book
Critics Circle Award (Criticism).[33] In 2024, the New York Times listed it as #96 in the top 100 books of
the 21st century.[34]

Works
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls,
Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (W. W. Norton & Company, 2019)
Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux,
2007)
 Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America
(Oxford University Press, 1997)

References
1. Okeowo, Alexis (October 19, 2020). "How Saidiya Hartman Retells the History of Black Life"
(https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2020/10/26/how-saidiya-hartman-retells-the-history-o
f-black-life). The New Yorker. ISSN 0028-792X (https://search.worldcat.org/issn/0028-792X).
Retrieved December 21, 2023.
2. "Saidiya V Hartman | The Department of English and Comparative Literature" (https://englis
h.columbia.edu/content/saidiya-v-hartman). english.columbia.edu. Retrieved November 7,
2023.
3. "Saidiya Hartman - MacArthur Foundation" (https://www.macfound.org/fellows/1038/).
www.macfound.org. Retrieved February 17, 2020.
4. "Saidiya Hartman" (http://www.narrativemagazine.com/authors/saidiya-hartman). Narrative
Magazine. June 6, 2008. Retrieved March 19, 2013.
5. "Saidiya V. Hartman" (http://irwag.columbia.edu/person/svh2102). Institute for Research on
Women & Gender at Columbia University. Retrieved March 19, 2013.
6. "Saidiya Hartman Named University Professor" (https://president.columbia.edu/news/saidiya
-hartman-university-professor). October 15, 2020.
7. "Narrative Prize Winners" (http://www.narrativemagazine.com/node/421). Narrative
Magazine. 2007. Retrieved March 19, 2013.
8. "Institute for Research on Women & Gender" (https://web.archive.org/web/2010062706061
8/http://www.columbia.edu/cu/irwag/pdf-files/vol27aug08.pdf) (PDF). Columbia.edu.
Archived from the original (http://www.columbia.edu/cu/irwag/pdf-files/vol27aug08.pdf)
(PDF) on June 27, 2010. Retrieved March 19, 2013.
9. Gralla, Joan (September 25, 2019). "LIer a 2019 MacArthur 'genius' grant recipient" (https://
www.newsday.com/long-island/zachary-lippman-macarthur-genius-1.36816141). Newsday.
Retrieved September 29, 2019. "Six geniuses live in New York City: theater artist Annie
Dorsen, 45; Mary Halvorson, 38, a jazz and rock guitarist and composer; Saidiya Hartman,
58, a Columbia University professor who traced "the aftermath of slavery in modern
American life"; contemporary dance choreographer Sarah Michelson, 55; artist Cameron
Rowland, 30, for portraying systemic racism; and neuroscientist Vanessa Ruta, 45, who
explores stimuli that affect neural circuits and behaviors, the foundation said."
10. "The American Academy of Arts and Sciences Inducts Six Columbia Faculty Members" (http
s://news.columbia.edu/news/american-academy-arts-and-sciences-inducts-six-columbia-fac
ulty-members). Columbia News. Retrieved May 3, 2022.
11. "RSL International Writers" (https://rsliterature.org/rsl-international-writers/). Royal Society of
Literature. September 3, 2023. Retrieved December 3, 2023.
12. "Saidiya Hartman" (https://www.pbs.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200701/20070126_hartma
n.html), Tavis Smiley. Archived (https://web.archive.org/web/20090626031732/http://www.pb
s.org/kcet/tavissmiley/archive/200701/20070126_hartman.html) June 26, 2009, at the
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13. Hartman, Saidiya V. (2019). Wayward lives, beautiful experiments : intimate histories of
social upheaval. W.W. Norton. ISBN 9780393285673. OCLC 1084731046 (https://search.wo
rldcat.org/oclc/1084731046).
14. " 'Lose Your Mother' Author Finds Heritage in Africa" (https://www.npr.org/templates/story/sto
ry.php?storyId=6955366). NPR. January 23, 2007. Retrieved March 19, 2013.
15. Hartman, Saidiya (July 17, 2008). "Venus in Two Acts" (https://muse.jhu.edu/article/241115).
Small Axe. 12 (2): 1–14. doi:10.1215/-12-2-1 (https://doi.org/10.1215%2F-12-2-1).
ISSN 1534-6714 (https://search.worldcat.org/issn/1534-6714). S2CID 144243349 (https://ap
i.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:144243349).
16. Siemsen, Thora (February 3, 2021). "Saidiya Hartman on working with archives" (https://the
creativeindependent.com/people/saidiya-hartman-on-working-with-archives/).
thecreativeindependent.com. Retrieved February 11, 2020.
17. Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Trade Route Terror.
Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007, p. 6.
18. Neptune, Harvey (Spring 2008). "Loving Through Loss: Reading Saidiya Hartman's History
of Black Hurt" (http://anthurium.miami.edu/volume_6/issue_1/neptune-loving.html).
Anthurium. 6 (1): 6. doi:10.33596/anth.113 (https://doi.org/10.33596%2Fanth.113).
ISSN 1547-7150 (https://search.worldcat.org/issn/1547-7150). Retrieved March 19, 2013.
19. Hartman, Lose Your Mother (2007), p. 85.
20. Wilderson, Frank. "Afro Pessimism" (http://www.incognegro.org/afro_pessimism.html).
Retrieved March 16, 2013.
21. Hartman, Saidiya; Frank Wilderson (2003). "The Position of the Unthought". Qui Parle. 13
(2): 183–201. doi:10.1215/quiparle.13.2.183 (https://doi.org/10.1215%2Fquiparle.13.2.183).
JSTOR 20686156 (https://www.jstor.org/stable/20686156).
22. Hartman, Saidiya. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth-
Century America. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997, p. 116.
23. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection (1997), p. 10.
24. "Venus in Two Acts," Small Axe 26 (June 2008): 1–14, p. 7.
25. Pearson, Robin; Richardson, David (June 2019). "Insuring the Transatlantic Slave Trade" (ht
tps://hull-repository.worktribe.com/output/1152980). The Journal of Economic History. 79
(2): 417–446. doi:10.1017/S0022050719000068 (https://doi.org/10.1017%2FS00220507190
00068). S2CID 159262888 (https://api.semanticscholar.org/CorpusID:159262888).
26. Hartman, Lose Your Mother (2007), p. 164.
27. Hartman, Lose Your Mother (2007), p. 165.
28. Hartman, Saidiya V. (2019). Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments : Intimate Histories of
Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals (First ed.). New York.
ISBN 9780393285673. OCLC 1037810804 (https://search.worldcat.org/oclc/1037810804).
29. "New York State Tenement House Act" (https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=New_York
_State_Tenement_House_Act&oldid=931116717), Wikipedia, December 17, 2019, retrieved
March 20, 2021
30. "I Am A Woman Again - Digital Transgender Archive" (https://www.digitaltransgenderarchive.
net/files/xs55mc356). www.digitaltransgenderarchive.net. Retrieved March 20, 2021.
31. Hartman, Saidiya V. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social
Upheaval. New York, NY: W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2019, p. 16-17
32. Moten, Fred. Black and Blur: consent not to be a single being. Durham, North Carolina:
Duke University Press, 2017, p. 70 - 77
33. Parker, Beth (March 12, 2020). "Announcing the 2019 Award Winners" (https://www.bookcriti
cs.org/2020/03/12/2020-awards/). bookcritics.org. Retrieved March 13, 2020.
34. "The 100 Best Books of the 21st Century" (https://web.archive.org/web/20240708070856/htt
ps://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/books/best-books-21st-century.html). The New York
Times. July 8, 2024. Archived from the original (https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/b
ooks/best-books-21st-century.html) on July 8, 2024. Retrieved July 9, 2024.

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