Notes on Feminisms 2: The Plot of Her Undoing by Saidiya Hartman

Description

Notes on Feminisms is a series of essays commissioned by Feminist Art Coalition (FAC), where each writer has been asked to discuss an issue or issues relating to feminisms that she/he considers urgent. 

Saidiya Hartman is professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. Her books include Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997), Lose Your Mother: A Journey along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (W. W. Norton, 2019). In 2019 Hartman was named a MacArthur Fellow.

In ‘The Plot of Her Undoing’, Saidiya Hartman writes:
“The plot of her undoing begins with his dominion. It begins in the fifteenth century with a papal bull, with a philosopher at his desk, pen in hand, as he sorts the world into categories of genus and species. It begins with a bill of sale, with a story in the newspaper that enumerates her crimes, with a note appended to the file: she answers questions easily, but appears stupid; it begins with a wanted poster that reduces the history of her life to a single word – condemned.”