Between Visual Scenes and Beautiful Lives: A Conversation with Saidiya Hartman∗

Abstract This wide-ranging conversation with Black cultural theorist Saidiya Hartman—occasioned by the twenty-fifth anniversary of her groundbreaking first book, Scenes of Subjection, to be republished this year in an edition by Norton—explores the author's shifting approaches to the visual over time, the limitations and potentialities of the archive for its discontents, and the models she has both turned to and herself invented—most notably the concept of “critical fabulation”—in the ongoing attempt to find ethical modes of engaging African/Diasporic life, thought, and form in an anti-Black world.