The Dead Book Revisited

The second public talk in the Fall 2016 Proseminar Lecture Series on the theme of Who the People: Punctuating Politics in the USA, Being America in the World

Speaker: Prof. Saidiya Hartman, Columbia University

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007) and Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford, 1997). She has published several articles on slavery, including “Venus in Two Acts” and “The Time of Slavery.” She is completing a book, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, which examines the sexual upheaval and radical transformation of everyday life that took place in the slum in the early decades of the 20th century.

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About the Proseminar:

The Division of Social Studies presents the Fall 2016 Proseminar in Humanistic and Social Scientific Inquiry, with the theme of "Who the People: Punctuating Politics in the USA, Being “America" in the World." This Fall, we engage with questions of the vitality, legitimacy, promise, im/possibility of democratic life that haunt one of the largest democracies in the world, which is also, indeed, one of the largest global imperial powers. How do the frames of polis, nation-state, colony, and postcolony intersect in the United States of America, and how are we to understand the people that fill out or outline these enclosures? What are the self-conceptions and proclamations, indeed also sighs and laments, of “the people” enclosed within these frames, and how do they impact the claims the people are able to make with regard to the meaning of politics, the political process, participation, and possibility--and indeed the very possibility of life within and without the polity. What must a transdisciplinary and decolonial inquiry into these matters of life and death look like, where does and must it happen, who does and must undertake it--and what affects and actions must it seek to enable and disable in us?