In her first book, Scenes of Subjection (1997), she bypassed the well-known literature about atrocities committed against enslaved people in nineteenth-century America, and instead sifted through the everyday evidence of dehumanization and terror revealed in plantation diaries, records of popular theater, freedmen’s primers-ephemeral texts that survived out of sight, in historical-society libraries and municipal archives. Saidiya Hartman has always been one of the curious ones. You see them going around with notebooks, scraping the dirt off gravestones, reading microfilm, just in the hope of seeing this trickle in time. “I thought that there wasn’t anybody alive in the world but me who would know this, who would make the connection,” she says. At the end of Alice Munro’s short story “Meneseteung,” which reconstructs in painfully intimate detail the life of an all but unknown woman poet in a small Ontario town in the late nineteenth century, Munro’s narrator discovers the poet’s grave, overgrown and forgotten a century later.
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