Scenes of Subjection

Content Warning: This section of the guide refers to the commodification and extreme violence of slavery as well as systemic racism.

Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America radicalized slavery studies by rethinking the historical category of slavery in relation to emancipation. Hartman does this most especially by challenging periodization or the idea that emancipation represents a break from slavery. Hartman instead argues that emancipation is a “nonevent” and, as a nonevent, slavery itself continues and only appears different on the outside. Thus, “freedom” is a continuation of an ever-shifting slavery. This also entails that slavery studies itself should then extend outside the periodization that categorizes slavery as a system in the United States that ended in 1865. Hartman’s book establishes that slavery studies as a field should also examine postbellum manifestations of slavery like sharecropping, including in the present day where scholars post-Hartman often consider the prison-industrial complex to be an extension of slavery.

Hartman thus redefines the meaning of slavery, revising the meaning of emancipation and the experience of “freedom” in the late 19th century. Her historic methodology similarly acknowledges the ways that the archive is weaponized against Blackness and thus must be “disfigured” so that it can be read against the grain, not to “recover” an experience of slavery but to emphasize what is obfuscated or refused in archival material.