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Hartman grew up in Brooklyn, but her people on her mother’s side are from Alabama. It’s a victory dance for the marginal, edgy, weirdo Black nerds.” “We’re celebrating her, but we’re also celebrating ourselves. Hartman sat in the middle of a long table, the reluctant center of gravity. “Which name do you want it signed to?” Another asked for advice on graduate programs Hartman invited the woman to come see her at Columbia.Īfter the signing, a group of celebrants headed out to an Italian restaurant nearby. Hartman, whose given name is Valarie, responded soothingly. One woman said that she was having a “small crisis” and was about to change her name. When the presentations were over, Hartman sat at a table at the back of the tent, where a line of people held copies of her book for her to sign. Rowland said that the letter evoked the “legacies of Black antagonism that are part of what Saidiya calls ‘acts of everyday resistance.’ ” As Rowland read, the crowd erupted into laughter and cheers. The artist Cameron Rowland read from a letter written by a South Carolina planter, detailing disobedience on his plantation-a litany of impudent acts that the planter seemed not to realize constituted a campaign of sly subversion. The choreographer and performer Okwui Okpokwasili sang a piece inspired by characters in her book: domestic workers, chorus girls, juvenile delinquents, and wanderers. In 2008, five years before Black Lives Matter was founded, she wrote of “a past that has yet to be done, and the ongoing state of emergency in which black life remains in peril.” Her writing has become a lodestar for a generation of students and, increasingly, for politically engaged people outside the academy.Īt the museum, Jafa screened footage that showed how Hartman’s ideas had “infiltrated” his art-making.

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In three books and a series of essays, Hartman has explored the interior lives of enslaved people and their descendants, employing a method that she says “troubles the line between history and imagination.” Her iconoclastic thinking on the legacy of slavery in American life has prefigured the current cultural moment.

Jafa, wearing a brocaded coat and gold-heeled boots, surveyed the crowd, which included the artists Glenn Ligon and Lorraine O’Grady. “Once you’re in the circle, you don’t want to leave,” Lax said. (Hartman’s partner, Samuel Miller, a civil-rights attorney, had stayed home in Manhattan to help their teen-age daughter study for finals.) Lax had been a graduate student of Hartman’s at Columbia, and they remain in touch. The event’s curator, Thomas Lax, was waiting inside the tent to show Hartman around. Thelma Golden, the director of the Studio Museum in Harlem, greeted Hartman with a hug and warned, “Prepare for fan-girling.” The hotel was a block away.Īt the museum, a tent had been set up in a courtyard, and a line of attendees snaked around it: artists, fashion people, writers, students, cool kids with their hair in topknots.

“She carries the universe in her head, and you can feel it in her presence.” But her best friend, Tina Campt, a professor of visual culture at Brown, called her endearingly “goofy and awkward.” On a recent trip to London, Campt told me, Hartman got lost returning to her hotel from a restaurant. “She definitely has a bit of that holding-your-tongue thing as a power mode,” the artist Arthur Jafa, a friend and collaborator of hers, told me. Hartman has a serene, patient demeanor, which the cultural theorist Judith Butler described as “withheld and shy, self-protective.” She speaks at what seems like precisely three-quarters speed, to allow her to inspect her thoughts before releasing them. A professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia, she occupies a singular position in contemporary culture: she is an academic, influenced by Michel Foucault, who has both received a MacArthur “genius” grant and appeared in a Jay-Z video. Hartman, who is fifty-nine, wore a blue batik tunic over slim black pants and plum-shaded ankle boots. “I’m this shy person, and this feels so weird.” Several artists planned to present work that illustrated Hartman’s influence on them. The museum was holding an event to celebrate Hartman’s latest book, “ Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments,” an account, set in New York and Philadelphia at the turn of the twentieth century, that blends history and fiction to chronicle the sexual and gender rebellions of young Black women. On a clear night earlier this year, the writer and scholar Saidiya Hartman was fidgeting in a cab on the way to MOMA PS1, the contemporary-art center in Queens.

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