Saidiya Hartman is a professor at Columbia University and lives in New York. She is also a Guggenheim Fellow and has been a Cullman Fellow and Fulbright Scholar and author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1996) and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007). Hartman introduces the idea of “critical fabulation” in her article “Venus in Two Acts”, a writing methodology that combines historical and archival research with critical theory and fictional narrative. Critical fabulation is a tool that she uses in her scholarly practice to make productive sense of the gaps and silences in the archive of trans-Atlantic slavery that absent the voices of enslaved women. Her most recent book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, was published in 2019.
