![]() ![]() ![]() ![]() Her first book, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, is an examination of, among other topics, the intersection of slavery, gender, and the development of progressivism in the United States through the exploration of blank genealogies, memory, and the lingering effects of racism. Hartman has made literary and theoretical contributions to the understanding of slavery. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery.' Hartman went back to Africa to learn more about slavery and came back having learned more about herself. This is the afterlife of slavery-skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. Slavery had established a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone. Hartman describes this process in detail in Lose Your Mother: 'I wanted to engage the past, knowing that its perils and dangers still threatened and that even now lives hung in the balance. Hence, the archive lives on through the social structure of the society and its citizens. Hartman outlines slavery's imprint on all sectors of society as evidenced in historical archives that may or may not exist. The 'afterlife of slavery' can be characterized by the enduring presence of slavery's racialized violence still present in contemporary society. Hartman also theorizes the 'afterlife of slavery' in Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. ![]()
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