{"id":1982581,"date":"2026-06-10T09:00:00","date_gmt":"2026-06-10T06:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1982581"},"modified":"2026-06-10T09:00:00","modified_gmt":"2026-06-10T06:00:00","slug":"saidiya-hartman-debits-performance-minor-music-at-the-end-of-the-world","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/?p=1982581","title":{"rendered":"Saidiya Hartman Debits Performance Minor Music at the End of the World"},"content":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/L_R-Audrey-Hailes-Bria-Bacon-AJ-Wilmore-Okwui-Okpokwasili_MM_fabian-calis_02-10-2025_09839.jpg?w=1024″]<\/p>\n

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\n\tIt\u2019s hard to think of a scholar who has had a bigger impact on the art of our times than Saidiya Hartman. The Columbia professor is best known for her method of writing history that she calls \u201ccritical fabulation,\u201d a way of using theory and speculative storytelling to fill silences and omissions left in the archives. Specifically, it\u2019s a way of painting a picture of people who were prevented from leaving straightforward material traces, often those who were oppressed or enslaved.<\/p>\n

\n\tHartman\u2019s homages have been many. Last year, Simone Leigh curated an exhibition titled \u201cCritical Fabulation\u201d at the Art Institute of Chicago, and in 2020, a group of artists\u2014including Garrett Bradley, Arthur Jafa, and Cameron Rowland\u2014celebrated her at MoMA PS1. In 2023, one of MoMA\u2019s permanent collection galleries was themed \u201cCritical Fabulations,\u201d too. And that\u2019s just to name the most explicit citations: Her way of working can be seen in everything from research-based practices, to work on colonial archives, to speculative experiments merging fact and fiction.
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Now, for the first time, Hartman is helming an artwork of her own. In October, she debuted a performance she wrote titled Minor Music at the End of the World<\/em>, a three-part work that imagines the end of white supremacy. It is deeply collaborative, featuring cinematic elements by Arthur Jafa, sculptures by Precious Okoyomon, and sounds by Peter Born. Cameron Rowland is credited as the \u201cAttendant of the Archive,\u201d and Andr\u00e9 Holland and Okwui Okpokwasili are the lead performers. Recently, Minor Music <\/em>had a run in Venice where, thematically, it echoes the Biennale\u2019s main show, titled \u201cIn Minor Keys.\u201d <\/p>\n

\n\tAfter seeing it there, I sat down with Hartman for a ranging conversation about her writing and Minor Music<\/em>; she also shared a museum\u2019s wild misuse of her ideas, and teased her next book.
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The performance is based on your 2020 essay \u201cThe End of White Supremacy,\u201d which responds to W. E. B. Du Bois\u2019s The Comet.<\/em> What prompted you then to revisit his short story year?<\/strong>
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In 2020, The Comet<\/em> felt terribly relevant. It was the short story\u2019s 100th anniversary: It was written at another horrendous point in US racial empire. Du Bois started imagining: how are we going to get through to the other side of racial capitalism and colonialism? The only way he could envision that happening was the literal end of the world.
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The summer I wrote that essay, millions of people around the world were demanding change, and his vision struck a deep chord. So much of the pessimism and the despair that fueled the piece has even greater purchase now. The forces of domination, racism, and Empire are stronger than they have been\u2014and more naked.
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\u201cNaked\u201d is a great way to describe it. How did the essay then become a performance?<\/strong>
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In 2021, Bernard Schwartz, the head of the Unterberg Poetry Center at the 92nd Street Y, invited Andr\u00e9 Holland to read the essay. It was the first dramatic performance of my work; until then, I was the only person allowed to do readings! And suddenly, it was no longer mine. Andr\u00e9 is an incredible actor. I joke that he can make Marx\u2019s theory of primitive accumulation sound like poetry. That flipped the switch about its possibilities.
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Arthur Jafa (AJ), Andr\u00e9, and I thought we should try to do something with this. We thought about making a film or, at least, a filmed reading of the work.
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Then I spoke with Okwui Okpokwasiliabout developing the work\u2026 The Comet<\/em> explores the possibility of a transformed world through the figure of interracial romance, but it has these very flat, empty portraits of both the black woman and the white woman in the story.
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Precious Okoyomon invited Okwui and I to come to Rome to rehearse and develop the piece. Gavin Brown, the gallerist of Precious and AJ, said: What could be better than the end of white supremacy performed against the ruins of Western civilization?
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The collaboration was supported by the Hartwig Art Foundation, and then HAF commissioned me to develop Minor Music at the End of the World<\/em>, with this incredible cast of artists and performers. Claudia Rankin recommended Sarah Benson as a director, because she\u2019s not afraid of lots of language and ideas. Minor Music<\/em> is performative, but it\u2019s not a play.<\/p>\n

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Saidiya Hartman<\/span>Photo Steven Gregory<\/cite><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

So much of your writing involves filling out the worlds and textures of others, whose lives were perhaps not captured in the archive. What was it like to experience something similar happening with a text of yours?<\/strong>
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I would say it feels like a way to get words off the page, and those words acquire a texture and meaning that exceeds me as they are spoken and embodied and actualized by others.
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It opens with a 40-minute monologue. Andr\u00e9 Holland plays the narrator alongside The Comet<\/em>\u2019s cast of characters: the male messenger, the beautiful white woman, the president of the bank, the white mob. The second movement is based on new writing, \u201cDead River,\u201d an unpublished essay I wrote with Okwui in mind. The third movement is a variation of Arthur Jafa\u2019s AGHDRA<\/em> (2020). When \u201cThe End of White Supremacy\u201d first appeared in BOMB<\/em> in 2020, it included three stills from AJ\u2019s film in progress. He and I were both thinking about Blackness and the Anthropocene, and AGHDRA<\/em> was a strong visual articulation of both the end of the human world, and the possibility for Blackness at the end of the world.
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Your idea of critical fabulation has been so generative for so many artists, it\u2019s exciting to see it evolve into also collaborations with those artists. Are there things you\u2019ve learned from working with artists that have been generative for you in return?<\/strong>
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My way of working with the archive is very indebted to artists, as much as it is to scholars. For historians, the archive might establish signposts for a route, the who, what, where, when, why. For artists, the archive is also matter for making a story, a film, a painting. For Walid Raad\u2019s piece in the Venice Biennale, he worked with just one sentence along the lines of: When Yasser Arafat was head of the PLO, he could sleep no more than two nights in the same room. hen, the artist imagined what all those rooms might have looked like.
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That belief in the imaginative and the speculative is so critical. For me, where the archive is incredibly limited\u2014often the person I\u2019m interested in leaves no trace, never speaks in the first person, or speaks only under the conditions of coercion\u2014the question becomes: How do I work with the extant material traces to tell a radically different kind of story? How can I utilize an archival trove of polyvocal utterances and make it feel like an orchestration of thought over the course of centuries, as I do in Minor Music\u2014<\/em>asopposed to just my singular framing of the end of the world?
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I hope people in the audience get to feel that sense of time. It\u2019s really sedimented and entangled.<\/p>\n

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View of Saidiya Hartman\u2019s 2025 performance Minor Music at the End of the World.<\/em><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n

Have you encountered artworks you might consider perhaps \u201cuncritical\u201d fabulations, or a misuse of something like your idea?<\/strong>
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Yes, by an institution in Germany. They were literally displaying the bones of Herero people inside this ethnographic museum, and they wanted to use \u201ccritical fabulation\u201d when rehabilitating that colonial museum. No. Critical fabulation is opposed to that project\u2014the accumulation that makes possible the museum collection, the violence necessary to capture and catalogue the human specimen.
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Ol\u00faf\u1eb9\u0301mi O. T\u00e1\u00edw\u00f2 has this term \u201celite capture\u201d [see: Elite Capture: How the Powerful Took Over Identity Politics (And Everything Else<\/em>)]. This was an elite capture, in order to enable a colonial ethnographic museum that literally contained the bones of the Herero. I thought\u2026 did you read what I wrote!? The archive is a mortuary, and the literal presence of bones exemplifies the violence of such repositories. A huge, resounding, loud, no!
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It\u2019s also worth distinguishing critical fabulation from fiction. Fiction is critically important, but for people who are committed to nonfiction, it\u2019s often because we believe that real life is stranger than fiction. The things people endure and make happen and create under the most brutal and extreme circumstances can seem unbelievable. I research and write to understand such lives.
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In the book I\u2019m writing now, there\u2019s a character who died imprisoned in the Soviet Union, and I found their death certificate. I can\u2019t even read it, but just to have it as a document is so critical: a different aspect of that character came into view for me. Documents and materials, as well as intuition and rumors, help me to figure out the story. I write with the sense that I am not going to know everything that happened, and bereft of steely certainty, but I do my best to account for everything I can.
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Absolutely. May I ask what your new book is about?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

In a way, I feel like every book is exploring the same question! In Wayward Lives<\/em>, there is a sentence in the prologue where I say that I\u2019m examining \u201ca revolution in a minor key.\u201d This new book is looking at a revolution in a major key, at the Bolshevik Revolution and its impact on black people\u2019s lives. I heard someone describe Marxism as second to Christianity (at least in the West) in affecting people\u2019s belief about how the world might be transformed. So, at this moment when there are brutal regimes of power all over the world, I\u2019m asking: What is our imagination of radical transformation? And I\u2019m thinking about how revolution plays out in a very intimate and local and embodied way. The relationship between the structural and the everyday, the lived experience, continues to be of importance in my work.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

[analyse_source url=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/art-in-america\/interviews\/saidiya-hartman-minor-music-arthur-jafa-precious-okoyomon-1234788621\/”]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

[analyse_image type=”featured” src=”https:\/\/www.artnews.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2026\/06\/L_R-Audrey-Hailes-Bria-Bacon-AJ-Wilmore-Okwui-Okpokwasili_MM_fabian-calis_02-10-2025_09839.jpg?w=1024″] It\u2019s hard to think of a scholar who has had a bigger impact on the art of our times than Saidiya Hartman. The Columbia professor is best known for her method of writing history that she calls \u201ccritical fabulation,\u201d a way of using theory and speculative storytelling to fill silences and omissions […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[61,226],"class_list":["post-1982581","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-politics","tag-artnews-com","tag-crawlmanager"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1982581","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1982581"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1982581\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1982581"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1982581"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/analyse.optim.biz\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1982581"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}