With this work, Hartman defies the conventions of academic scholarship and employs a speculative method of writing history, which she terms “critical fabulation,” to interrogate the authority of historical archives as the singular source of credible information about the past.
Her second book, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007), combines elements of historiography and memoir in a meditation on her travels to Ghana in search of a deeper understanding of the experience of enslavement. She extends her analysis to the present day by challenging contemporary scholars to be wary of recirculating scenes of the violated black body.
Her first book, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America(1997), traces continuities between pre- and post-emancipation eras in the United States by demonstrating how even advocacy-oriented abolitionist rhetoric reproduced the violence and domination of the state of enslavement. She weaves findings from her meticulous historical research into narratives that retrieve from oblivion stories of nameless and sparsely documented historical actors, such as female captives on slave ships and the inhabitants of slums at the turn of the twentieth century.
Hartman’s cast of freebooting Black women, rescued from the condescension of posterity through a blend of archival sleuthing and imaginative storytelling, are New Negroes before the fact… Wayward Lives approaches Harlem Renaissance history from the boulevard up, and addresses the question of what the 90 per cent of Black New Yorkers mostly unnoticed by Lewis and company were doing as Harlem prepared for faddishness.” Read more.Saidiya Hartman is a scholar of African American literature and cultural history whose works explore the afterlife of slavery in modern American society and bear witness to lives, traumas, and fleeting moments of beauty that historical archives have omitted or obscured. But this intimate feminist record of ‘social upheaval’ still strikes me as the most significant recent work of Harlem Renaissance scholarship. The words ‘Harlem’ and ‘Renaissance’ appear as a pair exactly once in its 441 pages, and it’s been far better recognized for the power of Hartman’s fictional-historical ‘critical fabulation’ than as a rival to When Harlem Was in Vogue. “ Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, published in 2019, doesn’t couch itself as a book about the Harlem Renaissance. Foreign Policy & International Relations.
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