IRWaG

is delighted to announce that

Professor Saidiya Hartman

will be joining our faculty
in September 2006.

Saidiya Hartman is a specialist in African American literature and history whose theoretical and literary contributions to our understanding of slavery are profound and original. Professor Hartman's first book, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America is an erudite and subtle exploration of the intersections of enslavement, gender, desire, and the making of liberal reason in the United States. Worked through an engagement with a variety of cultural materials – slave narratives, song and dance, legal texts, journals, diaries, and narratives -- Hartman explores the unstable institution of slave power. Her forthcoming book Lose Your Mother:A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route is, as she puts it, an exercise in literary fieldwork. It lyrically confronts the disturbing relationships among memory, representation, and narrative. She focuses on the "non-history" of the slave, the way in which the unnamable catastrophe of slavery erased any conventional modality for writing an intelligible past. Weaving her own biography into an imaginative historical construction, she explores and evokes the non-spaces of black experience—the experience through which the African captive became a slave, became a non-person, became alienated from personhood.

Professor Hartman comes to us from the University of California at Berkeley and will hold a joint appointment with IRWaG and the Department of English and Comparative Literature. We look forward to welcoming her to the Columbia community.