Saidiya Hartman. Photo: Steven Gregory
"...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.
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.
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.
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.
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."
--Excerpted from 'Theory into Practice' 'The Interview: Saidiya Hartman' interviewed by Sarah Jilani for ART REVIEW (AR) magazine, October 8, 2025
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.
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.
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.
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."
--Excerpted from 'Theory into Practice' 'The Interview: Saidiya Hartman' interviewed by Sarah Jilani for ART REVIEW (AR) magazine, October 8, 2025
