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).