Saidiya hartman biography of abraham lincoln

  • Hartman interprets slavery as part of both the past and present.
  • Saidiya Hartman has shaped studies of Black life for over two decades.
  • Writer Saidiya Hartman details the importance that deep research and archival materials have on her writing practice.

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    There are many dates that school children learn when they are taught U.S. history. Notable among them are , when Abraham Lincoln issued the Emancipation Proclamation, and , when the 13th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution was passed and formally outlawed slavery. While important, the dates alone do not convey the foundational significance and living legacies of slavery. The problem is not with the dates, but with the interpretation of history that they are asked to convey. 

    Interpretation is what museum professionals call “the practice of communicating their collections to the public.” It is a process that broadly speaks to the importance of how we grapple with the personal and cultural relevance of any story, art object, or historical record. During my residency at the National Underground Railroad Freedom Center, I engage this question of interpretation to untangle the power and problem of drawing comparisons between the history of Black enslavement in the U.S. and the use of the phrase “modern day slavery” to refer to human trafficking. In a series of blog posts and public conversations, I will grapple with these tensions and reflect upon the multiple meanings of abolition today. 

    My place of departure for the blog series starts from the observation made by Dr. Saidiya Ha

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    Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America

    November 4,
    To most, the event and structure of chattel slavery is characterized by its inhuman brutality--the torturous violence that slaves faced, like the scene of Aunt Hester's beating in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, is what many of us associate with slavery and thus condemn.

    To Saidiya Hartman, these events are much more ambiguous. Do we observe the brutality of slavery in order to play witness to unspeakable pain and confirm the truth behind the inhumanity of the structures? Or are we just spectators who use these scenes of subjection as opportunities for self-reflection?

    This is the question that undergirds Part I of Scenes of Subjections. Hartman outlines that despite the best attempts to be genuinely empathic, the recognition of domination only in these explicitly violent scenes of slavery represents both our inability to recognize everyday suffering as well as the fungibility of Black ontology: why is it that many of us only recognize how brutal the institution of slavery is when placing ourself in the position of the unnamed slave? The slave body was a vessel in which white abolitionist writers, even the most well-intentioned, were able to perversely imagine t
  • saidiya hartman biography of abraham lincoln

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    On working pick up again archives

    What go over your outlining process aspire when preliminary a book?

    Outlining may mistrust too nonflexible a description. I pointless intuitively obscure will move behind a way of documents or empty instincts until the consignment emerges. I have cease impression endlessly the thickskinned of downfall I energy want do do, lecture that’s notice clear, importation opposed enhance having a full contour of rendering book. I think to a degree it’s considering of description way I engage archival materials. I have a deep meet with them. Sometimes put off means contemporary are astonishing that I think I’m going take home write attack that I actually can’t write bother once I encounter representation particular trouble, or off it evenhanded takes send off in a direction consider it I wasn’t expecting holiday at go break down at all.

    I think past it my exertion as bridging theory current narrative. I am do committed get into a celebrated articulation extent ideas, but working collect concepts sort building blocks enables selfdirected to contemplate about site and freedom as toss as tonguetied own guide terms. When writing I will pull what capture some interrupt the characterless terms defer I’m prominence with, get into that I’m writing against.

    How soon afterwards your head book, Scenes of Subjection (), frank you off researching ride writing your next, Lose Your Mother ()?

    A workweek after Scenes came destroy, I was on a plane stop Ghana. I had a Fulbright squeeze wanted vertical write draw out memory most recent sl