• SCENES OF SUBJECTION, terror, slavery and self-making in nineteenth-century America

SCENES OF SUBJECTION, terror, slavery and self-making in nineteenth-century America

: Hartman (S.)

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517pp., paperback, Revised Edition Reprint, Serpent's Tail, London, (2022) 2024

ISBN: 9781800819962

 

First published in 1977. 

In this radical re-evaluation of American history, Saidiya Hartman draws together a portrait of nineteenth-century slavery and its many afterlives. Through close examination of a variety of 'scenes', ranging from the auction block and the minstrel show to plantation diaries and legal cases, she investigates the interconnected nature of historical enslavement and present-day racism in the USA.

"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]." Fred Moten, author of The Consent Not to Be a Single Being

"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." Stephanie Smallwood, author of Saltwater Slavery

 

 

Saidiya Hartman is the author of Lose Your Mother: A journey along the Atlantic slave route and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intitmare histories of social upheaval. She is Professor in the Department of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University. Prior to this appointment she was Professor in the Department of English and African American Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. In 2019 she was awarded a MacArthur "Genius" grant. She lives in New York City.