Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America

by Saidiya Hartman Narrated by Janina Edwards

Overview

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.



This twenty-fifth anniversary edition features a new preface by the author, a foreword by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, and an afterword by Marisa J. Fuentes and Sarah Haley.

Editorial Reviews

Publishers Weekly

08/22/2022

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. (Oct.)

David Roediger

"Sharpens our understanding of whiteness, property, and happiness in startling ways."

Nation

"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."

Fred Moten

"The brilliance of the book—a brilliance that is considerable, formidable and rare—is present in the space Hartman leaves for the ongoing (re)production of [black] performance in all its guises and for a critical awareness of how each of those guises is always already present in and disruptive of the supposed originarity of that primal scene [of violence]."

Stephanie Smallwood

"In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman prepared an intellectual ground for the phrase [the afterlife of slavery] to take root. Insisting that the conventional wisdom that slavery had died with legal emancipation was wrong, and that slavery was, as she put, ‘transformed rather than annulled by the 13th amendment of the US constitution,’ Hartman challenged us to consider that slavery didn’t just have a lingering trace or a shadowy aftereffect in the post-emancipation moment."

Vulture - Omari Weekes

"Meticulously researched.... The 25th-anniversary edition of this pathbreaking work of scholarship is a gift to those interested in thinking deeply and expansively about slavery’s ever-running machinations."

Nation Daryl

"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."

Product Details

BN ID:	2940160490670
Publisher:	HighBridge Company
Publication date:	01/16/2024
Edition description:	Unabridged

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