Implications. Theories and new perspectives on art studies

We are pleased to announce a new series of Implications for the spring semester of 2025. This semester we concentrate on one author’s work, American scholar Saidiya Hartman. This semester we will discuss travel, coasts, forts, landscapes, the silence of archives, resistance, the transatlantic slave trade and its afterlife, and much more. We will examine two important works by literary scholar, historian, and cultural critic Saidiya Hartman

In Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, Hartman takes us on a personal, academic, and archival journey through the landscape of Ghana and the history of the slave trade. The work is a reflection on loss, memory, silence, and the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. Hartman combines historical research with 'autofiction' to explore how the descendants of the diaspora relate to a past that is at once dark, incomprehensible, and present. The book illuminates the experiences of dislocation and the search for belonging among those whose roots have been torn up and lives undone by the history of slavery.

In Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Hartman writes about the lives of marginalized black women in early twentieth-century America. Through an experimental blend of archival research, speculative narrative, and poetic prose, Hartman explores the daily struggles and dreams of women navigating a world that sought to limit their agency. Through the concept of waywardness, Hartman shows how these women created new ways of being in the world through resistance and experimentation, often in opposition to the social norms that sought to control their lives.

Both works demonstrate Hartman's innovative approach to storytelling and theory development, working at the intersection of academic research, literary writing, and activist engagement. Her concepts of "critical fabulation" and "waywardness" are central to these books, inviting us to consider how we understand the meaning of the past in the present.

We look forward to reading Hartman's two books together and to an engaging discussion that will hopefully inspire our own practices and thoughts, whether you work in archival research, curating, academic research, or artistic inquiry.

This time we'll be discussing American author and university professor Saidiya Hartman's 2019 book with the full title Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments. Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women and Queer Radicals.

In this book Hartman attempts to trace, tell and reconstruct stories of lives lived in spite of a repressive and anti-black society. How do you capture the story of the unseen? Not the great heroes or iconic leaders, but the young black women who lived at the edge of modernity's dream. Saidiya Hartman's Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments is an exhilarating attempt to do just that: to give voice to those who exist in the archives only as footnotes, police records and pathologised cases. It's a book that boldly challenges the silence of history, inscribing itself into the vibrant space where life and imagination collide. Hartman's gaze is fixed on the dynamic cities of early 20th-century New York and Philadelphia, where young black women are on a quest to shape new ways of living, loving, and being free. They defy convention, leaving home, rejecting marriage, and forming intimate relationships that sometimes transcend gender norms. Their passion and anti-oppressive attitude are evident in their dance, their roaming, and their bold experimentation. To society and the archive, they are wayward, deviant, unruly, morally threatening. But to Hartman, they are radical experiments in their way of life. The book is not a traditional piece of history writing. It mixes biography, fiction, theory and archival revision in a poetic and political language that refuses to cut through reality. Hartman herself calls it ‘critical fabulation’ - a method that uses both speculative and historically informed fiction, but not to embellish; rather to do justice to those who never got to tell their story in their own words. Wayward Lives is an invitation: to read the archives against their will, to dream with those who refused to live the life they were given. It is both sorrowful and rebellious, gentle and radical. And for that very reason, it raises all kinds of exciting questions we often discuss in the Implications seminars: How do we read the invisible? How do we think of experimentation as a form of existence? How do we make reading a collective, critical and sensory gesture?

Come along if you want to read, think about, listen and talk to others about this book. In the following session on 11 June, Saidiya Hartman herself will participate and be available for a broad discussion of her writing. So now is a good time to start thinking about what we would like to ask her.