Scenes of Subjection

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.

Public acknowledgments of slavery often invoke the “agency” of enslaved people. Why does Hartman think that such a move is dangerously “romantic”? Instead of turning our attention to enslaved agency, where instead does Hartman think we should look?

If emancipation is the legal liberation from enslavement, why does Hartman describe emancipated individuality as “burdened”? How is the end of slavery a burden and not a liberation?

Abolitionists relied on scenes of graphic violence in their argument against slavery. This was particularly important in the context of pro-slavery rhetoric that insisted that enslaved people had a high tolerance for pain. Abolitionists wanted to thus display enslaved pain as pain. At the same time, Hartman argues that this abolitionist reproduction of pain was itself a form of violence and that enslaved pain is too “easily” reproduced and viewed, even today. What are alternatives to this representation of pain in the study of slavery?