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.

The Introduction begins with a discussion of the pivotal, early scene of the whipping of Frederick Douglass’s Aunt Hester in Douglass’s abolitionist 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Hartman will not reproduce Douglass’s account of this whipping because she wants to underscore how easily this scene of torture is reproduced by academics and how “participation” in this torture ensues in this reproduction. Hartman claims that we are not rendered witnesses in such a reproduction but, instead, voyeurs.

Hartman is broadly critical of the possibility of empathy, which the abolitionist reproduction of these scenes of torture attempted to elicit in white readers in Douglass’s time. Hartman is also suspicious of the supposed ideals of “humanity” and “individuality” espoused by liberal humanism. Rather than assuming, as most scholars have done, that violence lies in the refusals of humanity and subjectivity for the enslaved person, Hartman relocates this violence in the very construction of personhood and recognition of the enslaved person as subject.