Saidiya Hartman

Saidiya Hartman is a professor at Columbia University specializing in African American literature and history. She grew up in Brooklyn and received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and Ph.D. from Yale University.

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. 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. She is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997) and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). 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 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 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 toolong 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.”

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