[For this year’s Valentine’s series, I wanted to build on the weekend post on my Dad’s book and highlight a handful of other scholarly books that have been especially meaningful to me. Leading up to a weekend tribute to a scholar I love even more than her book!]
I mentioned in Tuesday’s post on The Unredeemed Captive that there was a more recent combination of narrative history and imaginative storytelling that had become even more of a signpost for my work on season one of my podcast. That book is Saidiya Hartman’s Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (2019), which I highlighted here as part of my Thanksgiving 2024 blog series on the podcast. I love many things about Hartman’s book, including her consistently impressive balance between the complex individual identities of her protagonists and the broader cultural and historical contexts to which they connect. But what stood out to me most when I read it, and what I talked about explicitly when I brought Hartman’s book into the podcast, was her willingness to thoughtfully include her own identity and perspective as part of her writing and analyses. If we’re going to bend the rules of scholarly genre enough to combine imaginative storytelling and narrative history, it seems to me that we might as well go further and combine the personal with the academic (as, of course, I do pretty much constantly in my own scholarly writing, here and everywhere; and, not coincidentally, as I highlighted my Dad doing in the Preface to his first book in last weekend’s tribute post). There are few scholarly books from recent years that I’ve loved as much as Hartman’s, and that’s a key reason why.
Last Valentine’s read tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Scholarly books or voices you love?
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