Thanks for the question, @maravillasband! "Replying all" to share this info more widely. (Mutual aid.) Yes, I assign a small excerpt from @sojournerlife's Scenes of Subjection in which she analyzes Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl.
I pair that small excerpt from Scenes—small bc the analysis is at a very high level of critical theory, so I work with my students collectively, line by line, to understand it—with the relevant sections from Incidents.
I always assign all of Incidents, but I discovered many students can't manage all the reading. 🤷♂️ So this fall I'll assign about 75% of Incidents, encouraging the students who can to read the whole book. Some of them will and they'll go on to engage it in their final projects.
I have read all of Scenes of Subjection and all of Hartman's second book, Lose Your Mother. Those two works combined changed my thinking about everything I do in the academy and higher ed, especially given my positionality as a white cisgender man.
I like to think Hartman taught me how to do scholarship. The first chapter I wrote for my dissertation is a joint reading of Hartman re Incidents & Incidents itself through lenses of trap music & what I call trap spaces bc of Jacobs' entrapment by her master & the racial state.
I just learned that a journal article based on that chapter is finally being published after multiple (understandable) delays. I'll be sure to post it here—it'll be open access—for my citations as much as anything else.
Two more notes on Hartman: You should also check out her latest book Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. I haven't had a chance to read it yet, but I'm looking forward to doing so with great excitement! 😃
Finally, there was a remarkable gathering dedicated to the 20th anniversary of Scenes' publication a few years ago. Check it out at #scenesat20. Dunno if the videos are still up, but the hashtag should point you to many other writers/scholars who've been influenced by her.
.@sojournerlife has created a brilliant, highly innovative, multiple-field-defining, vital (& vitalizing) oeuvre for more than 20 years. I just named the big titles but type her name into Google to learn about a lot of other work. Like many, I couldn't do my work w/o hers! 🙏🙏🙏
One last note: In addition to the Black women scholars I name in my pinned tweet as my primary influences, add Dionne Brand & @hystericalblkns, whose own brilliant work is also shaping my research & teaching (& organizing) programs now & going forward. And Toni Morrison, ofc!
Lmk how this thread lands with you, @maravillasband! Happy to answer follow-up questions or new qs or to make more recs. But my advice to everyone is to see who Hartman, Sharpe, Wynter, et al. have read—and then read those writers. That's what I do. #CiteBlackWomen #SayHerName
Oh, also: There's the @citeblackwomen project! An enormous resource if you're generally interested in reading work by Black women, @maravillasband!
