Hartman’s first two books found new angles of approach to Transatlantic slavery and what she terms its “afterlife”-the “skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment” that persist into our present. As a theorist, researcher, and writer, her impact has been enormous, her model formidable and enabling. For the past two decades, she has been among our foremost archival thinkers. Or so I’ve learned from reading Hartman, a professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Consulting these archives can feel like staring into a dense void. The absence of personal testimony isn’t compensated for but rather compounded by reams of documentation: bills of sale, court transcripts, ship manifests, newspaper clippings, and so on. Of the materials that constitute that trail, she writes, “The archive is, in this case, a death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body, an inventory of property, a medical treatise on gonorrhea, a few lines about a whore’s life, an asterisk in the grand narrative of history.” The scholar’s route to a different narrative is riddled with obstacles her sources are alternately too scant and too extensive.

For theorists, conceptual problems proliferate: how to listen for the dominated in the archives of the dominant? How, for example, might one recover the experiences of enslaved people-barred from literacy on threat of torture, sale, or death-from the records of owners and traders without amplifying the violence that confined them there? In her 2008 essay, “Venus in Two Acts,” Saidiya Hartman attempts to exhume one black woman called Venus, killed aboard a slave ship, from the paper trail of the Middle Passage.

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheavalīoth obsession and disappointment are magnified for scholars of the subjugated or the dispossessed.

Saidiya hartman wayward