Saidiya Hartman

Saidiya Hartman studied at Wesleyan University and Yale University. The recorded working language is English. Employment is recorded with Columbia University and University of California, Berkeley. Works named in the authority record are Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Distinctions recorded are MacArthur Fellows Program, Guggenheim Fellowship, Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy.

• Name — Saidiya Hartman • Born — 1961 • Birthplace — New York City, U.S. • Education — Wesleyan University (BA) Yale University (PhD) • Notable Works — * Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019) • Lose Your Mother (2006) • Scenes of Subjection (1997) • Known for — Critical fabulation • Awards — MacArthur Fellow • Occupation — Writer, academic

Hartman was born in 1961 and grew up in Brooklyn, New York City. She earned a B.A. from Wesleyan University and Ph.D. from Yale University. She completed her doctoral dissertation, "Performing Blackness: Staging Subjection and Resistance in Antebellum Culture," in American Studies, advised by Alan Trachtenberg.

Hartman worked at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1992 to 2006 in the Department of English and African American Studies. In 2007, Hartman joined the faculty of Columbia University, specializing in African-American literature and history. In 2020, she was promoted to university professor at Columbia. 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. Hartman won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019. She was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022. Also in 2022, she was named 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. She is the author of 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 work has been widely cited.

Hartman introduced the idea of "critical fabulation" in her article "Venus in Two Acts". The term 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. Critical fabulation takes as its point of departure the imbalances in the representation within the archive and the way that imbalance repeats slavery's structural violence. Critical fabulation is a means of telling "an impossible story" and revealing the mechanisms that impede its telling. 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. Hartman outlines slavery's imprint on all sectors of society as evidenced in historical archives, which live on through the social structure of the society and its citizens: "skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment." Hartman further fleshes out the afterlives of slavery through the ways in which photographic capture and enclosure spill into domestic spaces. She writes: "[The hallway] 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."

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. Her second book, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007), confronts the troubled relationships among memory, narratives, and representation. Frank B. Wilderson III, who coined the term Afro-pessimism, praised her as an Afro-pessimist scholar, though Hartman herself has not called it so.

Hartman explains how Black people in the Diaspora, with no knowledge of their past, try to imagine a past promised land: "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." This led to surprise when encountering Ghanaians who favored migrating to the U.S. to escape impoverishment. Hartman notes: "From where we each were standing, we did not see the same past, nor did we share a common vision of the Promised Land."

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 critiques how Black women's sexuality was policed and constructed within an ideology of criminality at the turn of the twentieth century. She illustrates how Black women navigate society under surveillance, violence, and partial or conditional citizenship. Their movements serve as acts of resistance against not only the state, but the examination of Black life by policy researchers, sociologists, and reformers aiming to "improve" Black women. Hartman also writes about the lives that slip from the archive into oblivion and are overshadowed by the figures of white and famous men, like the unnamed Black girl posed as Venus in Thomas Eakins' Photograph 308. The book won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism. In 2024, The New York Times listed it as #96 in the top 100 books of the 21st century.

• 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)