https://www.frieze.com/article/saidiya-hartman-vanessa-peterson-255
Featured in
Issue 255
Saidiya Hartman Uses Performance to Challenge Colonial Power
The writer and theorist explores how acts of performance can confront, unsettle and rethink enduring structures
+2
by Saidiya Hartman and Vanessa Peterson in Opinion | 29 October 2025
This piece appears in the columns section of frieze 255, ‘Performance’
‘Minor Music at the End of the World’ is a performance in three movements, made in collaboration with actor André Holland, performer Okwui Okpokwasili, and artists Arthur Jafa, Precious Okoyomon and Cameron Rowland. It takes its inspiration from two of my essays, ‘The End of White Supremacy: An American Romance’ [2020] and ‘Litany for Grieving Sisters’ [2022]. I don’t think I would ever have come to the idea of it being a performance if not for invitations from others. The first came from the 92nd Street Y’s Unterberg Poetry Center, to have André read ‘The End of White Supremacy’. Hearing him read was an entirely different experience than reading my words on the page. It no longer felt as if they were solely mine. They became something else.
Saidiya Hartman, dir. Sarah Benson, Minor Music at the End of the World, 2025, performance documentation, Internationaal Theater Amsterdam. Courtesy: Hartwig Art Foundation; photograph: Fabian Calis
After seeing André read, Arthur and I thought, wouldn’t it be great to make a film of him reading the text? Then, Precious, knowing that Okwui and I are friends and collaborators, suggested we all work together. Even though writing is a solitary activity, we’re at the page with so many other thinkers. I joke that, when I wrote my book Scenes of Subjection [1997], I thought I knew something about performance – then I met Okwui. There was a deepening of what I thought I knew in the context of this long-term engagement with her practice. The second movement, ‘Dead River’, was written with her in mind.
‘Minor Music’ isn’t a play. It’s performed discourse. It’s important to say that. This is consonant with the African diasporic intellectual tradition, where poetry finds a place in critical writing. It’s alive, like Aimé Césaire’s Notebook of a Return to the Native Land [1939]. I’m following in the path of many other artists who are trying to create thought in multiple domains. It’s not that I’m leaving my discipline and going into another. How do we make thought in multiple places, like the stage, the performance, Arthur’s film, Precious’s beautiful petrified forests, the movement of Okwui?
Saidiya Hartman, dir. Sarah Benson, Minor Music at the End of the World, 2025, performance documentation, Internationaal Theater Amsterdam. Courtesy: Hartwig Art Foundation; photograph: Fabian Calis
The ‘minor music’ is the articulation of grief, endings, afterlives, opening, possibility. What is to emerge? What new arrangements might unfold at the end of this particular formation of world? In the 1920 story ‘The Comet’, W. E. B. Du Bois wrote about the strains of a minor music that resonate after the collapse of the world. He understood the beauty and promise of the minor. I think of the minor in relation to practices of becoming which don’t have the aspiration to be major or proper. There’s a kind of richness, vitality, plenitude and openness in it. There’s the weight of everything that has been lost, but certainly, for Black people in the diaspora, every beautiful thing we’ve made has been produced in the wake of loss.
The question to be considered is: how might this structure, based upon violent extraction and accumulation, come to an end? For those who have been enslaved, colonized and dispossessed, those who have been subjected to genocides, we never stopped planning, imagining and plotting other visions of the possible. ‘Minor Music’ exists within that rich genealogy of imagining the otherwise.
Saidiya Hartman, dir. Sarah Benson, Minor Music at the End of the World, 2025, performance documentation, Internationaal Theater Amsterdam. Courtesy: Hartwig Art Foundation; photograph: Fabian Calis
Part of the work is about a radical act of affirmation, even in perilous conditions of utter negation. The wonderful potential and paradox of the performance space is what unfolds. There’s a way in which the performance exerts a pressure on the audience. But there’s no guarantee about the outcome. It’s not likely that people step into an art or performance space and are transformed. So, what does a performance do? It offers this incredible occasion for gathering, where something might happen or where we get to be in relation in different ways. The work is open. Enter if you can. If you cannot, so be it.
Our ways of knowing are produced and marked by particular formations of power, but they’re by no means eternal. A certain contingent set of events produced the world – a structure which is now so taken for granted that most of us can’t imagine a different set of arrangements. Another set of contingencies, ones that are as yet unforeseen, might change everything. The wretched of the earth welcome an end to the colonial order of being. There have been myths and prophecies of what will come after. ‘Minor Music at the End of the World’ offers no definitive answers, but inhabits the openness of the question, the moment of dereliction, the incompleteness of the not-yet, the interval of the in-between. In that, there’s possibility.
As told to Vanessa Peterson
This article first appeared in frieze issue 255 with the headline ‘Imagining the Otherwise’
Main image: Saidiya Hartman, dir. Sarah Benson, Minor Music at the End of the World (detail), 2025, performance documentation, Internationaal Theater Amsterdam. Courtesy: Hartwig Art Foundation; photograph: Fabian Calis
ABOUT THE AUTHOR:
SAIDIYA HARTMAN
Saidiya Hartman is a writer and academic. Minor Music, Hartman’s first stage adaptation, was commissioned by Hartwig Art Foundation, Amsterdam, and premiered at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam in October 2025
VANESSA PETERSON
Vanessa Peterson is senior editor of frieze. She lives in London, UK.
TAGS
Saidiya Hartman
Vanessa Peterson
Columns
Issue 255
November Issue: Performance
Performance
Hartwig Art Foundation
https://artreview.com/the-interview-saidiya-hartman/
The Interview: Saidiya Hartman
by Sarah Jilani
Features
8 October 2025
Art Review
Saidiya Hartman, Minor Music at the End of the World, dir. Sarah Benson, 2025. Commissioned and presented by Hartwig Art Foundation, world premiere at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam. Photo: Fabian Calis
“For centuries, we have named the vice in which we are held captive. The question is whether others are willing to know what we know.”
Since her groundbreaking study Scenes of Subjection (1997), American academic Saidiya Hartman has radically reoriented how we understand slavery’s afterlives. In books such as Lose Your Mother (2007), Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019) and numerous essays, she has theorised the liminal space between belonging and exile: the position of African Americans estranged from Africa yet constituted by its loss. In order to think through an archive of slavery that is marked by absences, silences and erasures, Hartman has developed a practice of ‘critical fabulation’, blending archival research with narrative invention to restore potential to the lives of those whom the record considers ‘minor’ historical actors. Her writing has become indispensable across fields from Black studies and feminist theory to literature and art, reshaping how we think about subjectivity, resistance and the ongoing structures of racial capitalism.
Her latest work, Minor Music at the End of the World (2025), takes critical fabulation to a new level in the form of a collaborative performance directed by Sarah Benson and presented by Hartwig Art Foundation in the Netherlands and inspired by a science-fiction story written by the leading intellectual voice on race, democracy and Black liberation of the past century, W.E.B. Du Bois. Best known for The Souls of Black Folk (1903), his magnum opus, Du Bois also wrote a science-fiction tale, ‘The Comet’ (1920), about the last Black man left on Earth following the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic. And it’s this that has shaped Hartman’s thinking in Minor Music. Structured in three movements – one drawn from her essays ‘The End of White Supremacy’ (2020) and ‘Litany for Grieving Sisters’ (2022); another, ‘Dead River’, newly composed; and a third remixing Arthur Jafa’s film Aghdra (2021) – the piece stages a choral, collaborative mode of thinking. With sections performed through spoken words and movement by artists including André Holland and Okwui Okpokwasili, it asks what kinds of dwelling, refusal and collectivity might emerge in a moment marked by ecological collapse, authoritarianism, human fungibility and the dismantling of academic and artistic freedoms. ArtReview caught up with Hartman in advance of the work’s world premiere at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam.
Saidiya Hartman. Photo: Steven Gregory
Theory into Practice
ArtReview You have referred to Minor Music as a kind of ‘chorus of the wayward’. I hear echoes in that of your past work on ‘fugitive being’. Could you describe the new work, and what you set out to do with it?
Saidiya Hartman The work consists of three movements. The first establishes a conjunction between the present and W.E.B. Du Bois, who a century earlier, in ‘The Comet’, described a US defined by racialised violence, segregation and the brutal rule of capital and elites. There is also the shadow of the 1918 Spanish Influenza pandemic. What would it mean to imagine the end of the racial order? We could say this ‘ending’ started in 2020, and was arrested. The stranglehold of authoritarianism, capitalism, white nationalism and the glorification of the heroes of slavery and settler colonialism has intensified in the present. So, the question remains: what does it mean to imagine the end of this order? To address it, Minor Music shifts between Du Bois’s text and mine – with the threat of other extinctions presented by the climate crisis – which is another dimension of the end of the world.
AR Writing can sometimes diverge from the author’s original intent when interpreted by others How is it to watch performers use their voices and bodies to interpret your texts?
SH The texts, ‘The End of White Supremacy, An American Romance’ [2020; Hartman’s text about ‘The Comet’] and ‘Dead River’ [2025; developed by Okwui Okpokwasili in collaboration with performers Bria Bacon, Audrey Hailes and AJ Wilmore], are themselves collaborative works, informed by a wide array of theorists and writers: a round of utterances. That defines the choral nature of this work. Even when my name is on the page, many voices are present. The performances don’t illustrate the text, they articulate it, enriching and transforming its meaning. This is the dynamism of the process – it remakes the text. So the work keeps evolving, and I love the collaborative character of it. I’m a contributor, but there are other makers – performers like André and Okwui, whose practices are extraordinary. I have a particular attunement to language: the power of the sentence, the movement of a paragraph, the drama of a page. But it’s very different to hear your words uttered by someone else. They become something other; it’s a beautiful, dispossessive experience.
Saidiya Hartman, Minor Music at the End of the World, dir. Sarah Benson, 2025 (rehearsal view, BAM’s Harvey Theatre, New York, 2024). Photo: Maria Baranova
Saidiya Hartman, Minor Music at the End of the World, dir. Sarah Benson, 2025 (rehearsal view, BAM’s Harvey Theatre, New York, 2024). Photo: Fabian Calis
It is crucial to state that what I’ve written is not a play – it is performed discourse or choral utterance. Okwui’s performance practice, which involves extended, physically demanding movement and voice, pushes against the grain of theatre: what does it mean to perform and embody discourse, which is different than a character‑driven play? Watching André, the magic is witnessing a classically trained actor transform critical thought into flesh and blood, and make concepts into an autobiography of the last Black man on Earth – these encounters with the world engender ruptures in our existence and trigger radical shifts in thought.
The End of an Era
AR I love that picture of collective study and collaboration. It reminds me of the feminist decolonial scholar Françoise Vergès, who has spoken to ArtReview about how collaborative re-imaginings of the museum, too, are vital. Yet Vergès also warns of such attempts being at risk of institutional capture. Do you find performance can resist that tendency?
SH Performance can of course be extracted and repackaged, but it’s different from the way an art object holds capital or can be collected by individuals. The relationship with elite institutions is always tense: a work with radical aims can paradoxically enable institutional reproduction. At this moment I think it would be very difficult to produce Minor Music in the US. Work that examines Black women, slavery, feminism, gender, anti-Blackness, climate, environment and capitalism is being prohibited and defunded as ‘anti-American’; the people who make such work are described as ‘the enemies within’. There have been calls for the arrest of Marxists and communists. We’ve entered an authoritarian period in the US. It is a revanchist, white-supremacist project that is hostile even to canonical Western thinkers such as [Sigmund] Freud and [Max] Weber. Sociology has been eliminated from the curriculum of many state universities. Critical frameworks devoted to examining power, structures of inequality and the forms of social difference created by extreme domination, precarity, fungibility and accumulation are being prohibited. The goal of this fascist authoritarianism is to resurrect an order of values that provided the foundation of slave society – the subordination and fungibility of Black life, futurity secured by extraction and command over the dominated, and freedom as the entitlement of propertied white men. There is a war against everything that doesn’t uphold the values and views of the administration. Objects are being removed from the museums; archives are being eliminated and destroyed. At present, we are in a struggle for basic academic freedom. In the US I’m not doing something fashionable; I’m involved in a project subject to eradication.
Saidiya Hartman, Minor Music at the End of the World, dir. Sarah Benson, 2025 (performance view, world premiere at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam). Photo: Fabian Calis
AR Thinking on the end of a world order can be frightening as much as it can be generative: we have seen it spark violent reaction from rightwing pundits and ordinary people alike. Indeed, times of revolutionary rupture can also be bloody and uncertain. Does the work also engage with mourning and uncertainty – the fact that we can’t go on as we are, yet we don’t have one single, shared vision of a post‑racial‑capitalist and ecologically healthy world?
SH The second movement is structured by that open question. What does it mean to find a way when the essential coordinates are unknown? Is human existence itself an open question – are we only a platform or threshold for other forms of creaturely life?
AR That asks us to let go of our anthropocentrism, too.
SH Yes. Think of the destructive character of ‘man’ – the history of ‘progress’ from slingshot to atomic bomb. Attempts at reform often inaugurate other orders of violence. I’m involved in practices in the now, practices for the time being: assemblages of care and collectivities that minimise harm and create other modalities of dwelling. There’s no guarantee for the future, but practice need not be directed by assurances regarding it. If we measured liberatory movements only by outcomes, we would misread them and minimise their accomplishments. Frantz Fanon notes that those who fought against colonialism often never lived to see benefits of their struggle.
Revolution as Housework
AR We often crave outcomes, rather than thinking long-term in that manner. What forms of relationality and practice can we pursue in our communities now, to pave the way for changes we may never see?
SH Many are already involved in these changes: free schools; mutual aid and exchange without money; radical collectives and land trusts. Many are refusing, by boycotting companies of billionaire technocrats aligned with the authoritarian project or that have adopted anti‑DEI agendas. Aspects of everyday practice can escape capture. Of course there’s no guarantee about what they will yield. When I was an undergraduate, we all wanted to be young revolutionaries. A teacher, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, admonished us: ‘The revolution is like housework – you have to do it every day.’ It is unfinished, incomplete, ongoing.
Saidiya Hartman, Minor Music at the End of the World, dir. Sarah Benson, 2025 (rehearsal view, BAM’s Harvey Theatre, New York, 2024). Photo: Maria Baranova
AR You’ve written about ‘ethical listening’ in Scenes of Subjection. Did you draw on that here? Who is the listener in this work, and what kind of listening do you hope its audiences practice?
SH The radical hope is that audiences will listen. I teach a course called The Frequency of Black Life, about the elements of Black life as figured sonically. Listening presumes the other and is a context of exchange. In this piece, ‘minor music’ – as sounded – signals change or a state when something has fallen away. The work explores the critical work of the minor key: not stepping into the major or proper, but embracing the dissonant work of the minor, as in, minor music, minor figures, minor literatures. The movement score embraces opacity and incompleteness. The sound score and the choreography of the physical performances together offer plural and divergent accounts of work and world. Minor Music is an invitation to gather and think collectively and it compels or obliges those experiencing the work to consider if or how they can receive it.
Absolute Violence
AR Much online commentary casts the piece as primarily concerned with voice and refusal in Black social life. While that may be the case, do you also see the work connecting to global struggles that we’re all bound up in under a racial and gendered capitalism?
SH The performance opens with a speaker thinking about their formation within the global system of capitalism. It’s a world system; our histories are transversal. US empire’s reach means what happens here is felt globally. Systems of racialisation, anti‑Blackness, coloniality are global – the structures that seek to uphold them learn from one another. For instance, the Nazis built their racial laws on US models. Hitler admired the US racial order. The question ‘what does it mean to exist at the end of the world?’ is shared. We grapple with it in geo-specific places, as sentient creatures on Earth, with varied beliefs about inhabiting land and time.
Saidiya Hartman, Minor Music at the End of the World, dir. Sarah Benson, 2025 (performance view, world premiere at Internationaal Theater Amsterdam). Photo: Fabian Calis
AR As capital seeks further accumulation and many governments grow more authoritarian, people around the world have seen their life expectancy and quality plummet. Many on the left hoped, at that point, a shared sense of cross-class and cross-racial solidarity would emerge, but that has not proven to be the case.
SH Those in the metropoles of Empire are catching up to existential questions others have carried within themselves for decades or centuries. The limits of states- and rights‑based politics demand planning for other modes of existence. The US state has shed any pastoral duty, becoming extractive and predatory – becoming absolute in its violence. In the meantime, private ‘solutions’ emerge: those with several hundred thousand dollars can now buy homes in eco‑enclaves that have biodynamic farms and practise organic living. The alternative is already being commodified.
Welcome to My World
AR That picture seems like a new form of apartheid: rather than regreening the Earth, creating gated liveable zones while the majority of us deal with climate fallout.
SH Figures like [Elon] Musk and [Donald] Trump are saying the quiet part out loud, defending a vertical order where some lives matter more than others. The hierarchy is taken for granted. In a liberal regime one had to mask that fact; there’s no need now. The apartheid order of the disposable, precarious, fungible and incarcerated grows. Policies blatantly funnel wealth upwards. Black people arrived at citizenship belatedly. The rights most Europeans took for granted in the nineteenth century, we gained in 1965: in my lifetime. Mostly, we [Black people] have lived under racialised enclosure and terror: that’s been the norm. Many Americans believe in US exceptionalism and can’t imagine their country sharing the fate of others – hence the absence of millions in the streets.
Saidiya Hartman, Minor Music at the End of the World, dir. Sarah Benson, 2025 (rehearsal view, BAM’s Harvey Theatre, New York, 2024). Photo: Maria Baranova
AR In a sense it is exceptional – as the imperial core, it was shielded from this fate a little longer – but the brutality is the same. What kind of hope may lie, as Minor Music suggests through its performances, in acts of imagination?
SH The band‑aid is off, but I don’t expect those newly seeing to be transformed. Those made comfortable by wealth and white privilege are experiencing threatened rightlessness and precarious citizenship for the first time. We say, welcome to the world. I hope this levelling, the nascent sense of a precarity-in-common, will eradicate the racial order that Minor Music stages as ending; but in the US, recognition of shared disposability has also catalysed a white nationalist project. Liberal pundits treat the present as an exception, and pine for a golden age – their own MAGA imagination – an age when the US ‘kept the peace’. They embrace an enchanted view of the foundations of the American Project, ignoring racial slavery and settler colonialism, and try to counter Trumpism with a delusion of their own. The privileged, the comfortable, don’t grasp the constitutive exclusions of liberalism.
AR Could this realisation – that state‑bestowed citizenship has always had exceptions and hierarchies – be a precursor to rethinking ‘at the end of the world’, personhood beyond the state’s racialised and gendered markers of recognition?
SH That’s a beautiful – and for me hopeful – formulation. In the US, we cannot forget that ‘Black’ is a structural position – disposable, subject to gratuitous violence and state terror, subject to diminished life chances, at the bottom of wage scale and the social order. For a long time, many Black people have considered themselves stateless: think about Malcolm X’s petition to the UN, or Paul Robeson and William Patterson’s petition charging the US with genocide. Du Bois died in exile, renouncing the US project. For centuries, we have named the vice in which we are held captive. The question is whether others are willing to know what we know, whether the formations of knowledge and power that enabled this capture can be expected to produce something else – or whether we must rethink existence, world and Earth from the ground up.
ABOUT THE GUEST SPEAKER AND ARTIST:
Saidiya Hartman
Dr. Saidiya Hartman is a writer, critic, literary scholar and 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), 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.
Read next: How to decolonise the Western museum model? Françoise Vergès advocates disordering, decentring and dispersing it
https://www.thenation.com/article/society/saidiya-hartman-interview/
Books & the Arts
November 3, 2022
How Saidiya Hartman Changed the Study of Black Life
A conversation with writer about her pathbreaking book Scenes of Subjection and how our understanding of race has changed in the last two decades.
Saidiya Hartman (Illustration by Diane Zhou)
Saidiya Hartman has shaped studies of Black life for over two decades. Her first book, 1997’s Scenes of Subjection, argued that slavery was foundational to the American project and its notions of liberty. Her follow-up, 2006’s Lose Your Mother, combines elements of historiography and memoir in exploring the experience and legacy of enslavement. Here she first used a speculative method of writing history given the silences of the archive. And her most recent book, 2019’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, examines the revolution of everyday life enacted in the practices of young Black women and queer people that created and sustained expansive notions of freedom.
After 25 years, Hartman’s influence is everywhere. Her coining of the phrase “the afterlife of slavery” changed the ways that historians consider the long ramifications of the chattel regime on Black life. It has prepared the public to engage with the work of artists like Kara Walker, who represent slavery’s continued hold on the present. And even the critiques of Hartman’s work demonstrate an anxiety about her influence, conceding that she has, in fact, influenced our ability to see the world. I spoke with Hartman earlier this year about the republication of Scenes of Subjection on the occasion of its 25th anniversary, about the ways that people in the 1990s misunderstood race and slavery, and about the expansive visions of freedom that enslaved people cultivated. This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Elias Rodriques: What led you to writing Scenes of Subjection?
Saidiya Hartman: I arrived at slavery unexpectedly. I started out writing a dissertation on the blues. To understand that substrate of Black life, I began to research slavery. To my eyes, it was impossible to make sense of the structural logic and foundational character of racism without reckoning with slavery. The available critical language seemed inadequate for describing the necessary violence and the extreme domination characteristic of slavery. I didn’t imagine that I would become a scholar of slavery. But I felt that the key terms of life in the modern age were set in stone in that formative moment; it provided the structure for our language of freedom and rights, man and citizen. I was also troubled by the prevailing liberal framework that marked formal emancipation as the end of slavery and as an incredible rupture. I had read Marx and [Orlando] Patterson, so I understood the limits of political emancipation as well as the distinction between manumission and emancipation and the disestablishment or abolition of slavery. The other major concern was theorizing violence: not just spectacular instances of violence, but the ordinary or quotidian violence that structures everyday life. The Marxist narrative of modes of production or the Foucauldian account of modes of power seemed inadequate when accounting for slavery. Taking seriously the issue of chattel slavery or racial slavery in the settler colony threw a wrench into those explanatory frames. This set of concerns formed the project that became Scenes.
ER: How did people think about race at the time that you were writing Scenes?
SH: For me, the people who most productively thought about racism were people like Stuart Hall, Paul Gilroy, and Hazel Carby. Theirs was a Marxist or post-Marxist framework that attempted to explain the way in which racism was structuring the social. Stuart Hall’s “Race, Articulation, and Societies Structured in Dominance” analyzed social formations in which race was the dominant feature and which couldn’t be explained as a secondary factor or by-product of the mode of production. How could racism, woven through the essential fabric of the West as a political project, be confined to the realm of ideology? How could we account for its materiality?
My intellectual training was very much shaped by the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies, because Hazel Carby was on my dissertation committee. [Carby’s] Reconstructing Womanhood and [Paul Gilroy’s] The Black Atlantic were important anchors. Michael Omi and Howard Winant’s racial formation theory was also important to engaging racism not simply as “ideology” but as producing and determining the character of the social formation. Yet even with all of this, a rigorous analytic of racism, or what people would now describe as anti-Blackness, was emerging and not at all the given.
Tackling racial slavery was no less difficult. At that time, Western historiography had devoted 50 years to refuting [Eric Williams’s] Capitalism and Slavery. People argued that racial domination had little or nothing to do with capitalism and tried to contain slavery as a premodern formation, both in terms of power relations and capitalist accumulation. When I was an assistant professor at Berkeley, European historians—I remember Hugh Thomas specifically—were still writing papers about why Eric Williams was wrong in asserting that slavery was essential to the emergence and development of capitalism. Joseph Inikori’s work was an important contribution to this debate. The European project was to deny that slavery was a key factor in the making of the modern world. This was the consensus. Yet I had an intuitive sense, even if I didn’t have the language to articulate it, that racial slavery was a constitutive feature of the world I inhabited. It had everything to do with our present and with the disposability of Black life.
ER: What was it like to hold on to that intuition at the time?
SH: When I shared with friends and classmates at Yale that I was writing about slavery, their eyes glazed over with boredom. “What kind of boring historical project is that?” they seemed to say. Then I read Cedric Robinson’s Black Marxism, which encouraged me to continue. But Black Marxism was also very challenging for me, because my education was within a post-Marxist framework, in which one took for granted critique of the totality. And Robinson was talking about an African totality! Robinson was thinking about racial capitalism, but slavery was not a moment of genesis in Black Marxism. He tracks racism as a formation inside of Europe that gets projected out, structures the encounters between Europeans and Africans, and shapes the language of the slave trade. But largely, he thinks about racism as part of capitalism’s emergence in Europe. I was studying these things and wanted to engage with the critical thinking of those who were enslaved and who lived in the aftermath of slavery. I was also reading subaltern studies, where scholars were asking, “How do we think about dominated people who have limited or no access to the means of representation? How does one push against the normative framework of history?”
ER: Who was pushing against that framework with regard to slavery?
SH: Some Marxists applied Marxism in a strange way: “Let’s think about Gramsci’s hegemony and apply that to the relationship between slave owners and the enslaved.” Then others replied, “Well, no, that’s not hegemony. That’s extreme domination.” So I wondered, “Who’s thinking about extreme domination and the particular constituents of slavery?” The work of political theorists was key in questioning the character of power and critical engaging the assumptions of liberalism. The testimony of the enslaved was the most valuable resource. For this, we owe a great deal to the editor of the WPA Slave Narrative Collection, George Rawick. He thought about the enslaved from a tradition of Italian Marxism—autonomia—that considered the significance of local struggles. He considered the plantation alongside the factory floor, although ultimately, Scenes underscores the discontinuity between the worker on the factory floor and the enslaved as a sentient commodity in the plantation order. Instead, it strives to think about the specificity of enslaved people in a thoroughly racialized order.
ER: In your new preface, you note that terms like “exploited worker” and “unpaid laborer” failed to describe slavery. What did they fail to describe?
SH: They failed to describe the fundamental violence of slavery; the particular modes of accumulation, extraction, and reproduction in racial slavery; the dual existence of the enslaved as subject-object; the state of social death; the hierarchy of the human; and the fungibility of Black life. When I wrote Scenes, I didn’t have access to Sylvia Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis, which will soon appear in the world. (Anthony Bougues and a team of graduate students are editing it.) Wynter expands the frame and states explicitly that domination and accumulation are fundamental to the position and experience of the captive. This original and ongoing accumulation conditions the exploitation of the worker, but the exploitation of the worker cannot and does not explain the position of the enslaved, the colonized, the wretched.
Orlando Patterson was also essential. Patterson provides a critical vocabulary of the constituent elements of slavery and its idioms of power in Slavery and Social Death. Patterson took note of the inadequacy of critical discourse in describing and explicating slavery. In an interview with David Scott in Small Axe, Patterson recounts his intellectual journey as a historical sociologist, and tells a story about standing in Trenchtown [a neighborhood in the Jamaican capital of Kingston] and wanting to account for its genesis. What was the relationship between that space of racialized enclosure, the ghetto, and the plantation that engendered it?
These people were essential to my thinking. Another person who comes to mind is [Hortense] Spillers in “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe.” I was a graduate student when Spillers gave the talk at the Yale Humanities Center; it is one of the most cited essays in Black studies. The response of the faculty was, “Why is she dealing with the Moynihan Report?” It wasn’t, “Oh my God! The intellectual ground has shifted.” Spillers asserted that our understanding of the human is thrown into crisis by the transatlantic slave trade and racial slavery. What critical language can attend to its features? The implications of Spillers, Patterson, and Wynter are enormous. Their work structures Black studies and has shaped two or three generations of scholars. It is not coincidental that thinking about slavery was key to their projects.
ER: In terms of timing, your own book came out in the 1990s. In your preface, you note that you could feel “the force and disfigurement of slavery in the present.” How did you feel it?
SH: The fungibility and disposability of Black life. The state-sanctioned murder of Black people. The radically restricted life chances of Black people. That is the world I knew and experienced, but thinking along these lines was untimely and certainly unwelcome. On the one hand, multiculturalism and the post-racial society were the hegemonic frame at the time, and on the other hand, the tremendous violence of the state and its carceral machinery targeted Black people as predators and criminals and made incarceration and premature death the expected horizon. [President Bill] Clinton’s liberal establishment was dismantling the welfare state and building the carceral complex.
Settler colonialism and racial slavery and liberal ideals of freedom gave shape to the United States. That is undeniable. But there’s a constant and relentless attempt to deny this. After [Barack] Obama was elected, a colleague of mine, a classicist, said to me, “Now your work is passé.” [laughter] That says everything.
When Scenes was published, it had a chilly reception. To state directly, plainly, and unapologetically the ways in which Blackness was marked by this experience of having been a commodity, to elaborate the conditions of social death, and to attenuate the notion of agency was not welcome. When historians began to address the question of agency, they failed to cite my work. Historians like Rawick, Sterling Stuckey, [Herbert] Gutman, and other pioneering radical historians of slavery offered rich accounts of the agency of the enslaved and slave culture. The intent of Scenes wasn’t to negate that work, but to think about power and structures of violence in a systemic way. While there are variations in the condition of slavery, I wanted to address the state of slavery, its structural features and constituent elements. That’s why Orlando Patterson and Claude Meillassoux were very important to me. Those thinkers helped me develop a critical language of slavery. Graduate students and young readers kept Scenes alive.
ER: The new version is very much a collective endeavor as well. Can you tell me about the new additions?
SH: I wanted the new edition of Scenes to enter the world with a collective voice and as a collaboration with others. The notations and compositions by Torkwase Dyson and Cameron Rowland make thought available in other ways. They are critical commentaries, abstract compositions, and elaborations of the central terms of the book. Over the years, people have said, “Scenes is so hard!” So when Cameron and I were collaborating on the notations, we thought, “Suppose you wanted a crib sheet of Scenes? Maybe you could just tear out the notations.” We offer the notations as points of clarification, which allow a variety of people to enter the text. They are outlines, provocations to read otherwise. Torkwase’s compositions or blueprints address issues of flight, enclosure, and Black movement in confined spaces. These abstract renderings frame the chapters; they are dense and suggestive in that they open other ways of reading and approaching the text. The new foreword by Keeanga Yamahtta-Taylor underscores the critique of the prevailing structures and the recognition that they cannot save us and cannot actualize our longing for another way to exist. This radical critique cannot be mistaken for resignation and despair. The afterword by Marisa Fuentes and Sarah Haley explicates the historical intervention, archival labor and critical context of Scenes. So, there are several different interpretations of Scenes inside the book. For me, this was a way of expanding and amplifying the work. It made collective utterance part of its framing.
ER: About that critique: You note that the recognition of humanity does not end violence so much as enable other kinds of violence. How?
SH: There was a commonsense understanding that the violence of slavery solely concerned the object status or denied humanity of the enslaved. But enslaved people were also recognized as human in slave law and statutes. The enslaved existed as subject and object—as property and as human—and their humanity was another site of violence. The promise of emancipation was the transition from being the property of another to the property of oneself. The liberal narrative of slavery’s end celebrates and fetishizes this transition: “Now you are a free worker!” But as Marx observed, the worker goes to the market, trades his hide, and needs to prepare for a tanning. That made me think, “Was this the liberatory horizon of freedom? It was so impoverished.” As we know, the domination of the ex-slave required direct forms of violence and of racist terror; the control of the Black laboring classes continued to employ forms of extreme violence, and the spectacle of terror never disappeared. Racism is a distribution of death, controlled depletion, and a brutal allocation of chances at life. The forms of direct, extrajudicial, and extra-economic modes of violence remained dominant after emancipation. Racism, as Du Bois notes, gave every white person the power of police over Black folk. This is to say nothing of the psychic dimensions of anti-Blackness.
If individualism and wage labor aren’t the horizon of freedom, then we need a radically different understanding of what the disestablishment of slavery or abolition entails, and a different language and imagination of possibility. We see the traces and practices of these other visions of freedom in the thoughts and in the social assembly of the enslaved. It isn’t a notion of freedom defined as the “liberty of contract,” which is what the Freedmen’s Bureau and Northern capitalists and missionaries imposed as the vision. The ex-slave was taught to read and, at the same time, was being trained to become a self-possessed subject; this was part and parcel of the “training and formation” of the dutiful and disciplined worker.
Of course, an enormous violence is required to produce a working class and drive people without any resources but the self to the market. However, this transition was radically truncated for the formerly enslaved. Late 19th- and 20th-century Black intellectuals, as well as ordinary Black folks, who were primarily agricultural laborers and domestics, stated repeatedly that Black people were living in a condition that was all but slavery in name. That was the reality. So, why the faith in the liberal narrative about emancipation and the end of slavery; why erect the barrier between variants of involuntary servitude when many of the essential features of unfreedom were still in place, when racist terror and state violence was the norm?
ER: What did you find studying that transition?
SH: I read the reports of field workers in the Freedmen’s Bureau and other visitors to the South reporting on the great violence in the former insurrectionary states. These reports were written by white officials and bureaucrats, and even what they described was sobering. Again, it raised the question: What does it mean to abolish slavery? Certainly, it would mean the end of racial capitalism and the hierarchy of life it has produced. It would entail dismantling the Western scheme of value and disenchanting the human. The racial taxonomy of life and value and the hierarchy of species would all have to be abolished. The end of private property—that’s what abolition entails. It is not the burdened individuality of freedom or the end of the legal property in slaves. Abolition requires uprooting the order of value and overturning the vertical order of life that created the system. A more far-reaching vision of abolition is imperative. The testimony of the formerly enslaved articulates this longing as well as the poverty of liberal and market freedom. The imagination of Black freedom has never been content to be defined by legal liberalism. It was always more capacious. What people wanted and hoped for was a revolution of the social order. In the US, the outcome of the Civil War negated property in slaves, and there was the possibility that the social order would be remade, so that an actual reconstruction might be possible.
ER: What are some of these other, more expansive visions of freedom?
SH: There is an expansive vision of freedom articulated in the everyday struggles against the plantation, the boss, the white man. The visions of what might be articulated by the enslaved were utterly antagonistic to white supremacy and the capitalist order. Sometimes it took the form of a messianic vision that didn’t imagine justice was even possible within the secular world, so people ran away from the plantation, took to the hills, and lived in the swamps. The majority expressed what might be or welcomed the world to come in spiritual practice. They articulated other visions of the possible and values fundamentally opposed to the prevailing scheme of captivity. For the settler and the colonizer, Earth is something that can be parceled out, that can be commodified, that can be sold. You can plant your flag or build your fort or erect your fence or post a “No Trespassing” sign and construct the sanctity of the private, the dominion of the sovereign nation or sovereign individual. This is a worldview that is at odds with the way most inhabitants of the planet have lived and have understood their relation to the earth. I wanted to recover those beliefs and values that have always supported and animated Black life and that remain utterly hostile to this project—to capitalism, to racism, to the sovereign “I.”
How did the enslaved conceive, imagine, describe, and engage the world in which they were situated? How did they attempt to create openings and lines of flight within the racialized enclosure of the plantation? Practice was the domain in which to engage these matters. It is the link between Scenes and Wayward Lives. What does it mean to know that you will be free? What sustains a belief in freedom when there’s nothing in the world that would allow or encourage you to think that it is reasonable or possible? This belief has a dramatic impact on the way the Civil War unfolded. For Lincoln, the goal was reunification of a warring nation. But as Du Bois observed in Black Reconstruction, the enslaved had a different vision and understanding of what this war meant. For them, it was a war against slavery. And they made it so.
ER: I want to ask you a question that you ask of Olaudah Equiano [the Black abolitionist and author of a slave narrative]: “How do you commemorate what has yet to arrive?”
SH: I love that moment in Equiano’s narrative in which he imagines and commemorates the end of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery, although the book was published in 1789. He has a knowledge of freedom that is tantamount to faith; it is faith. He knows that slavery will end and anticipates the celebration of that end. I aspire to such faith. I can see the wonder of it; I can see the hope it offers. I experience these moments as a writer. They’re short-lived and fleeting, but they are moments in which there is a glimpse of the possible, where radical transformation is palpable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saidiya_Hartman
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Early life and education
Hartman was born in 1961[3] and grew up in Brooklyn, New York. She earned a B.A. from Wesleyan University and Ph.D. from Yale University.[2]
Career
Hartman worked at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1992 to 2006 in the Department of English and African American Studies.[3] In 2007, Hartman joined the faculty of Columbia University, specializing in African-American literature and history.[4] In 2020, she was promoted to university professor at Columbia.[4]
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.[5][6][7][8][9] Hartman won a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019.[10]
She was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022.[11] Also in 2022, she was named a Royal Society of Literature International Writer.[12]
Critical Work
Hartman's major fields of interest are African-American and American literature and cultural history, slavery, law and literature, gender studies, and performance studies.[13][14] 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).[15] Hartman's work has been widely cited.[16][17][18][19]
Theoretical concepts
Hartman introduced the idea of "critical fabulation" in her article "Venus in Two Acts".[20] 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.[21] 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."[22]
Hartman also theorizes the "afterlife of slavery" in Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route.[23] 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."[23] 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."[15]
Study of slavery
Hartman has made literary and theoretical contributions to the understanding of slavery.[24] 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.[25]
Frank B. Wilderson III, who coined the term Afro-pessimism, praised her as an Afro-pessimist scholar,[26] though Hartman herself has not called it so.[27]
Work in archives
Hartman has contributed insight into the forms and functions of the historical archive, providing both 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 centers much of her interrogation of slavery's archive on Elmina Castle and inserts her own voice as one way to counter the silences surrounding forgotten slaves.[28] Hartman also recognizes that in her use of official records, she runs "the risk of reinforcing the authority of these documents even as [she tries] to use them for contrary purposes."[29]
Hartman introduces the concept of narrative restraint, "the refusal to fill in the gaps and provide closure," in her article "Venus in Two Acts".[30] Unable to write about the girl named Venus on the slaver ship Recovery owing to her brief appearance in the archive, Hartman's attempts to resuscitate possible narratives for her ultimately lead to failure. Hartman ultimately restrains her desire to imaginatively recreate Venus's final days.
The Promised Lands
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."[31] 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."[31]
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments
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.[15] 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.[32]
The book won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism.[33] In 2024, The New York Times listed it as #96 in the top 100 books of the 21st century.[34]
Works