How Saidiya Hartman Retells the History of Black Life

October 27, 2020 2:25 PM

In three books and a series of essays, Hartman has explored the interior lives of enslaved people and their descendants, employing a method that she says “troubles the line between history and imagination.” Her iconoclastic thinking on the legacy of slavery in American life has prefigured the current cultural moment. In 2008, five years before Black Lives Matter was founded, she wrote of “a past that has yet to be done, and the ongoing state of emergency in which black life remains in peril.” Her writing has become a lodestar for a generation of students and, increasingly, for politically engaged people outside the academy.
posted by Ahmad Khani (3 comments total)

In “Scenes of Subjection,” her subjects endure vicious circumstances through acts of imagination, making a way out of no way; they evaded work on plantations and, after Emancipation, refused to enter into contracts with their former masters. Hartman told me that her goal was to shift Black lives from the “object of scholarly analysis” to the basis for an “argument that challenged the assumptions of history.” Once, while she was discussing “Scenes of Subjection” with her class at Columbia, a student expressed surprise that she gave the words of a slave the same weight as those of Foucault. “Yeah,” she responded. “Exactly.”

posted by Ahmad Khani at 3:04 PM on October 27, 2020

Hartman knew that such a counter-history would be seen as less legitimate. “History pledges to be faithful to the limits of fact, evidence, and archive,” she wrote. “I wanted to write a romance that exceeded the fictions of history.” But a conventional history of the girls’ experience was impossible. As she noted, “There is not one extant autobiographical narrative of a female captive who survived the Middle Passage.”

This is wonderful, Ahmad Khani. Thanks for posting.
posted by cgc373 at 3:07 PM on October 27, 2020 [1 favorite]

I agree, wonderful!
posted by mareli at 6:19 AM on October 28, 2020