'One of our most brilliant contemporary thinkers' - Claudia Rankine

'A lodestar for a generation of students and, increasingly, for politically engaged people outside the academy' - Alexis Okeowo

'What Hartman has to say about both slavery and its continuing resonances should be heard as widely as possible ... A major scholarly contribution to the project of expanding and refining the nation's political memory.' - the Nation

'Meticulously researched .... The 25th-anniversary edition of this pathbreaking work of scholarship is a gift to those interested in thinking deeply and expansively about slavery's ever-running machinations.' - Omari Weekes

'The brilliance of the book - a brilliance that is considerable, formidable and rare - is present in the space Hartman leaves for the ongoing (re)production of [black] performance in all its guises and for a critical awareness of how each of those guises is always already present in and disruptive of the supposed originality of that primal scene [of violence]' - Fred Moten, author of The Consent Not to Be a Single Being