Saidiya Hartman Biography
Saidiya Hartman is an American writer and academic who worked at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1992 to 2006 and was a part of the Department of English and African American Studies.
Hartman is now a professor specializing in African-American literature and history at Columbia University. In Brooklyn, she grew up and got her B.A. from the University of Wesleyan and a Ph.D. from Yale University. One of the 26 people picked to be a MacArthur Fellow in 2019 was Hartman.
African-American and American literature and cultural heritage, slavery, law and literature, gender studies, and performance studies are Hartman’s main fields of interest. She is on the editorial board of the Callaloo journal. Hartman was a Fellow of Fulbright, Rockefeller, Whitney Oates, and the President of the University of California and was awarded the 2007 Narrative Prize from Narrative Magazine and the Human Rights Gustav Myers Award.
She is the author of Nineteenth-Century America’s Powerful Scenes of Subjection: Fear, Slavery, and Self-making ( Lose Your Mother: A Journey Down the Atlantic Slave Route and Wayward Live, Exquisite Experiments: Personal Accounts of Social Upheaval (W. W. Norton, 2019).
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Saidiya Hartman Age
Hartman was born in 1961 in New York, New York, United States. She is 62 years old as of 2023.
Saidiya Hartman Husband
Hartman prefers to keep her personal life private, so knowledge is not available about her love life. If she is married or has any children is also not known. However, as soon as it is available, this information will be updated.
Saidiya Hartman Net Worth
She has made a good fortune from her career as a writer and academic. Her net worth is still under review.
Saidiya Hartman In Lose Your Mother
She traces the history of the Atlantic slave trade in her book, In Lose Your Mother, by recounting a journey she took in Ghana along a slave road. She reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy, following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast, and vividly dramatizes the effects of slavery on three centuries of African and African American history.
Saidiya Hartman afterlife of slavery
The ‘afterlife of slavery’ is also theorized by Hartman in Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. The “afterlife of slavery” can be characterized by the enduring presence of the racialized violence of slavery that is still present in modern society. As seen in historical documents that may or may not exist, Hartman outlines slavery’s imprint on all sectors of society. Hence, through the social structure of society and its citizens, the archive lives on. In Lose Your Mother, Hartman describes this process in detail: “I wanted to engage with the past, knowing that its dangers and dangers were still threatened and that lives hung in the balance even now.”
A measure of a man and a rating of life and worth that has yet to be undone had been created by Slavery. If slavery persists as a problem in black America’s political life, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with past days or the burden of too long a memory, but because of a racial calculus and political arithmetic that were reinforced centuries ago still imperil and devalue black lives. This is slavery’s afterlife-skewed prospects for survival, restricted access to health and education, early death, imprisonment, and impoverishment. I am the afterlife of slavery, too. “Hartman returned to Africa to learn more about slavery and returned to learn more about herself.”
The afterlife of slavery is further fleshed out by Hartman through the ways in which photographic capture and enclosure spill into domestic spaces.
Saidiya Hartman Wayward Lives
Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, beautifully written and deeply researched, examines the black inner life revolution that took place at the beginning of the twentieth century in Philadelphia and New York. Many young black women developed ways of intimacy and kinship oblivious to the dictates of respectability and beyond the limits of law in dealing with the issue of what a free life is.
They clung to lovers and cast them off, exchanged sex to survive, and revised the meaning of marriage. Their studies on how to live have sparked longing and desire. They declined to work as slaves or to tolerate inhuman working conditions. These women are credited here for the first time with shaping a cultural movement that has transformed the urban landscape. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments recovers the radical aspirations and insurgent desires of these women through a merging of history and literary imagination.
Saidiya Hartman Books
- 2019; Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals
- 2006; Lose Your Mother
- 2002; Enduring Enchantments Walter Mignolo
- 1997; Scenes of subjection