Saidiya Hartman

Saidiya Hartman (born 1961) is an American academic and writer focusing on African-American studies.

She is currently a university professor at Columbia University in their English department.

Her work focuses on African-American literature, cultural history, photography and ethics, and the intersections of law and literature.

Hartman was born in 1961 and grew up in Brooklyn, New York.

She earned a B.A. from Wesleyan University and Ph.D. from Yale University.

Hartman worked at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1992 to 2006 in the Department of English and African American Studies.

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).

Hartman's "essays have been widely published and anthologized."

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.

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."

Hartman also theorizes the "afterlife of slavery" 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."

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."

Hartman has made literary and theoretical contributions to the understanding of slavery.

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.

In 2007 Hartman joined the faculty of Columbia University, specializing in African-American literature and history.

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.

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".

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. 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).

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, Hartman herself has not called it so.

Hartman won a MacArthur "genius grant" in 2019.

She was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022.

Also in 2022, she was elected a Royal Society of Literature International Writer

Hartman's major fields of interest are African-American and American literature and cultural history, slavery, law and literature, gender studies, and performance studies.

She is on the editorial board of the journal Callaloo.

In 2020 she was promoted to University Professor at Columbia.