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Black people in the Diaspora, with no knowledge of a past, try to imagine a past that is nothing like the harsh present entangled with murder, humiliation, and incarceration. Such imaginations include the pre-colonial era of Kings and Queens. Rastafarians envision a sort of replica of such a past into the future with calls of the downfall of Babylon and a return to the Promised Land. Hartman explains: "The heirs of slaves wanted a past of which they could be proud, so they conveniently forgot the distinctions between the rulers and the ruled and closed eyes to slavery in Africa. They pretended that their ancestors had once worn the king’s vestments and assumed grand civilization of Asante as their own." This, coupled with a longing for belonging only achievable by escaping the brutality of the West's racism and returning to Africa the homeland, led to disbelief and shock when encountering Ghanaians who favored migrating to the U.S. to escape the impoverishment of the present. Hartman notes: "African Americans entertained fantasies of return and Ghanaians of departure. From where we each were standing, we did not see the same past, nor did we share a common vision of the Promised Land." To the Ghanaians, the Promised Land is America, the images heavily circulated in movies, music videos, and more, that tell one story of wealth and prosperity even for Black Americans.

Hartman's most recent work, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (2019), explores the lives of various Black women in Harlem and Philadelphia during the 1890s. Hartman describes the boundaries of Black life and womanhood through both interracial and intra-racial relationships and examines how Black women's sexuality was policed and constructed within an ideology of criminality at the turn of the twentieth century. These "deviant" behaviors are referred to as "wayward" and illustrate how Black women navigate society under surveillance, violence, and partial or conditional citizenship. The social life of Black women under surveillance results in these wayward movements being characterized as "illegal". These movements serve as an act of resistance against not only the state, but the examination of Black life under the guise of policy researchers, sociologists, and reformers aiming to improve Black women in New York and Philadelphia. Hartman asks how to imagine Black womanhood outside of the archive and "the sociological imagination that could only ever recognize her as a problem," invoking DuBois' famed question in The Souls of Black Folk: "How does it feel to be a problem?" Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval critiques the pathologization of Black women's lives by constructing a social space of freedom and "waywardness" as acts of world-making and possibility.

It won the 2019 National Book Critics Circle Award (Criticism).

Hartman also theorizes the "afterlife of slavery" in Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. The "afterlife of slavery" can be characterized by the enduring presence of slavery's racialized violence still present in contemporary society. Hartman outlines slavery's imprint on all sectors of society as evidenced in historical archives that may or may not exist. Hence, the archive lives on through the social structure of the society and its citizens. Hartman describes this process in detail in Lose Your Mother: "I wanted to engage the past, knowing that its perils and dangers still threatened and that even now lives hung in the balance. Slavery had established a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone. If slavery persists as an issue in the political life of black America, it is not because of an antiquarian obsession with bygone days or the burden of a too-long memory, but because black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago. This is the afterlife of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am the afterlife of slavery." Hartman went back to Africa to learn more about slavery and came back having learned more about herself.

Hartman has made literary and theoretical contributions to the understanding of slavery. Her first book, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, is an examination of, among other topics, the intersection of slavery, gender, and the development of progressivism in the United States through the exploration of blank genealogies, memory, and the lingering effects of racism. Working through a variety of cultural materials –- diaries, journals, legal texts, slave and other narratives, and historical song and dance—Hartman explores the precarious institution of slave power. Her second book, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (2007), confronts the troubled relationships among memory, narratives, and representation. She concentrates on the "non-history" of the slave, the manner in which slavery "erased any conventional modality for writing an intelligible past". By weaving her own biography into a historical construction, "she [also] explores and evokes the non-spaces of black experience—the experience through which the African captive became a slave, became a non-person, became alienated from personhood. Through these experiences, came the title: "Because of the slave trade you lose your mother, if you know your history, you know where you come from. To lose your mother was to be denied your kin, country and identity. To lose your mother was to forget your past" (85).

Hartman's major fields of interest are African-American and American literature and cultural history, slavery, law and literature, gender studies, and performance studies. She is on the editorial board of the journal Callaloo. Hartman has been a Fulbright, Rockefeller, Whitney Oates, and University of California President's Fellow and was awarded the 2007 Narrative Prize from Narrative Magazine and the Gustav Myers Award for Human Rights. She is the author of the influential Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997), Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007), and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (W. W. Norton, 2019). Hartman's "essays have been widely published and anthologized."

Saidiya Hartman (born 1961) is an American writer and academic. She worked at the University of California, Berkeley, from 1992 to 2006 and was a part of the Department of English and African American Studies.. Hartman is now a professor at Columbia University, specializing in African-American literature and history. She grew up in Brooklyn and received her B.A. from Wesleyan University and Ph.D. from Yale University. Hartman was one of the 26 individuals chosen to be a MacArthur Fellow in 2019.