Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America
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- $15.99
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
The groundbreaking debut by the award-winning author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, revised and updated.
Saidiya Hartman has been praised as “one of our most brilliant contemporary thinkers” (Claudia Rankine, New York Times Book Review) and “a lodestar for a generation of students and, increasingly, for politically engaged people outside the academy” (Alexis Okeowo, The New Yorker). In Scenes of Subjection—Hartman’s first book, now revised and expanded—her singular talents and analytical framework turn away from the “terrible spectacle” and toward the forms of routine terror and quotidian violence characteristic of slavery, illuminating the intertwining of injury, subjugation, and selfhood even in abolitionist depictions of enslavement. By attending to the withheld and overlooked at the margins of the historical archive, Hartman radically reshapes our understanding of history, in a work as resonant today as it was on first publication, now for a new generation of readers.
This 25th anniversary edition features a new preface by the author, a foreword by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an afterword by Marisa J. Fuentes and Sarah Haley, notations with Cameron Rowland, and compositions by Torkwase Dyson.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
MacArthur fellow Hartman (Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments) probes in this innovative critical study, which has been revised and expanded from its original 1997 edition, why emancipation failed to translate into freedom and equality for Black Americans. Provocatively arguing that American liberalism itself, not the absence or denial of it, prevented African Americans from becoming full-fledged citizens, Hartman examines how "the recognition of the slave's humanity and status as a subject extended and intensified servitude and dispossesion, rather than conferring some small measure of rights and protection." Dissecting various "scenes of subjection" common to 19th-century culture, including parades of coffled slaves and minstrel shows, Hartman identifies the forces that made it impossible for people once defined as property to be immediately recognized as human beings. Instead, white supremacist culture rendered Black persons "socially dead" in all but the rarest instances, Hartman argues. Though her writing is impassioned and even lyrical at times, the book's theoretical discussions will be challenging for nonacademic readers. Still, this is a powerful and thought-provoking examination of slavery's far-reaching legacy.
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