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.

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.