Scenes of Subjection

Content Warning: This section of the guide refers to the commodification and extreme violence of slavery, indentured servitude, debt peonage, sexual violence, rape, graphic torture, and systemic racism.

Saidiya Hartman holds a BA from Wesleyan University and a PhD in English from Yale University. Her research focuses on slavery, African American literature, and legal constructions of subjectivity. She is author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford, 1997), Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Trans-Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (W. W. Norton, 2019). Wayward Lives was the recipient of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism, the PEN/John Galbraith Award of Nonfiction, the Judy Grahn Prize for Lesbian Nonfiction, and the American Studies Association John Hope Franklin Prize for Nonfiction. She is University Professor at Columbia University.

Hartman is most well-known for her first monograph, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, which changed the field of slavery studies. Liberal scholars of slavery have long argued against conservative, paternalistic approaches to slavery that stress reciprocity between enslaved and enslaver. Yet this liberal scholarship, Hartman has argued, presents the resistance of enslaved people to slavery’s violence in a way that wrongly insists on a notion of agency for enslaved people.