Fuentes and Sarah Haley, notations with Cameron Rowland, and compositions by Torkwase Dyson.įree and open to the public. This 25th anniversary edition features a new preface by the author, a foreword by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an afterword by Marisa J. By attending to the withheld and overlooked at the margins of the historical archive, Hartman radically reshapes our understanding of history, in a work as resonant today as it was on first publication, now for a new generation of readers. In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman’s first book, now revised and expanded-her singular talents and analytical framework turn away from the “terrible spectacle” and toward the forms of routine terror and quotidian violence characteristic of slavery, illuminating the intertwining of injury, subjugation, and selfhood even in abolitionist depictions of enslavement.

Seating will be first come, first seated basis This event will be live streamed on the GSAPP YouTube channel. Critical, Curatorial & Conceptual PracticesĪ discussion in celebration of Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Slavery, Terror, and Self-Making in 19th Century America, co-presented with the Institute for Research in African-American Studies of Columbia University. But she started to choke up-so, she just said, ‘Thank you. Never care what they say about you.’ And now here she was at the podium, biting her lip, and trying to hold back tears to embrace it all, to find her place in this great company, to accept that she, too, had contributed something to this venture. Had she achieved what they had said? Was not more proof required to establish that she deserved it? Was the grand celebration a mistake or premature? Didn’t she need to work even harder to prove she deserved it all? So she consulted the tattered outline of a plan for black female genius always at hand when she was writing, which was really just a how-to guide to survive in hostile conditions. The words she cobbled together could not even convey the joy, the enormity of endowment, the sense of disbelief as others described what she had done-what she had made possible. She tried to live like a cactus, and survive on so very little. She knew the longing for recognition and affirmation had destroyed many Negroes, ruined so many minds. So she trained herself not to desire recognition, not need the praise of others to nurture the endeavor.

“Decades earlier she had vowed never to lose sight of the work, never to be distracted by the business of it (the petty rivalries, the schools, the hierarchy, the administration, the protocols that deadened thought), never be embittered by the bullshit, the obstacles, the assault, and the fundamental disregard of this project-her project, our project.

Scene of subjection