The Plot of Her Undoing

Author: Saidiya Hartman

Publisher: Cutt Press (2023)

"Hartman’s prose poem accumulates scenes of subjugation and violence inflicted upon an historical ‘her’ – a collective figure whose dispossession forms the basis of our world. A chronicle of domination, her list encapsulates violences abstract and tangible, bureaucratic and enfleshed, structural and everyday – those perpetuated in the name of the law, the nation, the father, the ‘subject’, the market, whiteness, ‘modern’ thought, property. In the final section of the poem, Hartman inverts the construction that has structured the text to this point – ‘The plot of her undoing’ becomes the ‘The undoing of the plot’, with Hartman offering a collection of escape routes and moments of resistance, both major and minor..."