Scenes of Subjection

Content Warning: This section of the guide refers to the commodification and extreme violence of slavery as well as systemic racism.

Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America radicalized slavery studies by rethinking the historical category of slavery in relation to emancipation. Hartman does this most especially by challenging periodization or the idea that emancipation represents a break from slavery. Hartman instead argues that emancipation is a “nonevent” and, as a nonevent, slavery itself continues and only appears different on the outside. Thus, “freedom” is a continuation of an ever-shifting slavery. This also entails that slavery studies itself should then extend outside the periodization that categorizes slavery as a system in the United States that ended in 1865. Hartman’s book establishes that slavery studies as a field should also examine postbellum manifestations of slavery like sharecropping, including in the present day where scholars post-Hartman often consider the prison-industrial complex to be an extension of slavery.

Hartman thus redefines the meaning of slavery, revising the meaning of emancipation and the experience of “freedom” in the late 19th century. Her historic methodology similarly acknowledges the ways that the archive is weaponized against Blackness and thus must be “disfigured” so that it can be read against the grain, not to “recover” an experience of slavery but to emphasize what is obfuscated or refused in archival material.

Hartman’s text also challenges the ease with which “agency” is invoked and dispensed in slavery scholarship, insisting that this imposition of liberal humanism on the condition of enslaved people is a dangerous assumption. Similar to her insistence that agency is unavailable under slavery, Hartman simultaneously demonstrates how liberal humanism is not an appropriate framework for approaching slavery, since the category of “the human” and the subjectivity that that category confers can only exist outside of slavery. In fact, the legal recognition of the enslaved person as human was provisional and contextual, recognized within the problematic “agency” of criminality.

Hartman also redefines violence, arguing that abolitionists’ attempts to garner white empathy for enslaved people is itself a “scene” of violence not only in its reproduction of slavery’s violence (such as in the generic convention that is the scene of enslaved torture) but also in its narcissistic and violent energies, thus questioning the limits of empathy. Hartman thus redirects attention away from these reproductions of graphic violence toward enslaved attempts to redress the violence of slavery through mundane practices of (limited) pleasure. This shift from the extreme and graphic violence of slavery to more quotidian attempts to find a temporary and entirely incomplete redress of slavery constitutes a redirection of textual analysis. Furthermore, this shift places enslaved “practice” as a guiding principle to create a current ethical practice that also seeks to redress slavery and not exploit enslaved people further through archival abolitionist images of Black suffering.

Hartman’s attention to the “burdened individuality of freedom” also challenges liberal humanist frameworks. She argues that these frameworks are inappropriate to the consideration of slavery as they imply a supposed “self-possession” that is weaponized against the “free.” Hartman argues that the supposed contrast between enslaved and free person is itself part of the continuation of the violent energies of slavery that can only locate enslaved subjectivity in criminality. Similarly, it holds the freeperson impossibly “responsible,” meaning that they are always deficient, always in breach of a “contract” that is not a sign of reciprocity or freedom but one that instead legalizes and documents “consent” to a new form of ownership. This new form of ownership invokes agency only to refuse it and thus continues slavery of a different kind.