53 pages • 1 hour read
Saidiya V. HartmanScenes of Subjection
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Part 2, Chapter 5Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 2: “The Subject of Freedom”
Part 2, Chapter 5 Summary: “Fashioning Obligation: Indebted Servitude and the Legacy of Slavery”
Although emancipation was the end of slavery, it was not the end of bondage, and Hartman describes the freed individual as “nothing if not burdened, responsible, and obligated” (221).
Debt, almost inevitable for emancipated people, now authorized violence. Hartman cites Nietzsche in her consideration of debt as a morality measurer, linking the affects of guilt and obligation with the relation between creditor and debtor.
The intellectual and social work required of emancipated people was enormous. How does one live a new existence within the break from slavery at the same time that emancipation reconfigures the plantation system’s abuses? Ironically, the Freedmen’s Bureau assumed not the enormous intellectual and physical labor that freed people took on but, instead, the “idleness” of emancipated people, who, after laboring under the extreme violence of slavery, it was assumed, would not voluntarily labor, even for themselves.
The mobility of emancipated people was particularly threatening to whites; alongside the physical violence of slavery was its insistence on restricted mobility. With emancipation, however, freed Black people moved. This mobility reflected the search of emancipated people for stability but also reflected a lack of material accumulation, which was read as a lack of “responsibility.” All was interpreted through the context of capitalist production and accumulation, and this was the basis of the Northern liberal movement to the South to “educate” emancipated people into self-production.
Hartman moves into an extended analysis of handbooks written “for” emancipated people by the American Tract Society, organized in 1825 as an evangelical organization, which “preached” the virtues of self-discipline with the goal of social mobility. The metaphor of the sacrifice of white blood was throughout, with the negation of Black blood that was taken in violence in slavery and in the Civil War. These manuals and pedagogical tracts insisted that those from whom everything had been stolen owed everything for their freedom. This meant that systems emerged in which the free were forced to “sell” their (future) labor “voluntarily,” “consenting” to debt peonage. Freedom was a “gift” that had been acquired through white sacrifice, and thus debt peonage was Black “obligation.” Responsibility for the past and the present was imposed on Black victims, not white perpetrators.
The existence as “subject” demanded discipline of the body, alienation of that body, and the “reward” of money/wages/labor contracts. In these primers, then, the bent-in-labor spine and back became a metonym for freedom in its signification of the mandate of manual labor, self-discipline, and pain, with the body contorted to agricultural production. While many of these primers came out of a Christian context that was not necessarily abolitionist, former abolitionists played an instrumental role in this insistence on “free” labor ideology, which both assumed and cultivated burdened individuality. Another double bind in these primers regarding their presentation of enslavement was their emphasis on dependence rather than captivity. Along with this representation of dependence, the (forced) productivity of enslaved people was denied, so that postbellum representations of enslaved laborers also often took the form of the Sambo figure.
The “education” of emancipated people was grounded in domination that was articulated, as in slavery, in the legal system. Anti-enticement laws made it illegal to terminate a contract at one plantation to move to another, and vagrancy laws ensured that any person without a contract was “guilty” of vagrancy, which led to a fine, and if unable to pay this fine, involuntary servitude. The Black Code of Louisiana required every free laborer to contract within the first 10 days of January. A contract, then, something presumed to be voluntary and freely entered into, had nothing to do with choice or will, but was the means of a subjugation that was “akin” to slavery. The threat of Black “idleness” would be met with subjugation and forced labor.
Hartman reasons that if Black people were not to be “wandering” and, instead, were to be occupied in their labor and thus surveilled, then the home was crucial. Therefore, manuals regarding the proper way to conduct a home circulated alongside the tracts coming out of the Freedmen’s Bureau. Of particular concern were hygiene and the organization of different peoples within different spaces in “clean” ways. According to Hartman, these anxieties about Black hygiene and control of Black domestic spaces anticipate the violence of segregation that was codified with Plessy v Ferguson. Arrangements of the home—from architecture to home décor—were intended to serve the marketplace by “managing” Black lives rather than creating a refuge from the exploitations of the marketplace.
Part 2, Chapter 5 Analysis
The three markers of freed existence with which Hartman begins her chapter—burdened, responsible, and obligated (221)—are uncannily similar to the markers of enslavement and its impartial and violent rendering of enslaved subjectivity. This similarity underscores a key claim of Hartman’s text, namely that The “Burdened Individuality” of Emancipation resulted from the status of emancipation as a “nonevent,” meaning that reproduced the same underlying conditions that characterized enslavement.
“Responsibility” entailed constant “accounting” for oneself, with the burden on the freed individual to prove that they were not in the wrong (or “criminal”): To be “responsible,” then, was to constantly be “blameworthy.” The liberated, though technically in possession of the rights of the individual, existed with the burden of having to prove themselves “worthy” of these supposedly “God-given” rights. To do so, then, was to take on an impossible task: to prove one’s worth in the context of the extreme devaluation of Black life, all while mere survival was exhausting for so many freed people, a task that often exceeded human capacity.
This crisis of “worth,” then, was combined with the extreme hardships of emancipation, in which enslaved people generally had nothing of material worth at the same time that they were forced to prove their worth both as moral and legal subjects (citizen).
In this context, entering into any kind of “contract” was not about reciprocity but was the “vehicle of servitude” (222), and responsibility was “inseparable from peonage” (222). This lived existence within the context of unworthiness/guilt evoked the criminality that violently “endowed” enslaved people with legal subjectivity. The right of citizenship, like the legal subjectivity of the enslaved person, had been the means of separation from slavery but had also been weaponized. This burden of “responsibility” and culpability in the face of white-proclaimed Black worthlessness was the ground on which involuntary servitude occurred. In other words, Hartman suggests earlier in the book that pro-slavery logic had argued that the system of slavery was a response to the fact that Black people were incapable of agency, self-determination, and full legal subjectivity—thus rendering slavery an act of welfare for enslaved people at the expense of the enslaver—rather than enslavement being what caused Black people to be incapable of agency, self-determination, and full legal subjectivity. In this chapter, Hartman argues that emancipation similarly mistook cause for effect: The dire conditions for Black people that Hartman describes was seen as an effect of their inability to be self-determined legal subjects rather than these conditions causing this inability.
Moral worthiness supplanted economic worth after emancipation, and this transformation in worth requires a difficult consideration. The requirements in the performance of “worth” were arguably exacerbated, not ameliorated, by emancipation. While the commodification of slavery was intrinsically and unbearably violent in its objectification of Black life, Hartman restates that objectification may not in fact be the most extreme form of violence enacted against enslaved people: The “subjectification” of the enslaved person—and, for the purposes of Chapter 5, the subjectification of emancipated people via rights discourse—moved the freed person into the burden of having to prove a worth that could not be “proven” for any human being. Hartman does not go so far as to suggest that the burden of proving moral worth was more damaging than the imposed and devastating “worth” imputed to Black people under slavery’s commodification. However, she does suggest that the ongoing calibration of the “value” of Black life, juxtaposed with the assumption of white lives’ intrinsic value, traces a clear line of continuity—despite obvious differences—with slavery.
The question of worth, finally, became increasingly placed in the domain of “blood” for whites, reinforcing how worth was “internal” to whites and “natural” in its supposedly biological grounding in the body. This situates Hartman’s book at the forefront of a discourse on the topic of whiteness and racism—specifically the way whiteness is seen as neutral, natural, and normative, thereby rendering anything that deviates from whiteness unnatural, immoral, and wrong. Hartman adds, however, that white worth also became a topic of anxiety in the midst of concerns about interracial sexual relations, as discussed in Chapter 6. Whiteness increasingly required “protection.”
