16 Facts About Saidiya Hartman

Saidiya Hartman was born on 1961 and is an American writer and academic focusing on African-American studies.

Saidiya Hartman is currently a University Professor at Columbia University.

Saidiya Hartman worked at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1992 to 2006 in the Department of English and African American Studies.

In 2007 Saidiya Hartman joined the faculty of Columbia University, specializing in African-American literature and history.

Saidiya 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.

Saidiya Hartman was named a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 2022.

Saidiya Hartman is on the editorial board of the journal Callaloo.

Saidiya Hartman introduces the idea of "critical fabulation" in her article "Venus in Two Acts," although she could be said to be engaged in the practice in both of her previously published full-length books, Scenes of Subjection and Lose Your Mother.

Critical fabulation is a tool that Saidiya 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.

Saidiya Hartman further fleshes out the afterlives of slavery through the ways in which photographic capture and enclosure spills into domestic spaces.

Saidiya Hartman exposes the limits of such capture as she describes the hallway as a regulative, yet intimate space.

Saidiya Hartman has made literary and theoretical contributions to the understanding of slavery.

Saidiya Hartman's 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.

Saidiya Hartman has contributed insight into the forms and functions of the historical archive, providing both pointed critiques of and methodological guides to approaching the archive in scholarly work.

Saidiya Hartman introduces the concept of narrative restraint in her article "Venus in Two Acts" to delay an archival impulse to continually register as "a death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body".

Saidiya Hartman writes about the minor lives that easily slip in the archive into oblivion.