Böcker av Saidiya Hartman

In this radical re-evaluation of American history, Saidiya Hartman uses her singular talents to create a striking portrait of nineteenth century slavery and its many afterlives.By turning critical attention away from the 'terrible spectacle' of the popular imagination, a fuller understanding of the atrocity can be reached by looking instead toward its characteristic forms of routine terror and quotidian violence. Scenes of Subjection examines these forms of domination that usually go undetected: the encroachments of power that take place through notions of humanity, enjoyment and consent and the roots of Enlightenment ideals in racial subjugation. Delving into what has been withheld and overlooked at the margins of the historical archive, Hartman starkly illuminates the interconnected nature of enslavement, image-making and present-day racism - and the possibilities for Black resistance, redress and transformation. In a work as resonant today as it was on first publication, the updated edition features a new preface by the author, a foreword by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an afterword by Marisa J. Fuentes and Sarah Haley, notations with Cameron Rowland, and compositions by Torkwase Dyson.

In Lose Your Mother, Saidiya Hartman journeys along a slave route in Ghana, following the trail of captives from the hinterland to the Atlantic coast. She retraces the history of the Atlantic slave trade from the fifteenth to the twentieth century and reckons with the blank slate of her own genealogy.There were no survivors of Hartman's lineage, nor far-flung relatives in Ghana of whom she had come in search. She traveled to Ghana in search of strangers. The most universal definition of the slave is a stranger-torn from kin and country. To lose your mother is to suffer the loss of kin, to forget your past, and to inhabit the world as a stranger. As both the offspring of slaves and an American in Africa, Hartman, too, was a stranger. Her reflections on history and memory unfold as an intimate encounter with places-a holding cell, a slave market, a walled town built to repel slave raiders-and with people: an Akan prince who granted the Portuguese permission to build the first permanent trading fort in West Africa; an adolescent boy who was kidnapped while playing; a fourteen-year-old girl who was murdered aboard a slave ship.Eloquent, thoughtful, and deeply affecting, Lose Your Mother is a powerful meditation on history, memory, and the Atlantic slave trade.