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.

Empathy is the ability to share the feelings, thoughts, and experiences of another and is generally assumed to be a positive quality. Hartman, however, is concerned with the way that anti-slavery and abolitionist rhetoric attempts to elicit empathy in whites. Hartman contends that this attempt to gain empathy for enslaved people often consumes the people themselves. In other words, whites imaginatively occupy the enslaved people, placing themselves in that position in a way that, Hartman reasons, ultimately amounts to the destruction of Blackness and insertion of whiteness. Empathy, then, destroys Blackness in its ostensible attempt to liberate Blackness.

Hartman’s concern with the empathy that was central to the abolitionist movement and to the related genre of the slave narrative has influenced slavery studies and literary criticism.

Redress is sought by “everyday practices” of enslaved people. Twenty-first century discussions of redress center on reparations.

Hartman discusses the ways that the postbellum amendments to the Constitution—by insisting on abstract equality in the granting of rights to emancipated people—assumed a clean slate for emancipated people that denies the legacy of slavery.