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.
Themes
The Weaponization of the Legal Subjectivity of Enslaved People
Content Warning: This section of the guide refers to the commodification and extreme violence of slavery, indentured servitude, debt peonage, sexual violence, rape, graphic torture, and systemic racism.
Hartman challenges the assumption of both abolitionists and liberal scholars of slavery that the recognition of enslaved people as human—and, more specifically, the recognition of enslaved subjectivity—was fundamental to securing abolition and emancipation. Instead, Hartman argues that this impartial subjectivity that is legally constructed around enslaved people is a “subjection.” Rather than alleviating the violence of slavery, this subjection contributes to that violence and is part of the machinery—or internal workings—of slavery’s violence.
More specifically, legal subjectivity was denied to the enslaved person except in two instances: in the designation of criminality and in the state of extreme and graphic mortification of the flesh. In other words, the law only recognized the legal subjectivity of enslaved people insofar as an enslaved person could be found guilty of a crime and insofar as violence done to an enslaved person could be legally recognized as damage, though this was understood as damage to the enslaver’s property.
According to Hartman, enslaved people took on subject status as criminals and thus could be held legally responsible and as full agents only in cases of Black resistance to slavery and thus any physical resistance to any white person. The law recognized the enslaved person, in their resistance, then, only to destroy them through their prosecution and execution. Hence, legal subjectivity was weaponized against the enslaved person. Subjectivity, then, was “granted” only in service of the legal prosecution of enslaved people and the maintenance of slavery. It followed, then, that legal subjectivity was denied in other criminal matters in which an enslaved person might function as anything other than criminal (such as serving as witness). While enslaved people would be legally held responsible for “crime,” they were refused subjectivity in the apprehension of crime. This is the basis for Hartman’s claim that legal subjectivity is not necessarily superior to the complete objectification of the enslaved person, and in many respects this legal subjectivity enabled the violence of enslavement.
Hartman notes that enslaved people were also rendered legal subjects in cases of extreme mortification of the flesh, yet this subjectivity was granted not as much as a recognition of harm done to the sentient human but as the means by which enslavers could claim harm done to them by way of a devaluation of their enslaved property. This mortification of the flesh, moreover, did not include the unbearable violence of enslavement itself, so that the rendering of subjectivity in the case of mortification assumed slavery as an act of nonviolence that did not impose harm. Thus, subjectivity was not the means by which enslaved sentience under slavery was recognized but, instead, the means by which it was denied and displaced.
According to Hartman, this legal weaponization of enslaved subjectivity demonstrates that the system of slavery cannot be approached from traditional liberal humanist frameworks that assume subjectivity as a recognition of the individual as “self-possessed” and deserving of full legal personhood Slavery disfigures subjectivity so that, instead of being a legal means of apprehending the subject fully and thus respectfully, it harms the already disfigured subject of the enslaved person. This maneuver of the law serves to remove the enslaved “subject” from any kind of moral community in which moral agents are considered in relation to one another, with subjectivity only recognized within a context of violence and crime. This legal construction of enslaved subjectivity is, thus, a subjection of the enslaved person to further violence rather than a protection of the enslaved person from violence and is simultaneously designed to keep the enslaved person in the violence of slavery that is not recognized as violence.
Enslaved Everyday Practice as Redress
Liberal historians of slavery, in an effort to resist the legal and social refusal of the full subjectivity and personhood of enslaved people, traditionally focused on the “agency” of enslaved people. This agency—or ability to act as a full subject, most especially in forms of resistance—was championed so that the enslaved person would be seen as a full person rather than the partial person that legal subjectivity violently constructed.
Hartman, however, sees this insistence on agency as a liberal “romance.” While seemingly opposed to the conservative romance of the plantation as a space of “moonlight and magnolias” in which enslaved people live contented lives and do not realize their own subjugation, this liberal insistence on enslaved agency is nonetheless a romanticization of slavery, according to Hartman. By denying the fact that slavery did not allow for the agential actions that liberal historians want to reveal and applaud, this liberal perspective denies the horror and violence of the experience of slavery.
Instead of foregrounding an agency that was not possible within the extreme terror of enslavement, Hartman turns to what she calls the “practices” of enslaved people that sought temporary and incomplete “redress.” In doing so, Hartman also turns away from the well-intentioned abolitionist focus on slavery’s stagings of graphic violence.
Moving away from spectacular violence and spectacular, impossible enslaved resistance and instead toward the mundane practice that the archive obscures, Hartman emphasizes the limited, small, and unacknowledged ways of being that sought temporary redress. These include moments in which enslaved people “stole away” from their subjugation by feigning sickness, moving outside the plantation without a pass, praying or singing communally, and even instances of self-harm.
These practices are emphatically not grounded in a resistance that liberates enslaved people from their subjugation or creates autonomy. Instead, these practices are rooted in the rupture and breakage that is slavery and, though temporary, seek redress at the same time that they attend to this rupture.
According to Hartman, this practice of redress is later suffocated within the liberal discourse of rights that insists on a false “equality” after emancipation in fashioning emancipated people as rights-bearing citizens. The framework of rights assumes emancipated people as full agents, completely removed from the legacy of slavery and thus fails to attend to the rupture of slavery because it denies this rupture: Redress is thus not seen as necessary.
The “Burdened Individuality” of Emancipation
Emancipation has been theorized by historians of slavery as a clean break from slavery. With the end of enslavement, the former enslaved person was no longer property of another but “owned” themselves. With the end of slavery, then, enslaved people became rights-bearing citizens, and their liberation was presented to them and others as complete.
Hartman, however, troubles the notion of any clean break from slavery as well as liberal, scholarly confidence in “rights” as creating conditions of true equality. Instead, Hartman describes the movement out of slavery and into rights-bearing individuality as one that is “burdened.” Freedom created a “double bind” for the formerly enslaved, who were emancipated without material or financial resources. Thus, with emancipation came debt and exploitative systems of labor that, while technically “free,” required emancipated people to yield their freedom and enter into “voluntary” subjugation that created conditions resembling slavery.
Individuality was not a lifting of the weight of enslavement, then, but the weight of slavery’s legacy remained (with the additional burden of the denial of this weight), and emancipated people were expected to constantly “prove” their new “worth” as citizens, always positioned as unworthy. Unlike slavery, in which worth—as commodity—was clear, freed people now had to “stage” their own worth to whites in a performance that was uncannily similar to the forced performances of contented subjection in slavery. The freed person was always assumed to be deficient, and the proving of worth required an enormous effort within the context of an extreme lack of resources. Not to have resources meant looking for work, for a place to stay, for food, etc., and this was interpreted as “idleness” and subject to punishment: To be idle was not to be productive, which was not to be a worthy citizen.
Emancipated people lived in a state in which they were technically rights-bearing individuals, but this full legal subjectivity was in name only and “worth” was to be individually proven and performed by way of extreme responsibility, obligation, and humility. Occupation in labor must be consistent, but it also must not be threatening to whites. Thus, emancipated people had to be productive, but this productivity had to be packaged within extreme humility that assumed extreme obligation and thus was always blameworthy. Success was something that whites demanded but was also something that they punished. Freedom was lived on the precipice of terror.
Many emancipated people who were unable to apologize for their success once again found themselves in a form of bondage that exploited them as laborers and refused their ownership of themselves and their work and out of which they could not liberate themselves. This exploitation of emancipated labor was systematically maintained through systems of debt peonage in which the debt that was inevitable with emancipation entailed emancipated people signing over their labor and personhood in service of that debt. “Freedom” entailed the emancipated person’s transformation from property to debtor, which then required a “voluntary” subscription to indentured servitude, which stripped the “free” of many of the rights that were supposedly inalienable.
