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Saidiya Hartman moves to Columbia---who knew?





Apparently Saidiya Hartman, the well known African American literary scholar (best known for her extraordinary book Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self Making in Nineteenth Century America) has moved from the University of California, Berkeley to Columbia University. Hartman's first book is in my mind probably the most rigorous piece of scholarship emerging at the intersection of literary criticism and performance studies in the past ten years.

According to this link, she's been at Columbia since September. Dam, who knew? I wonder how my brilliant Columbia black-nerd buddies from undergrad feel about Hartman's move to their old "home". Hartman's newest book Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route looks at slave-castle tourist sites off the coast of West Africa and other performances of black traumatic memory. It has just been published byFarrar, Straus and Giroux. Saidiya, welcome to New York.

-Frank

Posted by the young people's professor on 12/25/2006 at 5:18:00 AM |

Given the atrocities that occurred during the enslavement of our ancestors throughout the African Diaspora, I often find it problematic when people refer to the places where they forcibly kept us, particularly on the West Coast of Africa, as "slave castles." Perhaps we might consider calling them "slave dungeons." That seems to me to be a more appropriate terminology given the historic fact of what occurred there, regardless of the architectural make-up of the space. Just a thought.

Posted by Anonymous Anonymous | 12/25/2006  

i knew!! lol...only cuz a friend told me back this summer that she was leaving berkeley...

Posted by Blogger AC | 1/03/2007  

Frank, isn't Tricia Rose also now at Columbia?

Fascinating to see her new book. There are some other folks working in that same area, so I look forward to checking out her book when I can to see how she explores the topic.

Peace and Happy New Year!

Posted by Blogger John K | 1/04/2007  

i'm so late on this post...but yeah I emailed Saidiya months ago but she never got back at me. Who knows how long she'll be "visiting" Columbia...for one day we'll have the luxury of ignoring tenure too...right?

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