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).

"[4][14] Hartman introduces the idea of "critical fabulation" in her article "Venus in Two Acts," although she could be said to be engaged in the practice in both of her previously published full-length books, Scenes of Subjection and Lose Your Mother.

Critical fabulation is a tool that Hartman uses in her scholarly practice to make productive sense of the gaps and silences in the archive of trans-Atlantic slavery that absent the voices of enslaved women.

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.

It is the liminal zone between the inside and outside for the one who stays in the ghetto; the reformer documenting the habitat of the poor passes through without noticing it, failing to see what can be created in cramped space, if not an overture, a desecration, or to regard our beautiful flaws and terrible ornaments.

[5] 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.

[19] Hartman's contributions to understanding slavery caught the attention of UC Irvine's Frank B. Wilderson III, well known for setting groundwork and coining the phrase "Afro-pessimism".

Hartman, who centers much of her interrogation of slavery's archive on Elmina Castle, inserts her own voice as one way to counter the silences surrounding forgotten slaves.

'"[23] Arguably all of Hartman's work is guided by "the impossibility of fully recovering the experience of the enslaved and the emancipated" from these written accounts, and she reads them "against the grain", knowing that in her use of these "official" records, she runs "the risk of reinforcing the authority of these documents even as I try to use them for contrary purposes".

[23] Hartman introduces the concept of narrative restraint in her article "Venus in Two Acts" to delay an archival impulse to continually register as "a death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body".

Unable to write about the girl named Venus owing to her brief appearance in the archive, Hartman's attempts to resuscitate possible narratives for her ultimately lead to failure.

She explains, "But in the end I was forced to admit that I wanted to console myself and to escape the slave hold with a vision of something other than the bodies of two girls settling on the floor of the Atlantic."

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.

"[27] 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.

Figures including Gladys Bentley, an out butch lesbian performer, regularly subverted and challenged written and unwritten laws meant to criminalize sexual and gender expression.

In 1952, Bentley published an article[30] in Ebony Magazine detailing her return to womanhood and marriage to a man in part to continue her career as a performer and as a result of the struggles she endured as an out-of-the-closet lesbian.

Living outside the boundaries of heterosexuality and what passed as woman, if not directly criminalized by the state, was still considered deviant and punishable outside the limited spaces created by and for queer folks.

Hartman contemplates on the girl's anonymity, which becomes "a placeholder for all the possibilities and the dangers awaiting young black women in the first decades of the twentieth century.