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.

Fields of interest

Hartman's major fields of interest are African American and American literature and cultural history, slavery, law and literature, 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."

Contributions to the understanding of slavery

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. 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 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 an 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.

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.

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.

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. 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.'" 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."

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' final days, her passages in Lose Your Mother only briefly mentioning Venus' 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?"