I recently started reading Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection which is being celebrated today in some academic circles 25 years after its original publishing. I am blessed to have come across Hartman’s writings because her work is helping me look more critically at the “afterlife of slavery” and my own recent experiences tracing the Underground Railroad two centuries later later.
Writing the forward for the book is another brilliant historian, Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, who discusses Hartman’s revised and updated work in a conversation sponsored by the Free Library of Philadelphia. The recorded conversation took place two months ago here in Philly, which I sadly was not aware of at the time.