Wild Thoughts and Rumors about the Auspicious Era of Extensive Freedom, or A Speculative History of the Demise of White Supremacy

Saidiya Hartman was born and raised in New York City. She received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and her Ph.D. from Yale University. She is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (1997) and Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007). She has published articles on slavery, the archive, and the city, including “The Terrible Beauty of the Slum,” “Venus in Two Acts” and “The Belly of the World.” She has been a Cullman Fellow at the New York Public Library, a Fulbright Scholar in Ghana, a Whitney Oates Fellow at Princeton University, and a Rockefeller Fellow at Brown University. She recently completed Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019), which examines the social upheaval and radical transformation of everyday life that took place in the emergent black ghetto in the early decades of the 20th century.