 I'm incredibly happy to be here with you tonight. And I want to say that this is a very unique moment. Congratulations, Adia Harman, for this 25th anniversary edition of Scenes of Subjection, Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in 19th Century America. It's such a beautiful edition of such an important work and we're honored to have you here tonight. And I want to also say thank you to Mabel Wilson for organizing this and for bringing it to GESAP. It means a lot for all of us and I think it's very unique. Mabel Wilson is the Nancy and George professor of architecture planning and preservation, professor in African American and African diasporic studies, co-director of the Global Africa Lab at GESAP here and also director of the Institute for Research in African American Studies at Columbia University. And I mean, you've seen the book, it's very necessary to congratulate everyone that took part on this amazing edition of this crucial work of our culture, our politics, our aesthetics now and I want to mention, of course, that the preface, the new preface that Sadia Harman did for this book and the foreword that Kinga Yamata Taylor and the afterword that Marisa Fuentes and Sara Hailey who are here with us tonight, right? Did and the notations by Cameron Rowland and who's also here with us and the compositions by Torquasa Dyson that are also incredibly meaningful and beautiful. And Torquasa did an exhibition here in, I believe in 2019 that was called 1919 Black Water and also I'm very, very happy to meet Torquasa today in person because we worked together for the 13th Shanghai Biennial but we never met in person. So all this is full of meaning for GESAP for me and I'm so happy and grateful that you're bringing this here with us. So welcome and please join me to welcome Saidiya, Torquasa, Marisa, Sara, Cameron and Alex and of course Maywe Wilson to whom I am passing now. Thank you, Andreas or Dean Hakka for that lovely introduction and welcome everyone who's here. I think this is also being Simon Casso. Hello, all of those on the interwebs but I just wanted to begin by also acknowledging that this university is built on the traditional land and unceded territory of the Linenapé and that we pay respect to their diaspora and honor the past, present and future rights and presence of the Linenapé on their homeland. And I should just a little bit about the Institute for Research in African American Studies and also FM or AAADS as we call it. And so for the past 29 years, the Institute for Research in African American Studies founded by the late professor Manning Marible has been a fierce advocate of social responsibility in black studies. Dr. Marible offered the prescient reminder in a New York Times article from 1998 that quote, black studies must utilize history and culture as tools by which an oppressed people can transform their lives in the entire society. Scholars have an obligation to not just interpret but to act in quote. So the Institute serves as an academic resource center for a local and global community that has cultivated an intellectual tradition grounded in Harlem and New York City's rich history and culture. And I will add now in partnership with our African American and African Diaspora Studies department, we continue together to expand the array of contemporary scholarship and interpretation of the diasporic black experience with ongoing series like tonight's conversations, a celebration of the new edition, here, yay. Of scenes of subjection, terror, slavery, and self-making in the 19th century by our colleague, Dr. Saidiah Hartman. And as Andreas mentioned, that joining Professor Hartman will be Dr. Sarah Haley and Dr. Marisa Farentes who contributed an afterward to the edition. We're also joined by Turquoise Dyson and Cameron Rowland whose contributions of notations and compositions open new ways for reading scenes. And we're also joined by Dr. Alexander Waheli who will offer thoughts on why scenes continue to be so relevant. So before I read the bios of tonight's stellar roster, I do wanna thank our co-sponsors of tonight's conversations and that is the CSER, the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race, ISSG, the Institute for the Study of Sexuality and Gender, ICLS, the Institute for Comparative Literary Studies, the School of the Arts, and of course here, GSEP, the Graduate School of Architecture, Planning and Preservation. Now some of you might wonder besides the big space, why we are in the basement of basically an Architecture, Planning and Preservation school. But I think it's indicative of the importance and reach of a book-like scenes of subjection. So I co-teach along with two other colleagues, Reinhold Martin and Lucia Allay, a required architectural history course for our masters of architecture students. So in week eight of the class, which we entitled Capital and Labor, we read Marx's Wage, Labor and Capital that we pair with chapter four, the burden of individuality of freedom from scenes. Now architecture as the West's art of buildings formation is deeply entangled with the West's colonial imperial project, nation-building of self-making and racial capitalism. And this chapter from scenes provides an invaluable primer for what Saidiya writes as how, quote, black subjection, race and how black subjection and race are positively framed questions of sovereignty, rights and power, which are all hallmarks of modernity, which are also enshrined and spatialized in the architecture of modernism. So this is exactly what makes the scope and scale of scenes, especially its attentiveness to everyday lives and how history might compel different contemporary social actions and imaginary relevant to all who learn and all who teach across disciplinary boundaries. So I will begin with brief introductions of everyone today. Professor Saidiya Hartman is a university professor and a professor of English and comparative literature here at Columbia University. I'm a Carther Fellow, Professor Hartman has published essays on photography, film and feminism. Not only is she the author of scenes of subjection, but she is also the author of the remarkable Lose Your Mother, a journey along the Atlantic slave route and wayward lives, beautiful experiments, intimate histories of social upheaval. Dr. Marisa Jeff Fuentes is the presidential termed chair in African American history and an associate professor of history and women's and gender and sexuality studies at Rutgers University. Her publications include the award-winning book Dispossessed Lives, Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive, and is the co-editor of Scarlet and Black, Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers' Histories, volumes one, two and three. And also, History of the Present, a special history slavery archives. Dr. Sarah Haley, whose research areas include U.S. gender history, carceral history, black feminist and queer theory, prison, abolition and feminist archival methods. She is the author of No Mercy Here, Gender Punishment and the Making of Jim Crow Modernity, and her writing has appeared in journals including Signs, the Journal of Women and Culture, the Journal of African American History, GLQ, a Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Souls and Women and Performance. She is an associate professor of gender studies and history here at Columbia University and has been active in prison abolition and labor movements and currently organizes scholars for social justice. Cameron Rowland is a New York based artist making visible the institution's systems and policies that perpetuate racial capitalism. Rowland's research intensive work centers around the display of objects and documents whose provenance and operations expose the afterlives of slavery and the colonization that permeate our daily lives. Rowland's work has been exhibited in solo exhibitions at the Institute of Contemporary Arts in London, the Museum of Contemporary Art Los Angeles, Gallery Buchholz, Cologne Germany, the Kunsthalle Freberg and Switzerland, Artists Space, New York and Essex Street and Maxwell Graham, New York. Tokwasi Dyson describes herself as a painter working across multiple mediums to explore the continuity between ecology, infrastructure and architecture. With an emphasis on the ways that black and brown bodies perceive and negotiate space as information, Dyson looks to spatial liberation strategies from historical and contemporary perspectives seeking to uncover new understandings of the potential for more livable geographies. Dyson's has had solo exhibitions and installations at the Colby College Museum of Art, the Graham Foundation for Advanced Studies in Fine Art and as Andrea's mentioned, here at the Arthur Ross Gallery at GSAP to name a few of the spaces of her exhibition. And I also want to point to you that you can see Tokwasi's powerful installations of a liquid belonging that is currently on view at the Pace Gallery in Chelsea. And Dr. Alexander Waheli is the Forbes university professor in the Department of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University Apologies for the most error mistake, where he teaches critical theory, black literature and culture, gender and sexuality studies, social technologies and popular culture. He is the author of phonographies, grooves in sonic afromodernity, habeas fiscus, racializing assemblages by a politics and black feminist theories of the human. And Finan, R&B music and the materiality of black film voices and technology. He's currently working on Black Life or Schwarzstein, which situates blackness as an ungendered ontology of unbelonging. So we are honored to have you all here today. And we will begin with a few words from Saidiya, followed by presentations from Sarah and Marissa, Cameron, Tokwasi and Alex. We will have a group discussion and toward the end of the evening, we will open it up for Q&A. And I want to say that our local independent bookseller, book culture, has copies of scenes of subjection available for purchase. So if you don't have a copy of this amazing book, and it is actually Cameron's work that's on the cover, I highly would recommend picking one up. So why don't we begin? Should be. So it's really great to be here tonight. And I really want to thank my colleague, my brilliant colleague Mabel for organizing this, but I also really want to thank my students because I don't really know that there will be scenes at 25 if there hadn't been scenes at 20 and a special issue of the Journal of Women in Performance. So I think my students really made me feel like I had done something. So really. And for all of the brilliant collaborators who are sitting at the table, I could just read the acknowledgments because really it's really the collective endeavor and it's the set of conversations that just inspire the work, keep it alive. So I owe so much. So I'm just gonna read the four pages from the preface and then I'm gonna sit down and I'm gonna hand it over to the brilliant minds. Okay, so this is The Hold of Slavery. The conviction that I was living in the world created by slavery propelled the writing of this book. I could feel the force and disfigurement of slavery in the present. The life of the captive and the commodity certainly wasn't my past, but rather the threshold of my entry into the world. Its grasp and claim couldn't be cordoned off as what happened then. For me, the relation between slavery and the present was open, unfinished. In rereading scenes of subjection, I am struck by the breathlessness of the prose by its ardent desire to say it all, to say everything at once. If it were possible, I might have written it as a 345 page long sentence. This sentence would be written in the past, present and future tense. Temporal entanglement best articulates the still open question of abolition and the long awaited but not yet actualized freedom declared over a century and a half ago. The hold of slavery was what I sought to articulate and convey. The category crisis of human flesh and sentient commodity define the existence of the enslaved and this predicament of value and fungibility would shadow their descendants, the blackened and the dispossessed. I also hope to change the terms in which we understood racial slavery by attending to its diffuse horror and the divisions it created between life and not life. The scenes of subjection I endeavor to unpack were not those of spectacular violence. The 33 lashes at the whipping post, the torture, rape and brutality ubiquitous on the plantation, the public rituals of lynching and dismemberment, the vast arsenal of implements employed to harm and maim. The Sadian pursuits, the endless variations of humiliation and dishonor and the compulsive displays of the broken and violated body, all of which were endemic to slavery and key to the cultivation of anti-slavery sentiment and pedagogy. My interests lay elsewhere. To be subjected to the absolute power of another and to be interpolated as a subject before the law were the dimensions of subjection that most concern me. I intended to bring into view the ordinary terror and habitual violence that structured everyday life and inhabited the most mundane and quotidian practices. This environment of brutality and extreme domination affected the most seemingly benign aspects of the life of the enslaved and could not be eluded, no matter the nature of one's condition, whether paramour, offspring, dutiful retainer or favored nursemaid. The shift from the spectacular to the everyday was critical in illuminating the ongoing and structural dimension of violence and slavery's idioms of power. No less important was the domain of practice. In creating an inventory of ways of doing and a genealogy of refusal, I tried to account for extreme domination and the possibilities seized in practice. Black performance and quotidian practice were determined by and exceeded the constraints of domination. This dimension has received less attention in the reception of the book. The focus on its arguments about empathy, terror, and violence, subjection, and social death has overshadowed the discussion of practice. Scenes endeavored to illuminate the countless ways in which the enslaved challenge refused to fight and resisted the condition of enslavement and its ordering and negation of life, its extraction and destruction of capacity. The everyday practices, the ways of living and dying, of making and doing were attempts to slip away from the status of commodity and to affirm existence as not chattel, as not property, as not wench, even when this other state could not be named because incommensurate or untranslatable within the conceptual field of the enclosure. The negation of the given was ripe with promise. The wild thought and dangerous music of the enslaved gave voice to other visions of the possible and refused captivity as the only horizon, opposed the framework of property and commodity, contested the idea they were less than human, nurtured acts of vengeance and anticipated divine retribution. The subjugated knowledge or speculative knowledge of freedom would establish the vision of what might be, even if unrealizable within the prevailing terms of order. It explains why a commodity might describe themself as human flesh or a fugitive trapped in a garret, write letters describing a free life in the North or a hand laboring in the field, read the signs and take note of the drops of blood on the corn as though it was due from heaven and in the woods discern in the arrangement of leaves a hieroglyph of freedom coming or an ex-slave proved capable of imagining an auspicious error of extensive freedom as does Olada Ecciano in the interesting narrative. Quote, may the time come, at least the speculation is to me pleasing when the sable people shall gratefully commemorate the auspicious era of extensive freedom. It is a curious and prescient formulation. How does one commemorate what has yet to arrive? In the context of social death, everyday practices explored the possibility of transfigured existence and cultivated an imagination of the otherwise and the elsewhere, cartographies of the fantastic utterly antagonistic to slavery. The enslaved refused to accept the order of values that had transformed them into units of currency and capital, beast and crops, breeders, incubators, lactating machines and sentient tools. At secret meetings and freedom schools, hidden away in loopholes of retreat and hush arbors, gathered at the river or dwelling in the swamp, the enslaved articulated a vision of freedom that far exceeded that of the liberal imagination. It enabled them to conceive other ways of existing, flee the world of masters and invite its fiery destruction, anticipate the upheaval that would put the bottom rail on top, nurture a collective vision of what might be possible when no longer enslaved, and sustain belief in the inevitability of slavery's demise. A messianic vision of the last days and the end of world was articulated in a range of quotidian practices from work songs to the ring shout, a circle dance of worship and divine communion. Such practices shaped the contours of the day to day, an expansive register of minor gestures, ways of sustaining and creating life, caring for one another, undoing slavery by small acts of stealth and destruction, communal dreaming, sacred transport, acts of redress and faith in a power greater than master and nation, made it possible to survive the unbearable while never acceding to it. The arrangement of stars in the night sky, the murmur and echo of songs traveling across a river, the revered objects buried near a prayer tree, the rumors of fugitives in the swamp or maroons in the hill, nurtured dreams of a free territory or in existence without masters or a plot against the plantation or reveries of miraculous deliverance. Thank you. Hi everyone, it's great to be here. I'm really grateful to Mabel and to everyone for coming and for all of my panelists. And of course, Saideah, though everyone here should be lucky, they don't have to follow her ever. The only way to change the order, she thought, was not to do something differently but to do a different thing from Toni Morrison, Paradise. Scenes is that different thing. As a graduate student, I remember discussing the book with my dissertation advisor, Hazel Carby, asking how she thought we should understand its main scholarly influences. Hazel replied simply, no, it's its own book. Sitting with scenes for nearly 20 years now, I realized that she was urging me away from the question of how it came to be and to consider how it breaks discipline and genre. Of course, one of these ways is its way with history. Scenes critiques prevailing understandings of history through events in their proliferation, famously declaring, I am trying to grapple with the changes wrought in the social fabric after the abolition of slavery and with the non-events of emancipation insinuated by the perpetuation of the plantation system and the re-figuration of subjection. For a book that challenged change as the epistemological zenith of history, for a book known for asserting the non-event as a category of analysis, scenes actually re-inscribes eventedness because scenes itself is evented. It is a scholarly watershed, not because the scholarship that came after scenes has lined up in fidelity to its aims and arguments. Scenes is too radical for such an alignment, but because the book's interventions have an everywhereness about them, their simultaneous depth and breadth make them as inescapable. Beautifully so. How could one write about black living or black subordination without considering the elusiveness of redress the paradox of performance? The tethers of the human, otherwise black practice, threadbare empathy, the racial liberalism of capitalism, the racial enclosures of gender. How could one elide its withering and haunting questions of form and practice? How would you dodge its quandaries and cautions about the reiteration of violence and its enurements? One must now look for terror and pained existence of the enslaved where it can hardly be discerned. Work must look different in the aftermath of the blistering line. The particular status of the slave as object and as subject requires a careful consideration of the notion of agency if one wants to do more than endow the enslaved with agency as some sort of gift dispensed by historians and critics to the dispossessed. The line, some sort of gift dispense haunted me ever since reading it. I lived and wrote in fear of being an agency gift dispensary. Hartman's assertion, the exercise of free will quite literally was inextricable from guilty infractions, criminal misdeeds, punishable transgressions and the elaborate micro-penality of everyday life. It was lightning. All of my work since then was, is to better understand the elaborate micro-penality of everyday life for black people, especially black women, girls and queer people. I am animated by the attempt to try and be as bold in the refusal of reform as Hartman models. Not only in my scholarship, but in my politics. She enjoins us to refuse the ruse of seduction in the everyday after life of slavery. I follow Hartman's path toward hallucinating the ensnaring and engulfing of black women's desire, grand and quotidian as crime and search the archive for relation and social life and social reproduction and care and theory and desire and intimacy that exceeds the given and the criminalization of want and will. That is the opening and the way that she and scenes made for me. I was never a formal student of SIDIAs. Despite having no formal obligations to me, her intellectual and professional generosity has changed me as a scholar, as a historian without a proper locus. So I jumped at the chance during the height of the pandemic lockdown and Zoom teaching to teach a graduate seminar on the work of SIDIA Hartman at UCLA. I thought it might be an intellectual self in the miserable times. As you might expect, it enrolled students from all corners of the university, visual artists in MFA programs, unruly sociologists, English PhDs, insurgent historians, feminist studies scholars, black studies MA students. The first day of class, one of my questions was completely routine. Why do you wanna take this class on the work of SIDIA Hartman? I got stares in response. I worried a senior colleague once told me never to teach a seminar on a topic you truly love because if it's disappointing, you will be depressed for the rest of the term. I thought I have done it now. I'm teaching a class on a big love and the students were fumbling and floundering as if I had asked them about life on Mars. As the semester went on, these students, very brilliant, very insightful about Hartman's work were still often reaching to express its impact. Eventually, I realized they were just grasping for a way to say that Hartman's was the work that made theirs possible. Its dissidence and creativity and non-conformity was an opening. The new edition of scenes reflects this, of course. Hartman turned scenes, already a work of art, into an artwork. The art theory with its vocabularies of recursion and antagonism is dazzling. The only way to change the order she thought was not to do something differently but to do a different thing. But don't just take it from me. In the poetry of her prose, Hartman is truly unmatched. And that is also why we are here 25 years later to celebrate this work. Open the book and point to any page and read it aloud, and I have. This is a work of art. This is the monument to slavery that Toni Morrison produced in her novel, Beloved. This is the love supreme that Coltrane offered us in three parts. It does not surprise me that Hartman initially was intending to write about the blues when the history of slavery made its echoes an essential route to travel down. Scenes of Subjection is the historical marker for the blues. In her new preface to the 25th anniversary edition of Scenes, Hartman says that if it were possible, she might have written it as a 345 page long sentence. And while I think you did. All right. Scenes is a feat of rigor and command where historiography, critical theory, black feminism, political theory, and cultural studies are drawn upon to meet the demands of its inquiry. In a recent reflection on the 25th anniversary of the text, Hartman writes, quote, I am struck by the breathlessness of the prose, by its ardent desire to say it all, to say everything at once. Its ardent desire is what gives the monograph its repeated breath, and what continues to reveal the value and necessity of careful complexity when conceptualizing the structural predicaments of blackness. These concepts. Each and every one of these years, including this year, every time I return to the book, I reread it again. I read it again with my students, and I learn how to read it again. The students, every year they got stuck puzzling over the problem of empathy. Every year has been the same. Most of the times the question is not explicitly asked, but sometimes they raise, how come? How is it that empathy is not a good thing in itself? How can it be such a violent gesture? Why is that the attribution of humanity to the enslaved person with amounts to an occupation of that interiority? But that, yeah, that's my formulation of the question. I always learn something new when I revisit scenes of subjection. And as anyone who's read my work, or heard me lecture on the 17th century origins of racial capitalism knows, I am always also glad to say publicly and with gusto that I owe a tremendous debt to Saidiah Hartman, to scenes, and to her later work. My thinking on slavery is so influenced by an entangled with Saidiah that it is almost impossible for me to separate out the strands. And so when I revisit scenes, I am struck most profoundly by what I owe. I have developed a theory of black sound. Capital B, one word, which I define most simply as a sonic compliment to blackface mistrusty. And how this concept builds upon the foundational work that Saidiah Hartman provides in scenes, it will not exist without it. For the extremity of restraint, I think those are open questions. Which is to say, Professor Hartman, in scenes you gave us our questions. Thank you for giving us our questions. Returning to where I began, to the circulation of this book, sharing, reading, rereading, carrying these ideas and questions, letting them shape what we can see in our archives. We are still working these questions. We aren't done yet, which is to say that scenes isn't done yet. Thank you. Good evening, everyone. I just want to join in thanking Mabel and all the sponsors for bringing us all together. And what an honor to be on a panel with such distinguished colleagues. Thank you. I am a student of Saidiah Hartman. This by now may be obvious. I'm also a student of scenes of subjection, of loser mother, of Venus in two acts and wayward lives. But scenes was the formative text. This book in hand with trios silencing the past shifted my intellectual world in the beginning of graduate school about the practice of history and about the violences of slavery, legal, diffuse, indiscernible, discursive and explicit. Scenes forced me to be rigorously suspicious of the orderly and progressive narratives of slavery and freedom in the historiography of slavery. It showed us how the notions of black humanity and black subjectivity enabled and enacted particular kinds of punishment, criminalization and terror on captive people. Scenes taught me to understand that our empathy for the horrendous injustices enslaved people endured and succumbed to and my and others' desire for the enslaved to survive and subvert the terrors of slavery displaced their denied pain for my own, a self-centering. It modeled for me the ethics of refusal, of critically reproducing violence, of narrative coherence, of archival power, of not standing down in the midst of challenging structures and disciplines and people who say this is not history. Scenes taught me to interrogate terms and concepts, agency, resistance, consent, that when placed in the context of slavery's domination and against liberal humanism as the measure of possibility, failed to account for the enslaved condition. For me, Scenes is inseparable from Saidea the person and her model of intellectual rigor and mentorship. Preparing these brief remarks, I recalled my first and only class with her, how I struggled to understand one single word of the discussion and when on the eve of my qualifying exams, a three hour oral interrogation, Saidea asked me a practice question and my mind went completely blank. Despite these moments of fumbling, she somehow kept me as a student and persisted in pushing me to envision a place for myself in this academic world. For this, I owe her a deep debt of gratitude. As an overwhelmed, tenured professor with no time to spare, I am also struck by the time Saidea and I had together, time she volunteered or initiated at a cafe where she had given me something incredibly hard to read, Spivax, Ken the Subaltern Speak, or historian Ranajit Guha's Chandra's Death, asking what I thought and how I might employ their methods and care in my work on gender and Caribbean slavery, their attention to political subjectivity and the relentless silencing of the Subaltern by archival and colonial power. These readings demonstrated an ethics of responsibility to historical subjects that I would keenly engage as I began my own intellectual work. At the time I was surprised and unbelieving that she wanted to know what I thought. This unbelieving lasted way too long and I am certain it tried her patience. It was Saidea who set the bar for me as I set out to write my dissertation and dispossess lives. A bar at first I doubted was reachable. I offer these reflections to pay tribute to her gifts of unceasing support, guidance and standards of excellence that continue on these 25 years and more and to stress how much this care has sustained me through the loneliness and fear of going against the politics and rules of a discipline and a field. As we gather here to celebrate the longevity and profundity of this book, I would be remiss not to comment on the idea that the legibility and traction of scenes, particularly in the discipline of history, was inevitable. In not attending to this, we missed the risk it took to write this book and to follow her theoretical leads. When I left graduate school 10 years after scenes was published and left my intellectual home of African-American studies, I quickly learned that the field of history wasn't reckoning with the book. Indeed, many historians of slavery either refused to engage it, she is not a historian, they said, or worse, borrowed her conceptual revelations without citation. What this meant for me, as integral as her work was to mine, was an uphill battle in a field still mired in empiricism and progressive teleological narratives. Prior to its publication, when I shared pieces of what would become dispossessed lives at various talks, I struggled to convince historians to stay with me through the violent and difficult terrain of urban Caribbean slavery and with non-traditional methods. I would field comments from members of the audience who express their concern about my not attending to the emotional lives and worlds of the enslaved that would evidence enslaved perseverance. Within my home institution, I was encircled by doubt. I was told by colleagues that there was not enough evidence to write a whole book, and I was warned not to present enslaved people in such subjection. No one would want to read this, they said, and that they couldn't wait for structuralism to return to the field. But what scared me the most, as my tenure depended upon the legibility and acceptance of my book, was being accused of writing fiction. This is the historian's sharpest dagger and most devastating accusation, even as it refuses to acknowledge the archive and historical narrative themselves are a kind of fiction. Fortunately, I also had the support of people who face similar pushbacks and who, despite the perils, insisted on rigorous work that explored the complexities of black lives, even if one's peers did not yet understand. Saidia's look of recognition was an incredible comfort. She told me to write the book I wanted to write, regardless of the consequences. She assured me I would land on my feet no matter what. She pushed me to take the risk because she had the incredible foresight that I did not. She had fought similar field battles. She also gave me permission through her advice in her scholarship to explore my writing as a method and to discover an argument through the process of critical fabulation. I don't want us to take for granted the path that Saidia forged, the ground she broke and the disciplinary barriers she knocked down, beginning with scenes but continuing through her genre defying and genius work wayward lives. Scenes is core to our thinking about the archives of slavery, how we write about violence, our ethical scholarly practices and necessary disciplinary interventions. The field of history can no longer deploy uninterrogated language and romantic fictions of slavery and ignore the dangers of freedom or the black precarity in the afterlife of slavery. Scenes of subjection requires careful, slow and studied reading. It must be reread in a moment when careful, slow and studied reading is a relic of a time before the flurry and fast pace of social media's academic trends. Saidia, thank you so much for this work, your care, this invitation and your example. Thank you. Good evening, everyone. Thank you so much, Mabel and all the work you've done to bring us here and thank you Saidia and all of the supporters of this event. I'm continuously honored to talk about scenes. So, I was asked by Saidia to make compositions for a book I thought I'd read. And when Saidia approached me to make these compositions, I was taken by the fact that she was so curious about my work in abstraction. And what it did, that sort of curiosity in my studio in particular, I call it before Saidia and after Saidia in my studio. And after Saidia in my studio was thinking about scenes and it brought me to a really specific project that I want to try to talk through tonight. And that's the project of abstraction. I think my work primarily is a work that deals with two different kinds of abstractions that scenes allows me to sort of navigate around. A legal abstraction and legal abstraction. So the difference between illegal abstraction and legal abstraction is what scenes sort of brings to life for me. And I will say this for visual artists who are trying to grapple with what abstraction means. The principles around it and the philosophies of it, I think scenes is a new gateway in which to understand the practice of abstraction, right? One of the things that scenes walks me through is this idea of how do we structure consciousness within shadow slavery? And what I sort of hooked on to is this idea of oppositional consciousness, right? And the cuffles and the auction blocks and the garrets, what does it mean to have black bodies performed against our natural state of being? And with this oppositional consciousness, I understood it as a legal abstraction, the dance, the song, the crying, the dance, the song and the cuffles, the resistance on the auction block, the auction block as an architecture. What does it mean to speak out against these moments? In relationship to the auction block as an architecture and in relationship to the auction block as a place of resistance, illegal abstraction occurs and legal abstraction occurs. The legal moment is when a body is placed on an auction block and it refused all of its sentient being, right? That is a way in which these human beings were legally forced and re-forced into enslavement, right? At the same time, using the auction blocks as a way to speak out from to say no, you will not have my body and you will not have my mind. This is a production of illegal abstraction. So what I'm trying to work through with this new version of scenes is what does it mean to choose to be in the realm of illegal abstraction and choose to embrace improvisation and choose to embrace the wandering and choose to embrace a kind of system that says my consciousness and my sensoria are the things that make me alive even in these wretched conditions. So what I've done is to write about it a bit in relationship to my own work. I begin by looking at the combination of architecture, infrastructure, and engineering to get at an atmosphere of presence, of black geography and spatial compositions that come from the ongoing work of environmental liberation. Thinking about this combination and their shared resonance in the built environment centers my thoughts in the poetics of invention and resistance. For me, this is where scene fits right in in supporting my desire to make illegal abstraction. I'm instantly connected to the ways we refuse and center our life as priority with velocity, scale, movement, structure, improvisation in these quotidian moments of resistance. This multi-scalular response and refusal will never dissipate because the transhistoric condition of scenes and of black liberation is a force that contends with the world building that precedes the making of blackness. So what I was able to do through scenes is think about a theory that I'm working on and ongoingness of black compositional thought and that is the ways in which we liberate ourselves in these conditions of oppression and dispossession. Within black compositional thought as a theory, I also supported the work by creating a shape language that I titled the hypershape. Really briefly, the hypershape consists of three geometric forms, right? Rectilinear and curvilinear conditions, the rectangle, the triangle, and the square, right? Box-brown, the rectangle, Harriet Jacobs' Irregular Triangle, right? And in these kinds of, I'll say geometries, what this space, I'm sorry, and Tony burns the curvilinear condition. What I'm doing with these hypershapes and what I think scenes propels me to do with these hypershapes is create compositions where I understand and recognize how we, as people in our ongoing fight of liberation within both climate change in a post-historical slavery condition, is use space, learn space, and make space along the way. So these three oppositional existences within these different liberation strategies, we understand that Box-found, I'm sorry, Box-brown created an architectural space, right? Harriet found an architectural space, and Tony reused consistently an architectural space. So within this idea of scenes as a trans-historical condition on abstraction, what it takes us through is learning how we find, create, and reuse in these continual moments. I would call it an ongoing recipe of sensoria that makes us feel alive and growing. And then the drawings that I made, I'll take us through a couple of more of the drawings. The drawings I made with these hypershapes in mind, I was fighting, and I still fight every day to be loose in my improvisation, to use these shapes as a base condition to create compositions that talk about precarity, that talk about scale, and talk about a multi-scaled tradition of self-liberation. So with the drawings, you see all of these, the shape language that I think in the drawing, sometimes create visual tension, they create space, and then create a condition of flatness, right? So one of the things about scenes is that it's always in my mind working in the foreground, the background, in my own work, right? While I'm drawing and thinking and referring to the book on my drawing table, I find myself standing up in scenes and rereading it and thinking about the ways in which we have to reclaim geography in our own bodies and how we map instantly a moment of freedom when someone says you don't have a sense, you don't have a light, you don't have a being, right? So this idea of representation in relationship to consciousness is what I'm trying to get at and what I'm trying to fight for in real time. So when I talk about, I thought I read scenes, that's just it. I've reread it several times now, and I would argue that it is a book about abstraction, and it is a book that makes the CERNs illegal abstraction in relationship to legal abstraction. And one more thing that, as I try to work on this new project around abstractions and scenes and emancipation, that so-called emancipation, that's idea talks so brilliantly about is this idea of the fragrant and the wanderer. What does it mean to police the body? And black compositional thought is that also, how do we get away from policing movement? And in scenes, when I think about the way in which, post-so-caught emancipation put real limits on the way in which we wander and wander, right? I know that in my work, I am interested in, and I wanna get this right, I am interested in revisiting vagrant wandering. I am interested in revisiting what does it mean to produce illegal abstractions and hold that in my paintings, drawings, and sculptures. So when this new project trying to purse out how scenes, I think, really is going to redefine how we think about, those of us who think about and take up abstraction in this sort of radical way. Thank you. So thank you, Mabel and Sadia, for building this event, and thank you, Sadia, again, for just the incredible generosity of opening scenes in this way to all of us here and elsewhere. As I said, the last time we were together, scenes didn't just impact me, it really changed my conception of the world. So when Sadia invited me to collaborate with her on what she called a concept map of scenes, I agreed immediately, but I really couldn't imagine how we would convey the complexity of its thought. We discussed it, and we imagined that it could maybe function as a kind of graphic study guide, something that could chart the relationships between some of the key concepts in the book, the ideas that have been elaborated on by others, and that are grounded in the thought and practice of others as well. So then part of the idea became to create another form of citation, one that might trace the correlations of certain ideas across the text and beyond the text. So this sort of precipitated a year and a half long standing weekly meeting where we would try to sort of think of things, figure out how we would approach this kind of impossible task of rendering the complexity of scenes as some kind of guide for reading. The impossibility of it, I think, was simultaneously frustrating and so generative, and it's like there was maybe even a sense that as we were discussing that the conversation was actually the sort of focus of what we were doing. For me, one of the crucial dimensions of scenes is that it disturbs linear progressivist historiography, troubles the category of the event, and so doing makes space for other forms of regard. So we wanted also to challenge the linear progressivist logic of most charts and diagrams to reflect the nonlinear nature of the book and its theses. We were trying to figure out a way to describe the book's recursive temporality, which allows for the violence of racial slavery and its afterlife to be held and thought together. We decided to call these concept maps notations that, like a score, would offer a framework for interpretation. We didn't want to prescribe a single reading, so we built out multiple notations, which approached the book in different ways, overlap with each other, and appear throughout the text. Transit in the flesh or on being the object of property consists of six images that respectively depict the grave of hackless Jenkins, James Smiley's mezzotint of the dismal swamp, utensils and a pot trammel made by an enslaved blacksmith, a cosmogram, the Green Hill slave auction block, and slave irons whose internal bells announced the continuous labor of the enslaved. This information is included at the end of the book after the bibliography in a section we call the annotations. Black antagonism is set on an image of a sweetgrass basket made on Edisto Island, South Carolina. Sweetgrass basket weaving is a traditional black practice maintained in the US through the history of the cultivation of rice in Georgia and South Carolina lowlands. The basket materially exemplifies the temporality described in scenes. Along the spiral of the basket, we located ideas and acts that appear within the text as part of a continuous and recursive trajectory, despite the ways in which they are recognized and interpolated as distinct. Cycles of accumulation and dispossession is organized around concentric circles and intersecting axes. The axes span categories that appear throughout the book as both tied and opposed to each other, such as blackness and property, practice and rights. Part of our effort here was to represent the ways in which these categories and the force they exert are all acting at once and operate in moving and shifting continually. Theses on the non-event of emancipation or the graphic register of a moan consists of a group of theses that Saidiya wrote. Originally, these were numbered. Some of them were quotes, some are new formulations. In this configuration, the numbering was removed. We laid them out as a kind of networked feedback loop across two spreads of the book following the final page of text. They orbit the non-event, and in doing so describe the conditions we continue to live in. One of the theses reads, we were free in every sense of the term, free of a home, free of land, free of prospects, free of 40 acres and a mule, free of reparations, free of everything except white folks. They were more dangerous now. They would kill us in the blink of an eye with no afterthought. They had no one to answer to. No one was keeping account of dead Negroes and the ones who went missing. We frequently discussed the critique of freedom and scenes, which I think still after 25 years remains one of the most potent and controversial aspects of the text. One of the things you emphasized is the ways in which freedom is a central concept of black life is categorically distinct from the moral, legal, and economic definitions of freedom within racial capitalism. That is that something other than black domination is unrecognizable within this regime, but the info politics of the dominated nonetheless exists. Scenes offers us an understanding that practice is not something you do alone. This is so evident in all the ways you bring other people's voices and actions and thought into your work. This is your care for us. The care that you define as the black heart of our social poesis. You so beautifully dedicated this book to those who made a way. So I wanna thank you for making a way in this way for us. Good evening, everyone. Thank you to Mabel, everyone else involved in bringing us together, my co-panelists, and of course especially Saidiya Hartman for providing the occasion. And before I begin with my remarks, I need to get my gut response to whenever Saidiya Hartman's work is summoned out of the way before it seeps out in other ways. Why are we not speaking about lose your mother? Or at least why are we not also discussing lose your mother? This is the proverbial hill that I will always die on. Because so many of the ideas in the text have become deeply entrenched common sense in critical black studies and a number of other fields, I would say much of the thought in the last 20 years produced in critical black studies would not be possible without scenes of subjection. The republication of scenes of subjection allows for renewed engagement that makes explicit again its parameters and stakes. The revised and expanded edition of scenes coronifies the earlier incarnation by interlacing the main text with communal voices from the academy and beyond. The new words make possible for Hartman's ideas to unfurl within different historical, political, methodological and aesthetic context. And I'm extremely grateful to Hartman's New Preface and Marisa Fuentes and Sarah Haley's Marvelous Afterward. And I deeply feel the struggle that you begin your afterward with in terms of trying to do this very much so. And I especially appreciated their necessary and intricate delineation of critical fabulation vis-a-vis scenes work with and against the deadening archives of racial slavery. I will have more to say about critical fabulation in my forthcoming book. The images and graphics in the 2022 version of scenes such as Torquas's Dyson's remarkable pieces a gesture towards other planes and unforeseen passage in the labyrinth of forms or the notations that Hartman and Cameron Rowland did collaboratively, especially or the graphic registers of a moan on the other hand swayed Hartman's ideas in the rhythmic incantations of the cosmos. The addition of these visual materials also continues and adds new layers to Hartman's virtuoso deployment of images in both wayward lives and lose your mother which is something that is not frequently addressed. And I'll also say one more thing. I'm really, really happy that this edition exists because I've had a strong antitha, and I've hated, let me put it that way, the physical manifestation of the 1997 edition since I read it 21 years ago in the spring of 2001. I hate the font, I hate how small it is, it looks like Times New Roman but when I was thinking about why I hate it, right? And it's hate. Is that it does not do justice to the idea in the book because it is a book that aspires to transcend its physicality, its materiality, and that is so counterintuitive to Saidiya Hartman's thought and I think that the other two books do this beautifully. And tonight what I will do is trace a few strands of the universe Saidiya Hartman's I'm thinking has made possible through the lens of scenes of subjection. Let me begin with a quote. Book titles tell a story. The original subtitle for Uncle Tom's Cabin was the man who was a thing. In 1910 appeared a book by Mary White Ovington called Half a Man. Over 100 years after the appearance of Stowe's book, The Man Who Cried I Am by John A. Williams was published. Quick skill thought of all the changes that would happen to make a thing into I am. Tons of paper, an Atlantic of blood, repressed energy of anger that would form enough sunlight to light the solar system, I'm sorry. A burnt out black hole, a cosmic slave hole and that's from Ishmael Reed's Flight to Canada from 1976. Lose Your Mother represents the wailing during the afterlives of the 1960s mirage of I am given the text preoccupation with post-colonial and post-civil rights disenchantment. While wayward lives, beautiful experiments might be set to conjure the era of Half a Man, especially since its author makes an appearance in that text, delighted as Mary White Ovington always was in being lost in the sea of blackness. Scenes of subjection epitomizes the opening gambit, the conceptual and historiographic loophole come threshold into the womb abyss of this burnt out black hole, that Hartman's corpus of thought has so rigorously, beautifully and devastatingly charted for us. Or in Hartman's own words, it has made possible and I'm quoting here another mode of writing a blueprint for disorder, a disruptive poetics, an unthinkable narrative from the confines of the hold. And after I finished writing a draft of this, I realized the reason that I reached for the cosmos is because Hartman has both publicly and privately always pushed totality away. So, you know, we're W. Du Bois with sociology hesitant, Saidiya Hartman is totality hesitant. So instead of that, we get the cosmos. Hartman's work advances a series of delicate tracings of this unimaginable yet extraordinarily palpable cosmic sphere in which scenes plays the part of the crack that leads to the aperture of this universe in which it is no longer necessary to argue for just how integral racial slavery has been and continues to be to what we term the modern world. This occurs, of course, across Hartman's oeuvre, not in historicist modus, but instead focuses on different elements or universes that amplify the non-eventness of this cosmos. The ongoing now or temporal collapse of the slave whole slash hold. It had no bottom, it had no top, just circles and circles of sorrow. Take for instance, lose your mother's length and huesian aphorism, I too am the afterlife of slavery. While Hartman phrases the statement in the present tense, the overarching temporality establishes just how intensely this present is engulfed by the entwined throngs of ongoing pasts violently assumed to not exist, the afterlife of slavery. So much so in fact that the past transfigures into the present and vice versa. In the mainstream imaginary, neither racial slavery and especially the way that Hartman thinks about its enduring effects, nor its afterlives are supposed to be real, let alone exert any force on the political and historical formation of our world. Hartman's writing reveals conscription and subjection to this dark and cosmic realm, but also the life that subsists within and against it. And the same can be said about scenes of subjections temporal politics. As Hartman states in the new preface, we've heard this a couple of times and I would like to read that sentence of 345 pages. Hartman's style and scenes of subjection, her two other books and countless essays, insists on feeling and relaying the very real disfigurement precipitated by slavery across several spatiotemporal domains simultaneously in the past, present and future tense. The resonances across Hartman's text represent something akin to recursive echoes of a black moan, such as the emphasis on the constancy of the breach of the African diaspora and scenes of subjection picked up more elaborately and lose your mother or the devastating continuities between the elaborate micropinality of everyday life and scenes and the many, many, many, many micropinalities charted in the New York and Philadelphia of wayward lives. The open boat, the hold, the cosmic slave hole, the womb abyss, a gesture towards other planes, an Atlantic of blood, a black moan, please add to this list a non-event of wantonness. In the vein of the concept maps, integrated into the new edition of scenes of subjection, I want to isolate a few pivotal keywords in and for this epoch-making text. Lexical modes of wayfinding or ruddiers, as Dionne Brand might call them. You might recall that Brand describes an oral rudder as, and I'm quoting here, a long poem containing navigational instructions which sailors learned by heart and recited from memory. Corine clearly represents the principal terminological and fleshman of Hartman's ideas in wayward lives. I'm still working out the word that encapsulates lose your mother. Currently, my front runner is brackish. When it comes to scenes of subjection, let me submit two candidates for the ruddier. First and foremost, wanton, and it should be pronounced wanton, not wanton, but with 10 manifestations in the 1997 edition, but only six in the 2022 edition, and inquiring minds would like to know at some point what happened to the rest of them, but I'm sure they're happy somewhere. Wanton not only demarcates the cruelty, excessiveness, lewdness, and limitless maliciousness exhibited by whites against black folks during de jure slavery and long after, but also unfolds an older definition that contains trace elements of undisciplined and unruly, which designates both the white imagination and enforcement of putative black ontological criminality and the multifarious modalities in which blackness, black people, and black life exist in and beyond the talons of worldwide white supremacy as scenes of subjection so vividly demonstrates. As a signifier, wanton encodes a portico to a slave cosmos inhabited in other dimensions by John Kimber, captain of the slave ship of the recovery and lose your mother, or the New York City police and the guards at Bedford Hills in wayward lives, as well as the said Negro girl in lose your mother's dead book, all the girls, bull daggers, aesthetical Negroes, lady lovers, pansies, and anarchists, and I think that is my favorite listing of identities ever, probably, in wayward lives, as well as Venus and the unnamed girl in Venus and Two Acts. Wanton as a word, a concept, an incantation, a black moan, represents Hartman's lexical rudder for the intimate liaisons between terror, violence, and enjoyment in the everyday non-eventness of a burnt out cosmic slavehole, an Atlantic of blood, a black moan, which brings us to non-event, the second conglomerate of letters at the core of scenes of subjections signifying apparatus. Hartman's deployment of the non-prefix works to draw a laser sharp focus on surplus and excess rather than negation and lack, and if I had more time, I would talk about how it's analogous to the way the Hortense Spellers uses the un-prefix and the kind of work that it does, and also the important work that scenes of subjection does in terms of rethinking questions of blackness and gender in enslavement and after, but for another time. For Hartman, the non-event of emancipation lies not in its non-occurrence as much as in the wantonly brutal ways emancipation was preempted by legal apparatuses, the whole host of institutions and everyday practices among many other factors. The ongoing non-event of liberation conjures a cosmic slave whole, whole as in the generalized condition of enslavement and its many afterlives across the globe. This epoch making non-eventness camouflages and facilitates the many forms of wanton violence perpetrated against black flesh. It is an eternal return of the disfigured present created by racial slavery and its almost infinite tentacles. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery. While Hartman dedicates the 2022 edition of scenes, as we just heard, to those who made the way, Hartman's thinking and scenes of subjection and beyond shows her to be our cosmographer of the wantonness of the non-event of slavery, the exacting and imaginative biographer of both its lives and afterlives and the black lives against and beyond, offering us not mere maps, but living rudders for both universes produced by, the universes produced by racial slavery and the worlds created by slaves, rudders for a cosmic slave whole slash hold. Thank you. Thank you all. I think these presentations were fantastic. And again, I think it gives us a sense of really the breath and impact of the book on the ways in which from our respective, I would say, practices, disciplines, modalities of working that the book has an impact and also what it makes possible because I think that's very, very, very, very, very important. And so I just thought that there were obviously questions, I think, amongst the group. I think particularly, Alex, you're sort of reading about exactly the reading across the books and especially thinking that this is 25 years since the first part, and I agree, horrible graphics. It's not, I mean, it's exact, yeah. And I think the volume now really speaks to the way in which Citea wanted the book to communicate, especially with the additions of Turquoise and Cameron's work and kind of the complexity of the thinking and how we can enter into the work. This is, I mean, actually, my entree into Citea's work was through Luzier Mother and a conversation about what she begins to articulate in Venus in two acts. And so I think there's a rich body of work that is completely interconnected and lays through a modality of thinking and working that is not only just critical black studies, but I think Turquoise's world-making is exactly, it's a process of making or a kind of polices in terms of what's possible in the work. And so I think if you each wanna respond, perhaps, I think to each other's work, or I mean, I'm sure there are questions, but I think let's maybe keep it within the, yeah, for at least 10 minutes within the group in terms of how you might respond to each other's contribution. And I also think that beautiful framing of Citea's larger body of work by Alex. And Citea, do you have anything you wanna respond to? You can send your letters to Oxford. About the constitution. No, I think I'm, I guess I would just say that, yes, that commitment to a kind of a coral articulation and just really, I mean, I said before, I actually no longer even believe in the single authored work, you know? I think we're always in, you know, we are producing in the context of other readings, other books, these ongoing conversations. So it was really nice for scenes to come into the world with, in the company of, you know? And so that was just really important to me. And there's all of these, you know, varied conceptual framings, which resonate with one another, which echo with one another, but yet are not identical, right? And so just that the text of difference inside the book wanting it to really feel open and also so that kind of theoretical amplification and the forward and the afterwards. And then the work of, you know, turquoise and Cameron wanting to bring, you know, other conceptual vocabularies inside the covers, you know, of the book. And just really with my opening remarks, I mean, when Alex was talking to me first about losing her mother, I was like, you love the ugly duckling, you know? Because it was kind of the question of like, oh, what does conceptual rigor look like? And I think it actually took a while for many to recognize such a thing and lose your mother. So just really thinking about that dialogue and the issues that I, you know, were working through was really, was critical. So I just feel very fortunate, you know, to be in this company and one image that I guess Cameron didn't share, or just say look at the last also, you know, pages of the book because again, it's another way of kind of stating formally the complex temporality of scenes. And I feel, you know, the compositions and the notations just, you know, they just, it's an ensemble of production. So yeah, that's what I would say. So maybe she would have other people say, or I don't know, if you all said so, search lovely things, do you want to? Now I'm gonna poke out. Okay, all right, okay. I mean, I guess, you know, one of the things that is it's less of a concise and critical comment, but you know, I think coming to, you know, kind of everybody's work here, reading your works era actually had such a big impact on my conception of this period of time, sort of after part two. And you know, I think Marisa, your construction of dispossession has also been like so sort of instrumental to how I think about and use that word. You know, I'm just as Alex knows and just sort of really sort of continue to be in study and in gratitude to the ways that you sort of trouble this category of human and flesh, particularly in the ways that you draw out, so much of what Spillers offers us into, I think, other realms of, you know, around thought and being. And you know, Dr. Pozzi, I'm just, you know, I'm really awed by the way in which you bring so many of these things together in your work. And so I guess my, what I would say is that, you know, I didn't even necessarily come to each of your work, you know, through scenes, it's, you know, is sort of organically through, you know, the sort of field of study that, you know, sort of were in relationship within, but I think it's just sort of incredible that we each have this very, you know, indebted in the good way relationship to this text and being able to share in the kind of modes of possibility that it opens up. And I think that that is maybe one of the misconceptions, right, that scenes, you know, shuts down forms of freedom and liberation. And when I think actually what it does is it opens up so much possibility in terms of modes of thought, that, you know, I think, you know, you said it so well, Sarah, you know, are, you know, operate differently, right? And just do a different thing. So I guess maybe my question would be, you know, how do you, I think it's also really beautiful and interesting, you know, talking about trying to figure out how this book came into, I mean, I feel like, you know, we were talking right before, you know, we did a pen and, you know, Sadie was telling me that, you know, that I had always thought that the dissertation was the entire book and, you know, that was only book one and part one and that that was what Oxford bought and that they received then part one and part two. And it's, you know, the way in which that happened, I think, is like to your point is like, it's maybe not what we should focus on, right? And the fact of it's coming into existence is really what's key and core and crucial. So I guess my question for you, Sarah, would be when you were thinking about how to work differently in your work, when students are asking you that question, when you're like thinking about how we work in the wake of Sadie's work and in honor of it, what do you do and what do you tell your students? Oh, gosh, what a question. Okay, well, first of all, I cleaned up that little anecdote because I was a very consuming grad student and I asked Hazel, what are the influences? I wanna know. What was Sadie Hartman thinking when she wrote this book? She appropriately redirected me, right? But I think that what I was getting at in that question and what it has meant forever since is precisely what Marisa said about risk. It's like, this means nothing. None of it means anything, unless you're willing to take a risk because the world is as cold as scenes presents it to be, and it requires that. So no matter what the topic or discipline or I think questions are, so I guess to my mind, that is the way I think about it and it's precisely a risk that is not about emulating, trying to write scenes or trying to write wayward lives or trying to write any of the books that we admire, which I think is such a understandable impulse when you're trying to learn how to do a kind of work because you want models and I think models are good and inspiration is also good, but that the core is about taking risk and I think the other part of what I would say is what you brought up Cameron, which is about care, right? Like it requires, I think black study in its best forms requires both risk and care because there are ledges to be stepped out on that are scary at times. Marisa, I can't imagine what it took to write dispossessed lives, for example, in the kinds of fields of history that we know we operate in and so scenes and Saidiya, very much so Saidiya herself was an engine of both care and risk for me and so when I decided to write some fiction in No Mercy Here, I did not know what anyone would think, least of all Saidiya, because that's not what she's advocating in Venus in two acts, but I wanted to present something that took the risk to say what was lost in the way that we do history and so I thought even if I'm messing it all up, right, that was kind of worth the endeavor. Taking the risk, right, it was worth taking the risk. It was worth it. That's the lesson. Yes, for me who stands at a drawing table in front of canvas is probably at least four to five hours a day and to think about this book in relationship to what needs to happen with abstraction now and how the book is extremely contemporary in the way in which we need to set up conditions of refusal now. So what I think in the inheritance and the continued giving for me as an abstract artist this book does is make me push for something that I have not seen before. So what does it mean to make art objects now in the wake of scenes in the condition of the indeterminable, the wayward and the ongoingness? So I think that when I'm making these compositions within the umbrella of black compositional thought, what scenes does and wayward does, it's pushed me to make scalar conditions, surface conditions, compositionals conditions that are on the edge of what I can't even believe, right? So when I'm thinking about, and I bring up, again in the book often to think about how one works in silence and works in this sort of clandestine way and then moves her body across these enslavements in an auction blocks and then produces her own abstraction in language saving her own body. So these scenes that I am witnessing as I read the book, the way in which they wash themselves through me in the studio is that I am not, I am very aware of my own freedoms in the studio now and I'm hunting for them every day as I try to make things that I do not recognize, right? That I am in the legacy or in the embodiment of a kind of freedom and liberation that Saidiya brings to my table, right? And so it's when I am pushing through compositions and I made, I think, three different sets of drawings to present to Saidiya, right? To sort of work my way to the book. And when she chose the seven and then she titled them, I felt like scenes is still doing the work in my studio in abstraction now by ways of making things we don't recognize, by making things that are unfamiliar and by pushing the undeterminable. Because in scenes that's what I think these sort of liberatory moments are, pushing the indeterminable. So that's what I'm interested in into this, to what you were bringing up and these sort of multi-spatial, multi-scalular in these kind of, this moment of time, right? It's ongoingness of liberation. And I think visual artists really need to take up this book to think about ways in which to reenter abstraction as something that has been done to us historically. And scene puts that on the table. Questions? And there is a mic, so if you raise your hand it's the mic. But you have to raise your hand high. It's a big space. You mentioned in your reading of the preface a line or a concept called Cartographies of the Fantastic. And I was hoping you could maybe define that or elaborate on that. Yeah, I was in that very much invoking Richard Eitan's work and for me it is precisely trying to think at the limit and beyond what it is that we can imagine. And it's that double gesture of an aqueano. Like how are you already imagined celebrating the anniversary of something that has not even happened yet? And so for me that would be an example of it. So all these forms of interpretation or mapping or articulation that are producing these imaginaries of freedom and abolition inside the enclosure. And so that's what I was trying to gesture with that and in that, is it in search of the Fantastic? In search of the Fantastic. Fantastic, yeah. Yeah, just really thinking of Eitan attending to the work of imagining that takes place in the context of black culture which often exceeds the imaginings of a proper political discourse. And I mean, I think someone like Paul Gowar is also thinking along these lines in terms of the politics of transfiguration. So I feel like that was always there with, again, the unrelenting critique of the limits of a kind of a liberal capitalist imagination and what I know that that's not gonna provide freedom for us, I know that. So that's why the kind of the attention to these, the gifts of a certain kind of black imagination that have always really known that too. And sometimes that knowing is described in the language of like a sacred discourse or just like, you know, negro madness or intoxicated thought or surrealism. So that's what I was trying to gesture to. Hi, so yeah, it's weird being back here. I just built off that really great question. I, when you mentioned the cartography of the fantastic, it wasn't only a citation, but also marking a loss. There's just something very, I don't know, beautiful but also very melancholic about the work that we do. We call black study. And Alex said, this beautiful phrase, I maybe got it wrong, but the eternal return of what did you say, broken present? Disfigured present. Disfigured present. And going back to recurring echoes, just the way that we're talking about time and how just with the smallest gesture, I guess this is kind of a comment, but kind of also a provocation, especially for folks who are just coming to the book now, how the smallest gesture, like talking about the fantastic could also reanimate an object in a disenchanted moment. So, you know, how can you come across the book without knowing that it's already touched so many lives but then to actually engage with it and sit with it, to sit with that larger ensemble that's around us. That's kind of the heaviest thing of being with this book and also, especially even with the turquoise work too, it's, I mean, yeah, cameras, there is something very whole and huge, like there's a world that I'm inside of, but it disappears as soon as we look up. So, I just wanted to thank you all for doing that work together because it is kind of a gift for, I think, a lot of people who we're all still trying to come into this disenchanted present to figure out that there is a little bit of magic really at hand and right here. So, thank you. Can we ask each other more questions? Yeah, I'm a Sunday here. Can you? The way in which you transverse the text in relationship to wayward and scenes, can you talk more about your project and how scenes and wayward sort of talk to each other? Yeah. I'll also talk about lose your mother. Oh, man. Oh, man. I'll also talk about lose your mother. Oh, man. Oh, man. Actually. Oh, man. I think they really, I think they really speak to each other and there's a kind of recursive quality to certain kinds of concerns, right? Not necessarily topics in a narrow sense and that's what I was trying to sort of work out that there's almost this rhythmic kind of quality in terms of thinking about the, now I'm not gonna get like the quotations, right? But the chasm of the African diaspora, right? That it's mentioned one or two times like in scenes of subjection and then in lose your mother, it is really pushed to the forefront. And the same thing with a lot of the stories. I hope you don't mind my calling them. In wayward lives and I think that there are all these different kinds of echoes between Venus and two acts, lose your mother, scenes of subjection and wayward lives. And I think each of the books is kind of a precondition for the other. And it's hard for me, going back to scenes of subjection, I'm happy for all the material because it makes me actually focus on the text more because it's really hard for me to just read scenes of subjection on its own, right? Because I see it like in all the different directions that it's I'm going, right? So yeah, and I think without saying that it's the same or variations on a particular theme that there are these concerns, right? And moments of care also in terms of what other people have been saying that happen throughout the corpus. And I think there's a way because each of these three books kind of have different forms that there's a way that folks tend to think about them as radically different. And for me, they exist like in the same cosmos, right? That's what I was trying to sort of say is like, that there is a cosmography that's idea is I'm charting for us and that begins just temporarily with scenes of subjection, but it doesn't end there, right? And I think it's also just as important as looking at scenes of subjection as like the precursor, quote unquote, to the other books. I think it's also important to kind of read back, right? In order to not fall into that trap of linear progression, right? Because I don't think that's what the texts do. And I think part of like their power and their beauty is that they don't do that, right? That they don't say, you know, I'm gonna give you this is historical moment, this historical moment and then this historical moment, right? And it's gonna be definitive, but it's about charting these questions and concerns across all these different space times, right? And also I would also add to that what you were saying about abstraction, right? And, you know, the way that all three texts deal with abstraction in very, very different ways, right? And I think most concretely, probably around the question of the archive, right? Which for me is a question of abstraction, perhaps not for other people, but I do think, yeah, I guess that's all just, stop there's a thank you. Yeah, thanks so much. This is super wonderful. I think for younger folks in the audience who are coming into these disciplines, we're coming in in a post-scenes of subjection world. And so I think I'm most curious for Dr. Hartman of course, but also the panel in terms of like looking at the time from scenes until now, maybe ideas, conceptual entry points that the book kind of beckoned that are now available or kind of dialogues that could maybe be taken for granted, if that's the right word, in the present that scenes really beckoned in in a certain way. I'm not sure. Can you say that this? I don't know if that, does that exist? What? That, yeah, yeah. Does that exist? Yeah, I think that was my impulse, too, because I was thinking, you know, the questions are open and one always has to fight for the ground again. And this moment when democracy is suddenly in crisis for a certain group of people, like the 14th Amendment is like the cure, right? But we have a whole, I mean, critical legal studies emerge in response to the limits of what, you know, a kind of a law and rights framework can do in terms of justice, critical race theory, extend to that project. So I feel like there's, that there's a kind of a recursive character to the struggle and particularly for, you know, for a black studies project. One has to continue to go to, you know, to restage those battles. I mean, there's an ascendant, you know, monocausal Marxism, which is again, you know, like, you know, trotting out to say like, oh, any attention to anti-blackness or racial capitalism as a formation is just a crude form of identity politics. So I think that maybe there's certain things that you can assume, but it's not as if the ground is one. And I think particularly in our moment now, that there's like a huge, you know, politicized struggle about the terms of our thinking and trying to actually make the terms of thinking themselves to criminalize them, to silence them, to make them illegal. So I would wanna hear you say like, oh, so what do you think we can take for granted? I think that for me, an assertion of this notion of blackness as kind of a vernacular in a certain sense is super useful. And I feel like super indebted to all of your scholarship now that there is kind of a like troddened path in terms of what it means to engage with blackness. And I think that you can kind of have, I think in any sense, having a lineage in a certain sense of thinkers who affirm dialogue in that way is super empowering because I think it's that excitement of like, regardless of where you fall, like I'm an architecture major, right? So like there's not some, like it's like if you're looking at, I don't know, Mies van der Rohe or like the classics of like capital A architecture, I feel emboldened in a class full of white students to say this is my mark. You cannot reconcile built environments without tending to, right? The brilliant dialogues of space that were had this evening. And so I think it's that process that when I think of maybe why I was interested in the answer to that question, I feel like the opposite of taking it for granted, but like paying homage and gratitude towards having that framework, having that. And I think, you know, celebration is such an awesome word for tonight's kind of gathering because that's what's awesome to celebrate. Is that like that brilliance that privilege to step into in a certain sense. So I guess that's like a long-winded thank you to Dr. Armin and everyone. And I feel like you answered the question for me by saying it's also like pushing the practice. And that's what you're doing when you can take a lot of stuff for granted. So thank you for pushing the practice. And just to add one more thing. I mean, you mentioned the kind of Marxist, sorry, the kind of Marxist strand, but I also think, you know, within black studies, there's also a kind of progressivist sometimes, you know, to celebratory narrative, right? And I think that especially scenes reminds us again and again, yes, while those gains might exist, the violence also still persists, right? And I think that's also important in terms of like returning to the text and what it makes possible and what it reminds us of, right? And it's never an either or question, but I do think, yeah, that is an important part that sometimes like, you know, it gets forgotten in the rush to say, you know, we've made it this far. Yeah, and I just also want to add that the two versions of the book and the first version, I think as Marius was saying about, you know, the ways in which our disciplines force us to produce a certain kind of work in a certain kind of context with a certain kind of academic press with a certain kinds of methodologies that then are valued, right, in certain ways but are also possessed by companies and corporations that then feel like they have a right to our knowledge and how it circulates. And I do think that is the difference between the beginnings of scenes and this new, you know, version of it that more speaks to the way in which you conceptualize the book as a project, a collaborative project. And I think it's important to recognize this university is the ways in which we work, you know, are all enmeshed in, you know, these in-modernity, I mean, within racial capitalism, within, you know, and it's a constant struggle on a daily basis, right, to be able to find that. It's not, yeah, I mean, it's a practice. I also think the relationship to architecture full scenes is full of architectural spaces and infrastructural spaces. So I think when I'm trying to parse illegal abstraction in legal abstraction, these are new ideas for me, right? Who's, you know, has been reading the book for years. So the idea that scene still has a wealth of things that have not been exhausted and have not been talked about is I think the reason why I'm here and studying oftentimes in the field of architecture and looking at this book in relationship to ideas of enclosures and even architects with a capital A who continuously put us in these conditions of enclosures that we resist. So this idea of this book really dealing with architectural spaces in this quotidian way and this sort of phenomenological way is what I continuously am pulling from it, like, you know, spider pulling a web, right? So I don't think, yes, that's what I'll say. Read it again through the lens of architecture as a singular subject and it will do something different to the way you think about, I think, your classes and Meese especially. I just wanted to add something really quick to that question, which is I think scenes is a peculiar book because it has this paradoxical place where I, you know, listening to Tarkasi talk, I think lawless abstraction and scenes and I think, oh yeah, this book is a crime. Like in many ways it is criminalized activity in the modes in which we work and so it has that presence of defiance, of really difficult things. And also though within Black Study, what it has shifted and allowed for in terms of the possibility for further defiance is really critical and so even in the narrative of struggle, I feel like an urgency around not losing that. You can't write violence in certain ways within Black Study after this book, right? You can't have easy discussions of agency. You have to think about racialized gender in particular way, like there are scenes within Black Study, not to be disciplinary, but like that are now made possible, right? Because of very like glorious, beautiful and just like politically potent formation, like the non-event of emancipation, right? Like I just, I feel like that is, it's a gift that is recursive as well. And it was hard fought, right? I mean, it wasn't accepted when it was written. I think it's another, going back to your point of risk and difference and you know, the question of what might be taken for granted at this point. I mean, this was not accepted as, you know, valid in so many different respects when it was written. And so I think that, you know, for me, one of the things that I take from and am so grateful to and want to honor is not just the book, but it's ideas, commitment to those ideas, regardless of how they were received at the time because they were so far ahead of the moment that they were written in and then were, you know, came into a public within. And so, you know, we said this, you know, recently, but in some ways it feels like this, you know, sort of coming back of scenes is a way of reflecting, you know, critically also on its reception when it was first published. Thank you. I just wanted to comment on those two things. And then I had a question for you, Sai. One, I think not only can you not write about certain things in the same way, you can't teach them either. Certain things you just can't teach in the same way. And I also, another comment is about the validity or the ways that it challenged things and people questioned, but I don't think there was ever a question about its brilliance. Like that was never, I don't think that was ever questioned. But I do want to ask you, how has your relationship to it changed over the years? Like what was your relationship to it as you were writing Luz, your mother, and what was your relation, you know, just did it, I think I have a sense of this, but I would love to hear you talk about it. You know, it's funny, because I can remember one of the reviews of scenes used the term a rebarbative brilliance. I was like, rebarbative, you know, so I was like, ah, but I think that, I mean, I think part of, you know, being in this thing called Black Study, I mean, we know that there have been just like so many foundational books and blocks that they've taken 50 or 75 years for people to come to their truth. I mean, Cameron and I, when we started out in this collaboration, we were like, oh, remember when basically most, you know, the overwhelming majority of like European and North Americans, historians were trying to prove that basically slavery was not significant. It didn't shape capitalism. Had nothing to do with Europe's development or the industrial revolution. So for, you know, like for a century, right? I mean, like that, those were the terms of the argument. So 25 years, you know, is a really short window compared to something like the reception and now the understanding of something like, you know, Du Bois's Black Reconstruction. So I think that that's the way in which, you know, oh, that's just like how it is. There were so many models of that. I think when I'm writing the next thing, I kind of forget what I've written before because in wayward lives, I mean, I was thinking a lot about involuntary servitude or these, you know, other forms of unfreedom. And then I went back to scenes. I was like, oh my gosh, I wrote about that in scenes. So it's not that I think that I'm building something out as much as there are these, you know, that there's a complex of critical issues that I keep on, you know, approaching from these different bandages. I mean, it was interesting reading scenes from cover to cover. I probably, until this revision, I hadn't done that since I finished it. And so I was just like, oh my God, who is the mad person who wrote that book? So it was just like encountering, you know, just like younger self. So that was kind of like, I appreciate her. And just for the students in the audience, I mean, you know, Farah and I have been talking because I can remember we both had these like dissertation fellowships and Farah came to see me and I was like, I don't have a dissertation. And she like, she's like, don't worry. I think you do. She kind of like helped me talk my way into something. But yeah, I just think I'm, you know, it's like, for me, it's like how we basically, how we live and survive in the racialized enclosure, you know, it's like how we break it, how we live inside, like that, that's just the fundamental thing that has been informing the work from the beginning. And I think on that note, on practice, it's a great way to say thank you so much for this evening. Thank you all for coming and really sharing your thoughts and engagement with scenes. And so I do want to say thank you to all of the folks who did the AV today, GSEP for hosting us, Sharon Harris, Sean Mendoza, Josh, Olivia, James for putting today together. And so, and thank you all for coming out this evening. I do want to say we have one more IRS AAAD event and it's relevant because it is the third of our Black Counter-Cartography series. And it is with Immanuel Admasu of GSEP and Mempol Matsipa, who's been a visiting adjunct at GSEP. So that's on Friday, December 2nd. So please go to our website and find out more information on that. But thank you all, this has been incredible. Thank you.