Saidiya Hartman has been praised as "one of our most brilliant
contemporary thinkers" (Claudia Rankine, New York Times Book
Review) and "a lodestar for a generation of students and,
increasingly, for politically engaged people outside the academy"
(Alexis Okeowo, The New Yorker). In Scenes of
Subjection--Hartman's first book, now revised and expanded--her
singular talents and analytical framework turn away from the
"terrible spectacle" and toward the forms of routine terror
and quotidian violence characteristic of slavery, illuminating the
intertwining of injury, subjugation, and selfhood even in
abolitionist depictions of enslavement. By attending to the withheld
and overlooked at the margins of the historical archive, Hartman
radically reshapes our understanding of history, in a work as
resonant today as it was on first publication, now for a new
generation of readers.
This 25th anniversary 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.