The undoing of the plot begins with her drifting from the course, with an errant path, with getting lost to the world.Įnacts gestures of refusal and nonparticipation, minor revolutions that strikeĪgainst a white supremacist ordering of the world and its fidelity to theĬategorical distinctions of subject-object fugitive expressions that emergeįrom, and return to, a shared and intimate sociality. The undoing begins with a potion poured into a silver soup tureen before she delivers it to the table, with acts of sabotage and destruction, with idleness and destitution. When life approaches extinction, when no one will be spared, when nothing is all that is left, when she is all that is left.

The undoing of the plot begins when everything has been taken. It is almost never recognized as anything at all and certainly never as significant.

The undoing of the plot proceeds by stealth. Undoing’ becomes the ‘The undoing of the plot’, with Hartman offering aĬollection of escape routes and moments of resistance, both major and minor: In the final section of the poem, Hartman inverts theĬonstruction that has structured the text to this point – ‘The plot of her Name of the law, the nation, the father, the ‘subject’, the market, whiteness, ‘modern’ AĬhronicle of domination, her list encapsulates violences abstract and tangible,īureaucratic and enfleshed, structural and everyday – those perpetuated in the ‘her’ – a collective figure whose dispossession forms the basis of our world. 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.Īccumulates scenes of subjugation and violence inflicted upon an historical 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. The plot of her undoing begins with his dominion.

Saidiya hartman wayward