Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America

TLDR: Hartman's Scenes of Subjection as discussed by the authors examines the apparent transformation from slavery to freedom in nineteenth-century America by paying particular attention to the antebellum and postbellum South.

Abstract: Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. By Saidiya V. Hartman. Race and American Culture. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. x, 281. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-19-508984-7; cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-19-508983-9.) Saidiya V. Hartman's Scenes of Subjection interrogates the apparent transformation from slavery to freedom in nineteenth-century America by paying particular attention to the antebellum and postbellum South. The author hopes to explicate the ambivalence of emancipation in order to address the issues raised by the continuing subjugation of blacks in a liberal nation. Hartman gives particular attention to the role of force and violence in constructing and perpetuating subjugation. She speaks importantly to such major historiographical debates as the question whether antebellum southern slavery was a paternalistic institution. Paternalism has been presented as recognizing the humanity of the enslaved, in part as a response to northern liberalism and abolitionism. In contrast to claims that the master/slave relationship was based upon reciprocal ties of mutual responsibilities and affection, however, Hartman supports those who argue that slavery was fundamentally based upon dehumanizing white physical force and violence. What Hartman's postmodernist analysis perhaps particularly contributes to such debates is her creative use of both traditional and nontraditional historical sources of evidence to interrogate and deconstruct the meaning of the ordinary "scenes of subjection." She thereby reinterprets such routine practices as slave dancing and singing, seemingly encouraged by paternalistic masters, as required demonstrations of white dominance that were epitomized by the forced performance of terrified slaves on the auction block. Hartman's deconstruction of the legal non-existence of the rape of a slave woman also emphasizes the dehumanizing violence of the law of slavery. But, at the same time, the personhood of the enslaved was recognized in the sense that they could be charged and found criminally responsible and blameworthy for wrongdoing. The argument that the association of black agency with blameworthiness comprised a lasting legacy of slavery leads on to the book's second section, in which Hartman focuses on the South after emancipation. Hartman's extended deconstruction of meanings, and her prose, can at times be so convoluted that the reader might at times wonder what she means to say; however, the book's second section helps to clarify her thesis that emphasizing the damaging legacies of slavery to emancipation is central to her critique of an American liberalism that defines "liberty" as the self-mastery of the man who--owning himself--could freely exercise reason, choice, and consent. …