Scenes of Subjection

Chapter 2 begins with an enslaver who, for religious reasons, thinks that dance is wrong, yet he insists that the people he enslaves dance to find pleasure. According to Hartman, “pleasure,” trumping religious reservations, must be seen here as political, coercive, and violent. Hartman argues that this “promotion of harmless pleasures was a central strategy in the enslaver’s effort to cultivate contented subjection” so that the enslaved person would discipline themself to participate fully in their own enslavement (81).

Yet many enslaved people did not want to be complicit in pleasure as a mechanism of slavery and refused to “indulge” in such imposed pleasures. Focusing on this enslaved refusal of contented suffering, Chapter 2 moves away from Chapter 1’s focus on enslavers’ staging of pleasure and into “clandestine forms of pleasure” that occur under the cover—and not in the illuminated theatre—of supposed “fun and frolic” (83). These forms of pleasure are not to be considered “passive revolution,” but they employ actions that are “recalcitrant” to the values of slavery. To understand how this pleasure can be recalcitrant, Hartman must place this clandestine pleasure within the context of “everyday practices,” “defamiliarize” the performance of Blackness that slavery grounds in fun so that Black challenges to slavery emerge within this supposedly frivolous domain, and “liberate the performative” from “contented subjection to engage the critical labor of redress” (83).

The tactics of everyday practices for enslaved people were not ones that could secure autonomy or removal from the domination of slavery. They could not maintain what might be secured in a very temporary and “incomplete victory.” These everyday tactics include unauthorized travel, feigned sickness, destruction of property, and self-harm. These practices aimed to facilitate relations among enslaved people, challenge the authority of the enslaver, care for the suffering body, claim the body and life of an enslaved person as one’s own, and secure some physical mobility. All of these practices, however, are understood by enslaved people as limited in their scope and done with an understanding that the conditions of enslavement will not change. According to Hartman, this understanding of the limited power of these practices does not signify acceptance of the conditions of slavery but, instead, an understanding of the enormous scope and power of the system of slavery.

Hartman argues that if the pain of enslaved people has not been acknowledged it is not, as many argue, because it is inexpressible. Rather, the reason is the “sheer denial of black sentience” that is embedded in the spectacle of “contented enjoyment” discussed in Chapter 1 (85). Ironically, the enslaved person is supposedly impervious to pain, yet is also controlled with threats of bodily punishment. Slavery’s insistence on an unbearable pain that is simultaneously denied by slavery is the context in which Hartman theorizes enslaved everyday practices that attempt to “redress” the pained body and the mental and spiritual pain of enslavement. The scope and depth of Black pain far exceeds any amelioration that can be achieved in these everyday practices.

Actually understanding this “practice” with necessary complexity requires a disabling of any kind of “romance” surrounding slavery; this includes romantic ideas of enslaved people’s agency and resistance. Enslaved “agency” must be considered in the context of what Hartman calls the “naturalization” of Blackness as a state of “pained contentment,” which requires extreme violence to maintain, and which can never be fully escaped.

According to Hartman, “practice” of (limited) pleasure was forged in community, but this was not a community grounded in sameness, as is often assumed, but one that revolved around the desire for change: abolition. Thus, there is no innate “connection” in what we now refer to as “Blackness.” This connection was forged in the lived conditions of enslavement rather than existing within Africanness, another romantic notion of slavery that must be discarded. Moreover, community was enacted rather than passively expressed through any a priori cohesiveness in “practice.”

It is through the framework of “practice,” Hartman claims, that we can start to understand the enslaved person’s capacity to act, and this practice also ensures the apprehension of the extremely constricted nature of enslaved subjectivity that enables action. Legally under the system of slavery, Hartman notes, subjectivity is only apprehended through the weaponization of personhood weighed down with extreme and unbearable “responsibilities” and “duties” that demand the negation of the self. Hartman refers to the way that legal subjectivity is acknowledged in enslaved people’s criminality: As a subject of the law, the enslaved person can be held responsible for killing their enslaver but simultaneously cannot serve as witness to any form of white violence. That is to say that, under the law, while the enslaved person can be rendered the agent of a crime, they may not themselves be the subject of a crime. Thus, subjectivity and personhood, as legally available under slavery, are designed to destroy enslaved people.

While enslavers and all those participating in the slave trade required that the enslaved people strike and step it up, lively, everyday practice of enslaved people consisted of “stealing the meeting,” “stealing themselves,” and “stealing away” (110). This language acknowledges the context of slavery (theft) as it also insists on a “stealing” of self from the commodified status in which the self is embedded: “Stealing away” was inherently resistant because it is insisted on a “taking” of the self.