In this provocative and original exploration of racial subjugation during slavery and its aftermath, Saidiya Hartman illumines the forms of terror and resistance that shaped black identity. Scenes of Subjection examines the forms of domination that usually go undetected; in particular, the encroachments of power that take place through notions of humanity, enjoyment, protection, rights, and consent. By looking at slave narratives, plantation diaries, popular theater, slave performance, freedmen's primers, and legal cases, Hartman investigates a wide variety of "scenes" ranging from the auction block and minstrel show to the staging of the self-possessed and rights-bearing individual of freedom. While attentive to the performance of power--the terrible spectacles of slaveholders' dominion and the innocent amusements designed to abase and pacify the enslaved--and the entanglements of pleasure and terror in these displays of mastery, Hartman also examines the possibilities for resistance, redress and transformation embodied in black performance and everyday practice. This important study contends that despite the legal abolition of slavery, emergent notions of individual will and responsibility revealed the tragic continuities between slavery and freedom. Bold and persuasively argued, Scenes of Subjection will engage readers in a broad range of historical, literary, and cultural studies.
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Editorial Reviews
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"Audacious....Original and provocative....What Hartman has to say about both slavery and its continuing resonances should be heard as widely as possible....A major scholarly contribution to the project of expanding and refining the nation's political memory."--The Nation
"A tour de force."--American Literature
"American historians, especially historians of the South, will learn much from Secenes of Subjection"--The Journal of American History
...a profoundly important subject...the author explores anew the calculated use of both blatantly overt and seemingly subtler forms of control over black bodies and black psyches."--Mississippi Quarterly
About the Author
Saidiya Hartman is Associate Professor of English at the University of California-Berkeley
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0 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
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Insightful,
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This review is from: Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Race and American Culture) (Paperback)
Saidiya Hartman, with "Scenes of Subjection" has penned a well-researched and insightful look at the interior life of enslavement, power, and personal freedom. Using copious first-hand resources, Hartman creatively considers how the every day life and rituals of enslaved African Americans demonstrates that one can enslave a body, but never a soul.
Reviewer: Bob Kellemen, Ph.D., is the author of Beyond the Suffering: Embracing the Legacy of African American Soul Care and Spiritual Direction , Spiritual Friends, and Soul Physicians.
10 of 23 people found the following review helpful:
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This review is from: Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Race and American Culture) (Paperback)
Scenes of Subjection provides a fascinating view of slavery and its effects. Hartman applies her brilliant intellect to this terribly important subject, providing the reader with insight and understanding that is sadly missing from other academic and non-academic treatment of slavery. This is a "must read."
0 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
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SCARES,
This review is from: Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Race and American Culture) (Paperback)
I haven't read this book yet by Saidiya Hartman, but, if this is a poweful as "Lose Your Mohter'", it must make people very uncomfortable, which it should, regarding the genocide, rape,and torture of Africans in the land of bigoty, racism and hypocrisy.
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First Sentence:
In an epistle to his brother, John Rankin illumined the "very dangerous evil" of slavery in a description of the coffle, detailing the obscene theatricality of the slave trade: "Unfeeling wretches purchased a considerable drove of slaves-how many of them were separated from husbands and wives, I will not pretend to say-and having chained a number of them together, hoisted over the flag of American liberty, and with the music of two violins marched the woe-worn, heart-broken, and sobbing creatures through the town." Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
black sentience, burdened individuality, repressive instrumentality, instrumental amusements, contented subjection, dual invocation, juba song, terror and enjoyment, white enjoyment, unredressed injury, black subjection, racial subjection, negligible injury, slave agency, pained body, willful submission, captive body, blackface mask, enslaved female, chattel status, subterranean history, black subordination, antimiscegenation statutes, legal subjection, slave humanity Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Thirteenth Amendment, John Freeman, Fourteenth Amendment, Freedmen's Bureau, Plain Counsels, Black Codes, Friendly Counsels, United States, Civil War, Miss Horton, Reconstruction Amendments, Dred Scott, Zip Coon, High Daddy, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Jim Crow, American Revolution, Fashioning Obligation New!
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Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
In an epistle to his brother, John Rankin illumined the "very dangerous evil" of slavery in a description of the coffle, detailing the obscene theatricality of the slave trade: "Unfeeling wretches purchased a considerable drove of slaves-how many of them were separated from husbands and wives, I will not pretend to say-and having chained a number of them together, hoisted over the flag of American liberty, and with the music of two violins marched the woe-worn, heart-broken, and sobbing creatures through the town." Read the first page Key Phrases - Statistically Improbable Phrases (SIPs): (learn more)
black sentience, burdened individuality, repressive instrumentality, instrumental amusements, contented subjection, dual invocation, juba song, terror and enjoyment, white enjoyment, unredressed injury, black subjection, racial subjection, negligible injury, slave agency, pained body, willful submission, captive body, blackface mask, enslaved female, chattel status, subterranean history, black subordination, antimiscegenation statutes, legal subjection, slave humanity Key Phrases - Capitalized Phrases (CAPs): (learn more)
Thirteenth Amendment, John Freeman, Fourteenth Amendment, Freedmen's Bureau, Plain Counsels, Black Codes, Friendly Counsels, United States, Civil War, Miss Horton, Reconstruction Amendments, Dred Scott, Zip Coon, High Daddy, Uncle Tom's Cabin, Jim Crow, American Revolution, Fashioning Obligation New!
Books on Related Topics | Concordance | Text Stats Browse Sample Pages:
Front Cover | Table of Contents | First Pages | Index | Back Cover | Surprise Me!
Citations (learn more)
This book cites 100
books:
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42
books
cite this book:
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- Negro Question (The Works Of George W. Cable - 19 Volumes) by George W. Cable on 7 pages
- Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl (Dover Thrift Editions) by Harriet Jacobs on 5 pages
- American Slavery, American Freedom by Edmund S. Morgan on 4 pages
- Modernism and the Harlem Renaissance by Houston A. Baker Jr. in Back Matter (1), Back Matter (2), and Back Matter (3)
- Slave Life in Georgia (The Black heritage library collection) by John Brown on page 25, Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
See all 100 books this book cites
- The Fugitive's Properties: Law and the Poetics of Possession by Stephen M. Best in Back Matter (1), Back Matter (2), and Back Matter (3)
- Ties That Bind: The Story of an Afro-Cherokee Family in Slavery and Freedom (American Crossroads) by Tiya Miles in Back Matter (1), Back Matter (2), and Back Matter (3)
- Ann Petry's Short Fiction: Critical Essays (Contributions in Afro-American and African Studies: Contemporary Black Poets) by Hazel A. Ervin on page 167, and page 168
- Relative Intimacy: Fathers, Adolescent Daughters, and Postwar American Culture (Gender and American Culture) by Rachel Devlin in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
- Necro Citizenship: Death, Eroticism, and the Public Sphere in the Nineteenth-Century United States (New Americanists) by Russ Castronovo in Back Matter (1), and Back Matter (2)
See all 42 books citing this book
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