Saidiya Hartman

But at the same time, kind of appreciating that the logics that work were often working to control humans and animals in similar ways.

Uh, and of course, uh, I know Saidiya Hartman has written about, uh, the transatlantic slave trade, right? And how slaves who were moved across the ocean were often recorded in ledgers as numbers, right? Two slaves, three slaves, and this is the same way in which animals who were moved across oceans were recorded and who died, who, who was actually...

So in this way, it's a kind of, it's a, it's a very tangible way to see how their histories are entangled and how similar logics were used to control humans and animals.

And your examples are so, so interesting.

What's it doing? What's it for?

Well, the collective, uh, of which I'm, uh, a part of was a, a group formed by Saidiya Hartman and Tina Campt.

Uh, I think at the time Tina was at Barnard College across the street from Columbia.

Saidiya's my colleague at Columbia.

And one of the things in retrospect that I realized that we were dealing with was a difficult archive of slavery-

Mm

... which are things, these, these are some of the questions that Saidiya Hartman's work is great for.

Like, what do you do when their evidence isn't there, or the evidence about the per- there's no name.

Yeah,

I think of him and I also think of C.L.R. James and Saidiya Hartman, that really textured approach to thinking about the granular and cellular level of experiencing kind of historical event.

And I think you do that so well in the book.

And in the book, you describe all of these moments of kind of interpolation, these moments where you recognize yourself or you're being recognized as a black subject by state bodies or by the government.

You know, I'm a historian, so I do it this way, and I don't really marshal this type of evidence because I'm a historian.

Um, and you have someone like a Saidiya Hartman who, um, beautifully and quite, you know, incisively called out, um, the ways that these, these disciplinary, um, uh, silos, um, not only are designed to silence, but they also keep us away from accessing the types of questions and, and experiences that we really want to elevate in the work.

Um, so, uh, I was trained by, um, in, in both areas.

So I situate myself really equally in both.

It's always interesting what continues to resonate.

Mm-hmm.

Um, and, um, I think that there are certain, like, we, you know, we can't talk about contemporary Black studies without Saidiya Hartman.

One of the things she does really well, she just writes incisively, concisely.

And so particularly if it's coming out of the West and the West's kind of project, the racial capitalism, and its epistemic, you know, sort of project of, like, the modern liberal subject and so on, that we have to understand how those things shape our way of knowing the world and being in the world, right? And so my scholarship and my practice, for sure, are impacted by that, and I'm always looking at Black Studies in order to sort of advance that.

And I've been really great... opportunity that I had was to join a collective that was organized by Tina Camp and Saidiya Hartman, Practicing Refusal Collective.

And we've probably been meeting for about 10 years.

And it's just a really sort of wonderful group of people with Christina Sharp and Dion Brand, Alex Wahaly, Tavion Yongo, Hazel Carby.

You know, because, because it was both, right? You have to have the same conversation about whether, uh, you are, uh, not using every tool in the toolkit, uh, whether you are not, uh, whether you are in community with the broader body of scholarship about, uh, Black life and thought that would help you scholarly.

So that's things like, um, uh, as an example, uh, you know, I, I take great, and, you know, as many others do, uh, uh, lessons and encouragement, um, you know, from the work of somebody like Saidiya Hartman, uh, even though she's doing something, uh, you know, is different.

Like, um, you know, I'm thinking of, like, "Venus in Two Acts," which is much more, uh, theoretical than, you know, what, um, you know, my, my work has, has looked like.

Uh, but, you know, Lord knows that's, that's informed, uh, you know, what, what I've done, right? And, uh, yeah, there's many other examples of, you know, scholars, theorists, you know, who I can name too as, as having that, that impact.

So I wanted to somehow fill in the blanks from all these gaps that are left, all the archival silence.

And how Saidiya Hartman talks about critical fabulation.

So basically using a combination of research, but also speculating a little bit.

to imagine something beyond these super biased archival gaps that we have.

I was teaching Black women in religion at Swarthmore, and I was looking for a text to use.

So I picked up—I've used Saidiya Hartman's work before, mainly— Lose Your Mother, I think.

So her latest book or her recent book was on women in New York.

It was called Wayward Lives.