![]() ![]() ![]() That work, she writes, “would preoccupy me for two decades.” In Lose Your Mother (2007), which interleaves a history and theory of the Middle Passage with a memoir of the year Hartman spent in Ghana in the late 1990s, she developed an account of what it meant to live in “the afterlife of slavery.” In the essay “Venus in Two Acts” (2008), she struggled with how to tell the stories of lives only fleetingly registered in transatlantic slavery’s ledgers and legal records. (A version of the piece appears as the preface to the book’s revised twenty-fifth anniversary edition, out now from Norton.) “In the archive of slavery,” she writes, “I encountered a paradox: the recognition of the slave’s humanity and status as a subject extended and intensified servitude and dispossession, rather than conferring some small measure of rights and protection.” The “critical lexicon” in the late twentieth century for understanding slavery and emancipation failed to capture that paradox. Last month, the Review published “ The Hold of Slavery,” an essay by Saidiya Hartman about writing her landmark first book, Scenes of Subjection (1997). ![]()
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