Saidiya Hartman

“What I remember and where I start is with the detail that is the equivalent of the punctum, the moment of a life, the shape of an object, the darkness of a room, that solicits me, most often because it represents an opening or a detour.”

“There are these three spaces or architectures that are absolutely foundational to my work: the Atlantic, the hold, and the circle. And I think that the circle is a central figure when trying to describe black radical imaginaries and anti-slavery philosophy…”

“The book is a meditation on memory, on memory and history, written in the form of a travelogue. But the journey through time and space is a device, a vehicle, a formal means to exist in the physical landscape of slavery and to embody that history and to carry it...”