Saidiya Hartman
Encyclopedia
Saidiya Hartman grew up in Brooklyn and received her B.A. from Wesleyan University
and Ph.D. from Yale University
. She is a specialist in African American literature and history and a professor at Columbia University
.
Her major fields of interest are African American and American literature and cultural history, slavery, law and literature, and performance studies. She is on the editorial board of Callaloo (journal). 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. She is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford University Press,1997) and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar,Straus and Giroux, 2007). Hartman's "essays have been widely published and anthologized."
Her literary and theoretical contributions to the understanding of slavery have been original. Her 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. Working through a variety of cultural materials –- diaries, journals, legal texts, slave and other narratives, and historical song and dance—Hartman explores the precarious institution of slave power. Her second book, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route confronts the troubled relationships among memory, narratives, and representation. She concentrates on the "non-history" of the slave, the manner in which slavery "erased any conventional modality for writing an intelligible past." By weaving her own biography into an historical construction, "she [also] explores and evokes the non-spaces of black experience—the experience through which the African captive became a slave, became a non-person, became alienated from personhood.
Wesleyan University
Wesleyan University is a private liberal arts college founded in 1831 and located in Middletown, Connecticut. According to the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, Wesleyan is the only Baccalaureate College in the nation that emphasizes undergraduate instruction in the arts and...
and Ph.D. from Yale University
Yale University
Yale University is a private, Ivy League university located in New Haven, Connecticut, United States. Founded in 1701 in the Colony of Connecticut, the university is the third-oldest institution of higher education in the United States...
. She is a specialist in African American literature and history and a professor at Columbia University
Columbia University
Columbia University in the City of New York is a private, Ivy League university in Manhattan, New York City. Columbia is the oldest institution of higher learning in the state of New York, the fifth oldest in the United States, and one of the country's nine Colonial Colleges founded before the...
.
Her major fields of interest are African American and American literature and cultural history, slavery, law and literature, and performance studies. She is on the editorial board of Callaloo (journal). Hartman has been a Fulbright, Rockefeller, Whitney Oates, and University of California
University of California
The University of California is a public university system in the U.S. state of California. Under the California Master Plan for Higher Education, the University of California is a part of the state's three-tier public higher education system, which also includes the California State University...
President's Fellow, and was awarded the 2007 Narrative Prize from Narrative Magazine
Narrative Magazine
Narrative Magazine was founded in 2003 by former Esquire editor Tom Jenks and author, Carol Edgarian. Narrative is a nonprofit dedicated to advancing the literary arts in the digital age. Its online library of writing by established writers, such as T. C...
and the Gustav Myers Award for Human Rights. She is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford University Press,1997) and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar,Straus and Giroux, 2007). Hartman's "essays have been widely published and anthologized."
Her literary and theoretical contributions to the understanding of slavery have been original. Her 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. Working through a variety of cultural materials –- diaries, journals, legal texts, slave and other narratives, and historical song and dance—Hartman explores the precarious institution of slave power. Her second book, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route confronts the troubled relationships among memory, narratives, and representation. She concentrates on the "non-history" of the slave, the manner in which slavery "erased any conventional modality for writing an intelligible past." By weaving her own biography into an historical construction, "she [also] explores and evokes the non-spaces of black experience—the experience through which the African captive became a slave, became a non-person, became alienated from personhood.