When Saidiya Hartman’s 1997 book, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America, was reissued last year, it included newly commissioned art by Torkwase Dyson and Cameron Rowland. That’s far from the only sign of the American thinker, cultural historian and 2019 MacArthur Fellow’s profound imprint on contemporary art, due to her intersectional, archive-delving expansion of incomplete written histories – particularly those of people of colour, women and queer communities. She’s had a longstanding and productive dialogue with Arthur Jafa, for example, whose own acclaimed moving-image work reflects Hartman’s granular and speculative approach to storytelling in the gaps left by official narratives, or what she’s termed ‘critical fabulation’. Currently, it appears, Hartman is working on Graces of the Unsung, an exploration of Black radicalism and the transformative actions of ordinary citizens; not a few artists will have it on preorder.