Scenes of Subjection

Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America is an academic monograph written by Saidiya Hartman, published in 1997 by Oxford University Press. The text is considered a field-changing book in slavery studies. Hartman was awarded the MacArthur Genius Grant in 2019 and is also the author of Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2007) and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments (Norton, 2019).

Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America challenges many assumptions about enslavement and radicalized how scholars approach historical archives as well as approaches to the experience of enslaved people. Hartman challenges the following assumptions, which were commonplace beliefs among scholars before Scenes of Subjection: Valorization of enslaved agency; the assumed ethical nature of white empathy in the context of slavery’s extreme domination; emancipation as both unequivocally liberatory and a radical break from enslavement; liberal humanism as a relevant framework for thinking about slavery; and the liberating nature of postbellum rights and citizenship. Hartman’s throughline argument is that the societal and material forces that benefited from slavery have simply reshaped how Black bodies are exploited over time rather than be destroyed; emancipation did not, Hartman argues, truly end the exploitation of Black people in America.

This study guide refers to the 2022 Norton paperback edition of the text.

Content Warning: The source text and this study guide refer to the commodification and extreme violence of enslavement, indentured servitude, debt peonage, sexual violence, rape, graphic torture, and systemic racism.

Summary

Hartman’s text is divided into two parts. Part 1, “Formations of Terror and Enjoyment,” consists of three chapters focused on slavery, and Part 2, “The Subject of Freedom,” focuses on the supposed liberation from slavery that comes with emancipation. Though the book is organized in these two sections and reflects traditional periodization, Hartman does not separate enslavement and the ostensible liberation that occurs with its abolition. Instead, the book hinges on the ways that slavery metamorphoses into emancipation, so that emancipation actually continues many of the foundational elements of slavery.

Chapter 1, “Innocent Amusements,” considers the forced spectacle and staging of slavery as pleasurable for enslaved people. Slavery created visual “scenes” that violently presented enslaved people as content to be consumed for enjoyment. The forcing of enslaved people to act out a supposed contentment occurred in the most unbearable “scenes” of slavery, such as at the auction block and in the coffle (a group of enslaved people chained together in order to be transported from one location to another). These scenes of supposed pleasure in subjugation were refuted by abolitionists. Hartman argues that this idea that Black people were impervious to the suffering enslavement should instill in a person persists to this day.

Chapter 2, “Redressing the Pained Body,” is a response to slavery’s “scenes of subjection” as ones of contentment in its examination of enslaved attempts to redress the pain of slavery. While slavery insists that enslaved people are content in their subjugation, it maintains power through pain. Slavery thus simultaneously recognizes enslaved people as experiencing extreme pain and represents them as immune to the very pain it cultivates to maintain slavery. Enslaved attempts to redress this pain may involve limited pleasure, but they do not stage slavery as pleasurable and refuse any facile claims about enslaved agency and resistance. Instead, the “practices” of redress that Hartman examines, such as unauthorized movement or communal gathering, are often very risky and always temporary in the relief that they are able to secure.

Chapter 3, “Seduction and the Ruses of Power,” examines sexual violence in slavery. Hartman challenges the idea of enslaved agency in Chapter 2, and in Chapter 3 she similarly challenges the possibility of any kind of enslaved consent. Chapter 3 addresses the legal refusal of recognition of rape of enslaved people, examining how harm in the case of rape is only ascribed to the enslaver, who can make legal claims of “damage.” Hartman analyzes several legal cases that reveal this refusal of enslaved harm. Concluding with Harriet Jacobs’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, Hartman examines Jacobs’s own attempts to redress slavery in what Jacobs calls her “calculated decision” to enter into sexual relations with a white man who is not her enslaver. Hartman considers this calculation not one of consent but one that attempts redress, securing a “retreat” from the imminent threat of rape from her enslaver and providing limited protection for the children she has as a result of these calculations.

Part 2 revolves around Chapter 4’s claim that a “burdened individuality” is imposed on the emancipated person. Emancipation positions the formerly enslaved as “free,” yet this “freedom” demands extreme obligation to white people and their pre-existing society, even though emancipated people do not have the resources that such demands require. Thus, the weight of enslaved bondage metamorphosed into the burden of a supposed free individual that had nothing yet was expected to provide everything.

Chapter 5, “Fashioning Obligation,” examines the practice of indentured servitude that occurred post-emancipation. Debt provided a “reason” for a new kind of slavery in the form of debt peonage, so that once again Black labor was exploited and became part of a new system of bondage.

Chapter 6, “Instinct and Injury,” explores the postbellum amendments and the congressional and judicial discussions surrounding these amendments, particularly those regarding difference and equality. These amendments imposed the liberal humanist framework of the individual on emancipated people, so that the granting of Black rights supposedly ensured “equality.” Yet this insistence on an equality that occurred in the possession of rights assumes a clean break with slavery that does not acknowledge the extreme differences between white privilege and Black subjection, despite technically having the same rights. The conferral of civil rights, then, is part of the burden of individuality that emancipated people must carry.