The groundbreaking debut by the award-winning author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, revised and updated.

Praise for Saidiya Hartman and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments

Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism
Winner of the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction

“Hartman has influenced an entire generation of scholars and afforded readers a proximity to the past that would otherwise be foreclosed.”
—The MacArthur Foundation

“I’m enthralled by [Hartman’s] gift for combining historical research with evocative imaginative leaps. Her writing in [ Wayward Lives] is a profound act of reclamation, and a simply stunning read.”
—Maaza Mengiste

“Hartman, one of our most brilliant contemporary thinkers, introduced the term ‘critical fabulation’ into my world. She’s a theorist and writer who actually changes what’s possible in my thought patterns. It’s exciting.”
—Claudia Rankine

“I was inspired, surprised, and deeply moved. . . . [Hartman’s] mode is intimate, radical and always alive to the details.”
—Leslie Jamison

“[ Wayward Lives] left me awestruck and grateful. I don’t think I’ve ever read anything like it—radical, rigorous, lyrical, attentive. . . . I read this thinking that I want to be wherever Saidiya Hartman is.”
—Yaa Gyasi

“Daring, and often inspiring. . . . Hartman is a tremendously gifted writer with the eye and the lyrical prose of a novelist. . . . The talent to do what Hartman does in [ Wayward Lives] is rare.”
—Annette Gordon-Reed

Saidiya Hartman has been praised as “one of our most brilliant contemporary thinkers” (Claudia Rankine, New York Times Book Review) and “a lodestar for a generation of students and, increasingly, for politically engaged people outside the academy” (Alexis Okeowo, The New Yorker). In Scenes of Subjection—Hartman’s first book, now revised and expanded—her singular talents and analytical framework turn away from the “terrible spectacle” and toward the forms of routine terror and quotidian violence characteristic of slavery, illuminating the intertwining of injury, subjugation, and selfhood even in abolitionist depictions of enslavement. By attending to the withheld and overlooked at the margins of the historical archive, Hartman radically reshapes our understanding of history, in a work as resonant today as it was on first publication, now for a new generation of readers.

This 25th anniversary edition features a new preface by the author, a foreword by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an afterword by Marisa J. Fuentes and Sarah Haley, notations with Cameron Rowland, and compositions by Torkwase Dyson.