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Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America
In this provocative and original exploration of racial subjugation during slavery and its aftermath, Saidiya Hartman illumines the forms of terror and resistance that shaped black identity. Scenes of Subjection examines the forms of domination that usually go undetected; in particular, the encroachments of power that take place through notions of humanity, enjoyment, protection, rights, and consent. By looking at slave narratives, plantation diaries, popular theater, slave performance, freedmen's primers, and legal cases, Hartman investigates a wide variety of "scenes" ranging from the auction block and minstrel show to the staging of the self-possessed and rights-bearing individual of freedom.
While attentive to the performance of power--the terrible spectacles of slaveholders' dominion and the innocent amusements designed to abase and pacify the enslaved--and the entanglements of pleasure and terror in these displays of mastery, Hartman also examines the possibilities for resistance, redress and transformation embodied in black performance and everyday practice.
This important study contends that despite the legal abolition of slavery, emergent notions of individual will and responsibility revealed the tragic continuities between slavery and freedom. Bold and persuasively argued, Scenes of Subjection will engage readers in a broad range of historical, literary, and cultural studies.
While attentive to the performance of power--the terrible spectacles of slaveholders' dominion and the innocent amusements designed to abase and pacify the enslaved--and the entanglements of pleasure and terror in these displays of mastery, Hartman also examines the possibilities for resistance, redress and transformation embodied in black performance and everyday practice.
This important study contends that despite the legal abolition of slavery, emergent notions of individual will and responsibility revealed the tragic continuities between slavery and freedom. Bold and persuasively argued, Scenes of Subjection will engage readers in a broad range of historical, literary, and cultural studies.
292 pages, Paperback
First published September 4, 1997
About the author
Saidiya Hartman
32 books787 followersSaidiya Hartman is the author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, and Scenes of Subjection. She a Guggenheim Fellow and has been a Cullman Fellow and Fulbright Scholar. She is a professor at Columbia University and lives in New York.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 86 reviews
December 7, 2017
I'll admit this was a tough read for me, especially the first part. The academic writing style was difficult, which is on me: I don't have the educational background that would probably have made it more accessible. I regret that, because I'd be better able to summarize, share, and discuss the vitally important topics Hartman analyzes.
I found Part 2: The Subject of Freedom to be astonishing and compelling. The concept of emancipation and the plain language of the Thirteenth Amendment was just the beginning of a truly American wave of backlash, retaliation, and enormous effort on the part of white America to maintain and exploit black subjugation, only with the pesky legalistic definition of "chattel slavery" having been legally discarded. Hartman's study of the efforts to fit the newly freed people into a system that comfortably (for whites) replicated antebellum norms is amazing. "The lessons of conduct imparted in freedmen's primers refigured the deference and servility of the social relations of slavery...Clearly, these lessons instilled patterns of behavior that minimized white discomfort with black freedom. The regulation of conduct lessened the discussions of the war by restoring black subordination on the level of everyday life..." (148)
The failure of Reconstruction, the acquiescence of the federal government to the creation and passage of state Black Laws, the concept that legal freedom need not intrude on local definitions of acceptable behaviors (at the expense of achieving social equality for black people), the rise of Jim Crow, the decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, and the fact that all of this was enforced by legal and extra-legal terror and violence, all of it reminds me that my early education about slavery and Emancipation pretty much ended with just that: Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, blah blah blah, then Brown v. Board of Education...American exceptionalism.
No, no and no. I totally recommend this book. If, like me, you find it challenging at first, keep going. I may not have been able to process or understand everything I read, but I value what I learned. This is one of those books that changes everything.
I found Part 2: The Subject of Freedom to be astonishing and compelling. The concept of emancipation and the plain language of the Thirteenth Amendment was just the beginning of a truly American wave of backlash, retaliation, and enormous effort on the part of white America to maintain and exploit black subjugation, only with the pesky legalistic definition of "chattel slavery" having been legally discarded. Hartman's study of the efforts to fit the newly freed people into a system that comfortably (for whites) replicated antebellum norms is amazing. "The lessons of conduct imparted in freedmen's primers refigured the deference and servility of the social relations of slavery...Clearly, these lessons instilled patterns of behavior that minimized white discomfort with black freedom. The regulation of conduct lessened the discussions of the war by restoring black subordination on the level of everyday life..." (148)
The failure of Reconstruction, the acquiescence of the federal government to the creation and passage of state Black Laws, the concept that legal freedom need not intrude on local definitions of acceptable behaviors (at the expense of achieving social equality for black people), the rise of Jim Crow, the decision of Plessy v. Ferguson, and the fact that all of this was enforced by legal and extra-legal terror and violence, all of it reminds me that my early education about slavery and Emancipation pretty much ended with just that: Abraham Lincoln freed the slaves, blah blah blah, then Brown v. Board of Education...American exceptionalism.
No, no and no. I totally recommend this book. If, like me, you find it challenging at first, keep going. I may not have been able to process or understand everything I read, but I value what I learned. This is one of those books that changes everything.
June 24, 2016
Saidiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection reveals with great detail how Slavery has shaped and continues to influence the construction of subjectivity amongst Black individuals today. While the entirety of this book is incredible there are three key concepts that I would like to recount here. The first being the construction of Black suffering or images and accounts of Black suffering as used for entertainment for a white majoritarian environment. Hartman analysis of the Black suffering body reminds us that spectacles such as whipping, lynching, rape, flogging, etc. were created as mode of entertainment be that for humorous purposes or for sympathetic ones. The Black body politic was one created for white individuals to "feel" something and psycho-affective responses factor into this; Hartman clarifies this by analyzing how many white abolitionists used images of Black suffering to give an account about how Black suffering affected them, as oppose to hearing how it affects those who wear enslaved. Secondly, Hartman tackles the "bonds of affection" that existed with slave masters and their slaves, arguing that the law afforded slave masters (and by extension white individuals because let us not forget that structure of Slavery subjected all Black individuals to the will of white individuals in the States, slave owner or not) the ability to be "overcome" with emotion and negatively re/act against a Black individual. It should come as no surprise that rape was a lawlikely bond of affection committed against a Black woman. Moreover, by detailing this relationship with the law, Hartman points out that questions of agency or power that Black women may have had under such circumstances are ill place because what's at stake in this power dynamic is their well being and lives. Thus, claims of seduction, or affairs with actually cater to the myth of "happy slave," "gentle master," or those who "accepted their status." Hartman asserts that this narrative plays into the spectacle of pacifying the atrocities of Slavery. Lastly, Hartman's analysis on the "burden of freedom" that was placed upon the freed Black man's body is crucial to examining the ways in which respectability politics shaped, and still shapes, encounters with Black individual's lives. By examining mid 19th century text on "how to be free," Hartman is able to show how Black bodies were expected to disarm white individual's anger against them by "proving" that their freedom was "not for nothing" through their attire and attitude. This structure is still in place as Black individuals bear the burden of having to prove that they belong in certain environments, specifically institutional ones where the structures and conditions actively work against them.
November 26, 2021
To me, this is truly a groundbreaking text. Saidiya Hartman offers us a critical perspective on the ways we think of (racial) chattel slavery and makes truly compelling arguments about the making of the subject and its continuation after "emancipation." This text is in incredible dialogue with, and clearly influenced, Christina Sharpe's scholarship in Monstrous Intimacies and In the Wake, and should be carefully studied by anyone interested in 19th century America and its foundation of subjection, servitude, and slavery. Her analysis of Reconstruction and the limitations of so-called "freedom" after 1865 were particularly important for me. The book's (at times) dense text is made up for by a treasure trove of knowledge, emotion, and vision for the future.
November 4, 2021
To most, the event and structure of chattel slavery is characterized by its inhuman brutality--the torturous violence that slaves faced, like the scene of Aunt Hester's beating in the Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, is what many of us associate with slavery and thus condemn.
To Saidiya Hartman, these events are much more ambiguous. Do we observe the brutality of slavery in order to play witness to unspeakable pain and confirm the truth behind the inhumanity of the structures? Or are we just spectators who use these scenes of subjection as opportunities for self-reflection?
This is the question that undergirds Part I of Scenes of Subjections. Hartman outlines that despite the best attempts to be genuinely empathic, the recognition of domination only in these explicitly violent scenes of slavery represents both our inability to recognize everyday suffering as well as the fungibility of Black ontology: why is it that many of us only recognize how brutal the institution of slavery is when placing ourself in the position of the unnamed slave? The slave body was a vessel in which white abolitionist writers, even the most well-intentioned, were able to perversely imagine themselves as the subjects of violence while being able to leave that imagination freely.
But what Hartman ultimately addresses aren't these overt, obvious scenes of subjection. Instead, she examines the everyday scenes of slavery, in which the brutality of slavery isn't made immediately clear. The forced cheerfulness at slave auctions or the song and dance of minstrel shows are the sites of formation for both terror and enjoyment that Hartman alludes to. Slavery was not just a structure created with whips and chains, but reaffirmed by the very performance of being a slave. Without giving away too much of the details, Hartman makes detailed analyses of topics like the antiheroic roles of slaves in minstrel shows or the denial of Black femininity and seduction within slave law. In the end, though, Hartman is not a pessimist about these systems: she also addresses the everyday, micropolitical acts of resistance common across plantations and how intent ultimately controlled the effects of theatricality, religion, and performance upon Black ontology.
Part I is a stunning piece of academic work on it's own, but Part II of the book is where it solidifies itself as a masterpiece. The fundamental question that Hartman attempts to answer is: if race--prior to 1863--was a marker between man and chattel, White being analogous to free and Black to slave, how did emancipation change our understanding of race? (Interestingly, Hartman doesn't really address the existence of antebellum free Black northerners, though I feel like the answer to that ontological issue becomes pretty clear in her following analysis.)
Hartman's answer begins with an examination of the fundamental labor shortage that came with the abolition of slavery. When emancipation happened, society had to figure out how to transform the former slave population into a rational worker producing labor of their own accord. The answer that civil society settled on was the idea of responsibility. As freedmen, former slaves would now need to take care of themselves, and the most honorable way to do so would be to toil away in labor. This idea not only manipulated the sanctity of freedom, it reframed the system of slavery as a codependent relationship and away from the realities of brutal captivity and forced productivity. In a way, the productive system of labor was a realized version of the Panopticon, where the single security guard transformed from the slave owner into the forced ideal of discipline and self-possession (quick reminder: fuck Jermey Bentham).
How did postbellum society allow this to happen? Why did Reconstruction fail so badly in securing the social and civil rights of former slaves? The narrative of equality, once the ideal that abolition marched towards, was now being used to guarantee the social subordination of Black folks. Legislators and the judiciary both ruled against provisions like the Civil Rights Act of 1866, because they gave "special" treatment to freed slaves and would taint the sanctity of mature responsibility that came with freedom. The law offered no intervention to actually guarantee the equality that it proposed, and nowhere does Hartman make this more evident than in her analysis of Plessy v. Ferguson.
In its ruling, the Supreme Court upheld that the legal distinction of white and colored folks in no way violated the equality of the two races. This decision not only implicitly affirms the ways in which race continued to be shaped by slavery, it also confirms that one's racial category is one's property that can be definitively determined by others--DESPITE THE FACT THAT HOMER PLESSY WAS PHENOTYPICALLY INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM WHITE. The decision in Plessy is so unsettling to Hartman because not only was the ideal divide of the public and private ignored, the state showed that it had the power to arbitrarily intervene to uphold social norms that it found to be correct. The state not only regulated and upheld inequality, it actively engaged in the reproduction of racism.
Hartman makes clear throughout her book that it is "an attempt to recast the past... [to] offer some small measure of encouragement and serve to remind us that the failures of Reconstruction still haunt us." Without a doubt, she succeeds on the mission she set out to accomplish with this book, and the claims she makes rings just as true 25 years later as when the book was written. 5/5.
To Saidiya Hartman, these events are much more ambiguous. Do we observe the brutality of slavery in order to play witness to unspeakable pain and confirm the truth behind the inhumanity of the structures? Or are we just spectators who use these scenes of subjection as opportunities for self-reflection?
This is the question that undergirds Part I of Scenes of Subjections. Hartman outlines that despite the best attempts to be genuinely empathic, the recognition of domination only in these explicitly violent scenes of slavery represents both our inability to recognize everyday suffering as well as the fungibility of Black ontology: why is it that many of us only recognize how brutal the institution of slavery is when placing ourself in the position of the unnamed slave? The slave body was a vessel in which white abolitionist writers, even the most well-intentioned, were able to perversely imagine themselves as the subjects of violence while being able to leave that imagination freely.
But what Hartman ultimately addresses aren't these overt, obvious scenes of subjection. Instead, she examines the everyday scenes of slavery, in which the brutality of slavery isn't made immediately clear. The forced cheerfulness at slave auctions or the song and dance of minstrel shows are the sites of formation for both terror and enjoyment that Hartman alludes to. Slavery was not just a structure created with whips and chains, but reaffirmed by the very performance of being a slave. Without giving away too much of the details, Hartman makes detailed analyses of topics like the antiheroic roles of slaves in minstrel shows or the denial of Black femininity and seduction within slave law. In the end, though, Hartman is not a pessimist about these systems: she also addresses the everyday, micropolitical acts of resistance common across plantations and how intent ultimately controlled the effects of theatricality, religion, and performance upon Black ontology.
Part I is a stunning piece of academic work on it's own, but Part II of the book is where it solidifies itself as a masterpiece. The fundamental question that Hartman attempts to answer is: if race--prior to 1863--was a marker between man and chattel, White being analogous to free and Black to slave, how did emancipation change our understanding of race? (Interestingly, Hartman doesn't really address the existence of antebellum free Black northerners, though I feel like the answer to that ontological issue becomes pretty clear in her following analysis.)
Hartman's answer begins with an examination of the fundamental labor shortage that came with the abolition of slavery. When emancipation happened, society had to figure out how to transform the former slave population into a rational worker producing labor of their own accord. The answer that civil society settled on was the idea of responsibility. As freedmen, former slaves would now need to take care of themselves, and the most honorable way to do so would be to toil away in labor. This idea not only manipulated the sanctity of freedom, it reframed the system of slavery as a codependent relationship and away from the realities of brutal captivity and forced productivity. In a way, the productive system of labor was a realized version of the Panopticon, where the single security guard transformed from the slave owner into the forced ideal of discipline and self-possession (quick reminder: fuck Jermey Bentham).
How did postbellum society allow this to happen? Why did Reconstruction fail so badly in securing the social and civil rights of former slaves? The narrative of equality, once the ideal that abolition marched towards, was now being used to guarantee the social subordination of Black folks. Legislators and the judiciary both ruled against provisions like the Civil Rights Act of 1866, because they gave "special" treatment to freed slaves and would taint the sanctity of mature responsibility that came with freedom. The law offered no intervention to actually guarantee the equality that it proposed, and nowhere does Hartman make this more evident than in her analysis of Plessy v. Ferguson.
In its ruling, the Supreme Court upheld that the legal distinction of white and colored folks in no way violated the equality of the two races. This decision not only implicitly affirms the ways in which race continued to be shaped by slavery, it also confirms that one's racial category is one's property that can be definitively determined by others--DESPITE THE FACT THAT HOMER PLESSY WAS PHENOTYPICALLY INDISTINGUISHABLE FROM WHITE. The decision in Plessy is so unsettling to Hartman because not only was the ideal divide of the public and private ignored, the state showed that it had the power to arbitrarily intervene to uphold social norms that it found to be correct. The state not only regulated and upheld inequality, it actively engaged in the reproduction of racism.
Hartman makes clear throughout her book that it is "an attempt to recast the past... [to] offer some small measure of encouragement and serve to remind us that the failures of Reconstruction still haunt us." Without a doubt, she succeeds on the mission she set out to accomplish with this book, and the claims she makes rings just as true 25 years later as when the book was written. 5/5.
March 6, 2025
Was expecting to read a history book, but unfortunately for me, this is almost entirely a work of critical theory. Most, if not all, the things this book argues for are sound. My issue is not with the content (or Hartman’s conclusions), but method. So many arguments here are ‘proven’ through the quotation of secondary literature. If primary sources are used, they are generally legal documents or works of instructional literature that are elaborated on for pages and pages without once being contextualised (How popular was the book in question? What were the implications of this particular judgment? How did these laws affect people in the day to day? How exactly were they implemented?). This is a work of history almost entirely bereft of people. Instead, there is merely declarative abstraction.
November 23, 2015
If you think slavery was a benign system. Read this book. Saidiya Hartman's scholarship cannot be denied.
February 25, 2026
Boldly 4 starring instead of 5 starring this because I did not particularly enjoy myself while reading, but undoubtedly a super influential body (pun intended) of work. just could’ve been like 90 pages shorter for sure
Currently Reading
August 29, 2007the discourse on terror and enjoyment between master/slave relationships is insightful, deep, and oft' times, frighteningly relevant to my own experiences as a performer and as a black man negotiating (enjoying and cautious of) the fruits of my culture.
January 13, 2024
“The conviction that I was living in a world created by slavery propelled the writing of this book.” This powerful assertion is the first sentence in the Preface of Saidiya Hartman’s high level work on the philosophy of racialization and American slavery, “Scenes of Subjection.” This revelation immediately sets the tone for what follows—an analysis of America’s fundamental nature and the role that slavery and anti-Blackness played in molding that nature.
Hartman explores the everyday, “ordinary” forms of violence that enslaved Africans suffered from, and the total emptiness of emancipation as a form of “freedom” for Black people, ultimately concluding that America’s nature is fundamentally and irredeemably anti-Black. In fact, Hartman comments on the categories of “Black” and “white” as indices of subordination, domination, objectification, and privileged property, respectively. In doing so, she makes clear that the American project steeped in a pervasive and irredeemable oppression that cannot be changed with mere legislative advances.
While Hartman spent a lot of time discussing the scenes of subjection characterized by chattel enslavement, I was fascinated by the evaluation of the transitory point between slavery and reconstruction, wherein Hartman described America’s deliberate failure to make citizens and “humans” out of formerly enslaved “chattel. In short, Blackness—whether enslaved or “free”—served as an instrument of white enjoyment and entertainment from plantation days all the way through the racial Nadir of the 19th Century.
The section on the role of enslaved Africans as entertainment was striking. Slaveholders deliberately encouraged artistic expression among their slaves as a means to quell insurrectionist sentiment and consciousness. As Hartman explains, artistic expression on plantations reflected “temporary freedoms” that slaveowners allowed their enslaved to engage in, for the purpose of plantation management and general pacification. However, Hartman also detailed how the enslaved used these moments of artistic expression and temporary liberty to develop their revolutionary consciousness, often clandestinely. In this way, Blackness itself is characterized by the push and pull of objectification and resistance.
Ultimately, this is a striking piece of work on the foundational anti-Black nature of America. Highly recommended.
Hartman explores the everyday, “ordinary” forms of violence that enslaved Africans suffered from, and the total emptiness of emancipation as a form of “freedom” for Black people, ultimately concluding that America’s nature is fundamentally and irredeemably anti-Black. In fact, Hartman comments on the categories of “Black” and “white” as indices of subordination, domination, objectification, and privileged property, respectively. In doing so, she makes clear that the American project steeped in a pervasive and irredeemable oppression that cannot be changed with mere legislative advances.
While Hartman spent a lot of time discussing the scenes of subjection characterized by chattel enslavement, I was fascinated by the evaluation of the transitory point between slavery and reconstruction, wherein Hartman described America’s deliberate failure to make citizens and “humans” out of formerly enslaved “chattel. In short, Blackness—whether enslaved or “free”—served as an instrument of white enjoyment and entertainment from plantation days all the way through the racial Nadir of the 19th Century.
The section on the role of enslaved Africans as entertainment was striking. Slaveholders deliberately encouraged artistic expression among their slaves as a means to quell insurrectionist sentiment and consciousness. As Hartman explains, artistic expression on plantations reflected “temporary freedoms” that slaveowners allowed their enslaved to engage in, for the purpose of plantation management and general pacification. However, Hartman also detailed how the enslaved used these moments of artistic expression and temporary liberty to develop their revolutionary consciousness, often clandestinely. In this way, Blackness itself is characterized by the push and pull of objectification and resistance.
Ultimately, this is a striking piece of work on the foundational anti-Black nature of America. Highly recommended.
March 6, 2026
Really quite incredible. This has been on my TBR for a while and I’m happy it didn’t disappoint. I found the first half to be more compelling than the second, both were good, but the close-reading of Plessy v Ferguson just wasn’t really what I was looking for when reading this.
Her central observation that the enjoyment/pleasure/desire afforded to enslaved people was specifically engineered to force Black people further into submission should seem obvious, but the way she lays it out feels groundbreaking. The close reading of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was a highlight, and really opened my eyes to some of Jacobs’ rhetorical strategies that I somewhat overlooked. I also thought the “Burdened Freedom” chapter was really strong, and perhaps most relevant to a present day historical context. It illuminated the many contradictions toward marginalized people that are needed to sustain a world view based on oppression. White supremacy is addicted to moving the goal posts.
The academic language isn’t the most accessible, but I don’t think it’s impenetrable either. Definitely worth giving a chance if you’re interested in legacies of enslavement, and I’m excited to buy a copy.
Her central observation that the enjoyment/pleasure/desire afforded to enslaved people was specifically engineered to force Black people further into submission should seem obvious, but the way she lays it out feels groundbreaking. The close reading of Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl was a highlight, and really opened my eyes to some of Jacobs’ rhetorical strategies that I somewhat overlooked. I also thought the “Burdened Freedom” chapter was really strong, and perhaps most relevant to a present day historical context. It illuminated the many contradictions toward marginalized people that are needed to sustain a world view based on oppression. White supremacy is addicted to moving the goal posts.
The academic language isn’t the most accessible, but I don’t think it’s impenetrable either. Definitely worth giving a chance if you’re interested in legacies of enslavement, and I’m excited to buy a copy.
February 28, 2023
It feels silly to give this book a rating because it is so high above Goodreads #nooffense. I think this is the most important academic work I have ever read. Hartman just completely reimagines a way to use the archive, write black history in the us, and imbibes the book with passion and interest. Throughout my academic life this boom has forced me to consider my own interest in the archive and archival practices. I’m done on here for now but if you want to talk about Scenes, I’m always around.
November 15, 2025
It’s so rare and special when you can trace the steady decline of your mental health to the moment you picked up a book. Transformative, paradigm-shifting, beautiful, and relentless in its pessimism about the principles of liberty, emancipation, and enjoyment in relation to Black life. Hartman’s thesis on the contiguous relationship between slavery and freedom—that freedom produces slavery and slavery produced freedom—will be with me till the day I die.
January 20, 2025
Utterly blown away
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February 25, 2023Some themes of note emerge in the introduction: 1) the role of violence as “an inaugural moment in the formation of the enslaved” 2) “the uncertain line between witness and spectator” 3) Hartman’s attention to “savage encroachments of power that take place through notions of reform, consent, and protection” (3-5). The book is split into two halves, organized by periodization, specifically, the antebellum and postbellum, or slavery and emancipation. This is a very rewarding text when it comes to highlighting the pervasive influences of enslavement that carry into the reconstruction era. Hartman highlights how enslavement conditions our impression of freedom, and furthermore, how race is embedded in subconscious processes of relation and identification.
One of her most intriguing claims is delivered in the final chapter, which takes up the monumental task of explaining the United States’ muddied relationship with questions of the social sphere, class, and civil society. Letting her speak directly, “blacks have largely occluded and represented the social, and by dint of this the issue of social rights was neglected until the New Deal. Worse yet, when social rights were belatedly addressed, they were configured to maintain racial inequality and segregation” (168). A very provocative claim, arguably the text's most intriguing, enduring statement for the present. Of course, her reading of enslavement as a condition that evades prospects of redressing (chapter two) is clearly influential. As is her approach to white fascination with Black pain (chapter one). In general, the text offers a rich range of jumping off points for future study. Her writing is emotional charged, poetic, verbally rich, and generative. Nonetheless, I do wonder why her insights from the sixth chapter haven't been as explicitly taken up by scholars of Black Studies as well as American Studies writ-large. Failure to do so has certainly contributed to misinformed engagements with Afropessimism as merely "racial reductionism."
One of her most intriguing claims is delivered in the final chapter, which takes up the monumental task of explaining the United States’ muddied relationship with questions of the social sphere, class, and civil society. Letting her speak directly, “blacks have largely occluded and represented the social, and by dint of this the issue of social rights was neglected until the New Deal. Worse yet, when social rights were belatedly addressed, they were configured to maintain racial inequality and segregation” (168). A very provocative claim, arguably the text's most intriguing, enduring statement for the present. Of course, her reading of enslavement as a condition that evades prospects of redressing (chapter two) is clearly influential. As is her approach to white fascination with Black pain (chapter one). In general, the text offers a rich range of jumping off points for future study. Her writing is emotional charged, poetic, verbally rich, and generative. Nonetheless, I do wonder why her insights from the sixth chapter haven't been as explicitly taken up by scholars of Black Studies as well as American Studies writ-large. Failure to do so has certainly contributed to misinformed engagements with Afropessimism as merely "racial reductionism."
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November 29, 2021i'm not going to act like i will ever have the range to fully understand everything within the 202 pages of this book because i didn't. with that said, Saidiya Harman is remarkable scholar, professor, archivist, and all the above . this was probably one of the most insightful and powerful books i've ever read on black subjectivity/ black suffering (almost unbearable at this time).
reading this definitely changing and helps put into perspective of the black experience. i will be going back to this book for the rest of my life.
reading this definitely changing and helps put into perspective of the black experience. i will be going back to this book for the rest of my life.
March 28, 2021
There were parts of this book I didn't fully grasp when I read it, but have jumped out to me in the day-to-day whether in conversation or by reading through various takes on social media. Highly recommended reading for any and all historians, professional or not. Saidiya Hartman should be the example all historians strive to emulate in writing, sourcing, and analyzing the hegemonies of our time.
January 7, 2019
Invaluable text by one of black studies most inventive authors. A study in attentive scholarship.
January 6, 2020
as probably everybody who has read it knows, this is one of the best books ever written. the analysis is incredible and trenchant, and remains as much nearly 30 years after publication.
March 15, 2023
a long, necessary, impactful and field molding read. this book is really gonna frame my scholarship and the way i build as a nerdy doctoral student and may make me shift my focus from the early 20th century to the late 19th. but, also, on a just literary level, there is a powerful application of language in here, a knitting like quilt like magic that's breathtaking. i think this book (or its well-done audiobook iteration) might be just what everyone interested in understanding slaverys afterlives and modern impact might need. necessary reading. five stars.
October 15, 2023
monumental… considering authorship so long ago. we hear echoes reverberating in historiographical chamber now, but hartman’s voice and questions dominate. yet, i question whether the value in this book is obscured behind overly complex language and lack of pattern. information could benefit so many more than just academics, but message is hidden deep within. will need to read again. dense, take your time. hartman’s words are not simple.
EDIT: upon second reading, hartman’s argument is all the more illuminated.
EDIT: upon second reading, hartman’s argument is all the more illuminated.
October 14, 2025
Last week’s anthro selection. Very astute arguments MADE ME THINK and I got to facilitate class for this book and the discussion was so good which made me like it more. Emancipation as a nonevent! The only thing I didn’t like was how flowery her language was it definitely didn’t help clarifying her arguments but then I remember she’s trained in literature
July 24, 2023
This book definitely deserves a better rating than I’m giving it, what I actually learned is that it wasn’t what *i* was looking for. Turns out I have a low tolerance for history, and so much of this book is about slavery and emancipation itself and as a historical moment.
The central argument—that seemingly liberatory discourse of humanity, rights, and equality can actually facilitate subjection by legitimating undergirding power dynamics—is really good and really well argued.
The central argument—that seemingly liberatory discourse of humanity, rights, and equality can actually facilitate subjection by legitimating undergirding power dynamics—is really good and really well argued.
September 23, 2024
" How does one give expression to outrages without exacerbating the indifference to suffering that is the consequence of the benumbing spectacle, or contend with the narcissistic identification that obliterates the other, or the prurience that too often is the response to such displays? "
December 29, 2024
(All books get 5 stars) Hartman’s work is undeniably important in rewriting the understanding of Black history in America. She examines the archive and how it obscures and illuminates the real story of Black lives around slavery. Truly eye-opening. Academic in its scope and presentation, so not an easy read.
April 22, 2025
brak skali
May 14, 2025
An unflinching absolute masterpiece. I came to this one after reading ‘wayward lives’ in a day. This book took me about a year, with much stopping and starting and rereading, to really comprehend how complicated and powerful these arguments are… this is one of those books that I hope my children will read, wish my parents had read, and it will inform my opinions for the rest of my life when it comes to law, power and bodies.
December 2, 2025
I wanted to re-read Scenes with this edition which celebrates 25 years of Scenes' publication. This book is one of those works which leaves me wanting to say so much while also leaving me speechless. Its beautiful and continues to shape my thinking about the world and suffering.
January 5, 2025
This is analysis and review because the book is dense.
Review: Slavery - Scenes of Subjection by Saidiya Hartman
Coincidentally this review was written over 6 years ago, during an extremely painful time in my life. I had lost so much of myself at that time. There was so much pain, suffering and loneliness that felt so normal and it psychotically became comfortable. I read terrifying books on racism, sexism, homophobia, the holocaust etc as some psychotic salve to the horrors that I was experiencing in the ordinariness of my own life. I don’t know what left a larger scar… these books or my lived experiences of collapse. Anyways here is an excerpt from that review.
This book came about and into my life from a karmic path that eventually led me to taking humanities courses at the University of Amsterdam. When we become ignorant to the ordinariness of structural injustice that might not be felt or seen affectively by the privileged but lived ordinarily by the oppressed, we require a reading in history to understand our collective humanity. Many people in this world live with debilitating mental health issues like depression and anxiety. We might desire to medicate, to confront, or to draw out some kind of story to alleviate ourselves from its grasp. Intergenerational trauma could also find its way into our present, and yet tracing out the truth was always going to be messy. Scenes of Subjection by Saidiya Hartman is a brave attempt to elucidate the limits of historical redress and to find a pathway from continuing structural racism to its roots in the American slave trade.
I have a little story. In University, I had the privilege of being able to study abroad in the Netherlands. Somehow through a string of coincidental events, the opportunity arose and with slight hesitation, I went ahead. Living abroad for half a year was a difficult challenge about independence and embracing discomfort. As an introvert, it requires exhausting strength to engage in social spaces as they often feel enervating rather than rejuvenating. However I embarked.
Before the trip, I had insightful conversations about traditional festivals within Dutch culture before the eve of Christmas. I ended up having a heated debate about the tradition of Zwarte Pete. This caricature was a local historical re-imagining of the tale of Sinter Klaus. Pete was a black helper who provided support for Sinter Klaus along his journey. However contemporary representations of Sinter Claus felt uneasy as white dutch people often painted their faces black in order to represent the historical figure. There are many videos online about this issue, but many Dutch people felt it was a tradition that should not be challenged as it was deeply embedded within the childhood imaginary of the country.
Coming into the country we coincidently made our way to a few historical museums tracing out proud ventures of the Dutch people–the european slave trade and colonial conquest. Now what made these museums significant was the perspectives organized around these traumatic ruptures within our collective global historical continuum. The Dutch and europeans' voices were illuminated with stories that built a sense of empathy and compassion for their struggles of human development that felt necessary for the progress of humanity. A particular atmospheric affect about how the Dutch left a positive impact through their brave travels was produced. On the other hand, images of the enslaved were often assembled as inhuman animals being civilized or treated as they were–less than human. This particular structure of feeling was curiously malicious and left a tinge of sourness on my mouth as I navigated its halls of pride.
At another museum I was also startled by depictions of blackface that went beyond my surprise of Zwarte Pete. These displays showed caricatured depictions of white people in painted blackface, exaggerated features. Their physical activity and expressions clearly depicted a sense of comedic currency, and often included animalistic attributes like tails with monkey-like behavior. Franz Fanon’s concept of ‘thingification’ speaks truths to these racist narratives as the collective affective structure posited colonizers as virtuous progressives and the colonized as submissive saved subjects toward a collective world-building project. These felt upon me as distortions to my liberal conceptual understanding of progress. I was greatly impacted by these malicious constructions of a collective global historical continuum of ‘progress.’
Thus came this book. Trigger warning to those who might deal with depression and racial trauma. However reading or even reading a review of this book helps to realize the important implications of human subjugation to realize the potential of physical, material and psychological harm to marginalized populations.
Book Review: Scenes of Subjection by Saidiya Hartman
I found it important for myself to unpack why it is so important that the world to consider the black historical account, to elucidate the present with further clarity. To allow perspective arguing against a linear progressive idealism that effaces the ongoing struggle of people of color in the face of white-supremacy, capitalism and cis-heteropatriarchy. To comprehend the struggles of people who share a collective identity marker, even as that identity has been historically shaped to violently carry dominion over another. I chose to read “Scenes of Subjection” by Saidiya Hartman, in light of reading Achille Mbembe’s essay, Necropolitics, and upon Americanist intellectual Lauren Berlant’s recommendation. Scenes of Subjection asks its readers to critically question the recognition of humanity granted to freedmen considerate of historical epoch’s and the licensing of rights during the 19th century, such as the abolition of slavery, Emancipation, Reconstruction, the fourteenth amendment and the civil rights act.
What if this recognition of humanity was effectual only in so far as it intensified black suffering and subjugation? What if affective and expressive capacities that commonly produce inroads towards positive relations such as sentiment, enjoyment, affinity, will and desire further facilitated subjugation, domination and terror? From my understanding, what this book is attempting to communicate is the difficulties and challenges faced by a nation of people, whose constitutional ideas of liberty, individualism and rights is built upon an institutional foundation of slavery and contingent systems of white supremacy, capitalism and cis-heteropatriarchy. Primarily, Hartman is concerned with ordinariness, or the quotidian. She displaces the monolithic integrity of the historical event to pinpoint how everyday acts have tended toward reproducing the vestiges of slavery and insidious structures of power.
Chapter 1: Innocent Amusements: The Stage of Sufferance
One of the most painful considerations of existence under the institution of slavery is “the subjection of the slave to all whites [that] defined their condition in civil society. Effectively this made the enslaved an object of property to be potentially used and abused by all whites.” Under the pained situation of object-status, the enslaved were contingently mired as instrument to the desires of the dominant in addition to being economically fungible as an exchangeable commodity under capitalist relations. Thus, to be enslaved entailed a reality of being socially dead—operating outside and barred from societal inclusion—and criminally culpable—submission being paramount to the constitution of (white) society, and any acts in contestation to that formation are subject to ‘law’.
The enslaved status as object produced attributes of fixedness, instrumentality and commodification. This orientation can be understood as a painful impasse, whereby intractable subjection ruptures possibility for freedom. Here, I aim to pinpoint that “pain provides the common language of humanity; it extends humanity to the dispossessed and in turn, remedies the indifference of the callous” [18]. Empathy is the conduit, by which a witness gestures toward placing a projection of one’s own personality into an object, with the “attribution to the object, of one’s own emotion.” [18] Hereby explanation oddly confirms, a sort of reinforcement of objectification through what is commonly considered an exemplary form of compassion. The subject of empathic witness, as Hartman notes: “exploits the vulnerability of the captive body as a vessel for the: uses, thoughts, and feelings of others.” The humanity extended to the slave, inadvertently confirms the expectations and desires definitive of the relations of chattel slavery. This is not to unilaterally discount the value of empathy, as it is an important linkage to the condition of human suffering that I believe, holds space toward acts of healing reciprocity. In the chapter Innocent Amusements, Hartman illustrates the fungibility of the black body, considerate of acts of enjoyment, sentiment and pleasure in scenes of minstrelsy, melodrama, the coffle and literature.
Hartman first, deconstructs the genealogy of the word enjoyment. Beyond its common understanding as a scene of pleasure, and happiness, Hartman finds corollary between enjoyment and the inexorable citizen’s rights to their objects of enjoyment. Here she examines enjoyment as property, noting enjoyment as: “the exercise of a right, privilege or incorporeal hereditament, beneficial use, interest and purpose to which property may be put implies rights to profits and incomes there from” [24]. Relative to the propertied state of the enslaved, the enjoyment of property additionally entails “the use of one’s possession [and] the value of whiteness (an incorporeal hereditament or illusory inheritance of chattel slavery)” [24]. Further expanding on whiteness as value, the enslaved are held as white hereditary property, thus employed as supremacist currency. The enslaved therefore become displaced as willful agents, whereby their acts produced in scenes of pleasure are mired in their usage as objects of white property, resulting in acts of violence being effaced.
Melodrama & Minstrelsy
When I had studied abroad in the Netherlands, I was first confused, and then fervently upset at the discordant act of blackface as a cultural and historical artifact. First encountered within the historical scene of Sinterklaas and his (black) helpers, I then discovered toys and other preserved objects, reproducing blackness to incite enjoyment, reinforce stereotypes of questionable black sentience, and deployed as an object of fungible, contented, boisterous, and happy subjectivity. Engaging in conversation with a dutch individual, this form of subjugation was reinforced as an important historical artifact, that held sentimental currency, . Rather it was dissimulating the historical legacy of colonialism, engendering the innocence of a nation, and a marker colonialism and black subjugation as necessitated duty for the common good and prosperity of the nation. As depressing as this sounds, people hold onto images that appear as symbolic markers of a collective identity that in their very (re)construction disavows the brutal contortion from their truthful conditions of violence and deprived humanity of which they came.
Even when I navigated spaces that avowed Netherlands and its legacy of slavery at TropenMuseum of Amsterdam, interpretations, voices, and perspectives of whiteness, engendering empathy (such as ‘the plight’ of having to bear living in a ‘foreign country’) were amplified while the enslaved were remembered in scenes of emaciation, silence and subjugated labor in proximity to the eye of supervisory whiteness. Here I felt the melancholy of a displaced humanity, and effacement of evil amidst the act of attempting to reveal a shameful national memory. This brings to question why historical scenes such as Museums, and national events end up effacing evil and violence in that act of ‘protection.’ And this protection appears in the situation of a reputation, an impressionable public or upholding a form of sentimental expectation. What is being protected? And for whose interests? Surely the botched seams of these fabrications would eventually reveal the bludgeoned reality that has so evidently soaked through.
Minstrelsly “was an American form of entertainment developed in the 19th century. Each show consisted of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music.” (Wikipedia 2017). Blackface was another form of entertainment where white folks put on blackness through makeup and dress, to project blackness in the form of a dim-witted, lazy, buffoonish, superstitious and happy-go-lucky being (2017). In an attempt to counter these representations, melodrama was employed by abolitionists in the context of minstrelsy to alter the reproduction of black abasement. According to Hartman, Melodramatic Minstrelsy was an “essential language of good and evil [that] armed antislavery dissent with the force of moral right and might.” While brim with good intent, blackface was reproduced and only an illusory agency was to be found in the staging (mis)representation of black freedom. On the minstrel stage, what is left is the scene of white subjects seemingly necessitated as placeholders for the depiction of black emancipation. Anti slavery minstrelsy wasn’t capable of exceeding the fear of disavowing white enjoyment.
The slave coffle is another scene of examination in which Hartman elucidates its production as a site employed for white self-reflection, and a display of socially tolerable violence. Hartman describes the coffle as “the pageantry of the trade, the unabashed display of the market’s brutality, the juxtaposition of sorrow and mirth, and the separation of families” [32]. Accounts of the coffle by 19th century observers such as George W. Featherstonhaugh, exclaim that it was “the most striking spectacle ever witnessed.” The incongruity of the coffle laid bare by enforcing the enslaved to sing minstrel tunes for basic necessities. The intent of this distortion of reality was to attenuate the brutality of the scene and uphold the limits of socially tolerable forms of violence necessitated for the normalization of slavery. Furthermore Featherstonhaugh notes that “the poor negro is naturally a cheerful, laughing animal, and even when driven through the wilderness in chains, if he is fed and kindly treated, is seldom melanchole” [33]. Featherstonhaugh’s reflection defines for a white audience an empathic relation to the enslaved that produces black subjection as natural, its embodiment as animalistic, and defines for the enslaved their condition as contented, if not enjoyed. Additionally, is this not to relieve citizens the responsibility of defining for themselves, how they feel about the institution of slavery?
In the coffle, the enslaved are fettered with chains, concomitant with their emotional state; which is defined through the white spectacle. Unlike Featherstonhaugh, even depictions that are produced with seemingly good intention reproduce objectification. Abraham Lincoln, encountering a slave coffle aboard the steamboat Lebanon en route to St. Louis, shifted the scene as witness of the crimes of the trade to “consider ‘the effect of condition upon human happiness.’” [34]. He notes:
“In this condition they were being separated from the scenes of their childhood, their friends, their fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, and many of them, from their wives and children, and going into perpetual slavery where the slash of the master is proverbially more ruthless and unrelenting than any other where; yet amidst all these distressing circumstances, as we would think them, they were the most cheerful and apparently happy creatures on board...How true it is that “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb’ or in other words, that He renders the worst of the human condition tolerable, while He permits the best, to be nothing but tolerable.” [34]
From what appears to be a staging of tragedy toward empathizing with the dehumanizing condition of the enslaved, what we are instead left with is the “establish[ed] suitedness of the slave’s nature to the condition of slavery [and] mus[ing] about the adequacy of the human condition” [34]. Lincoln’s analyses displaces focus from the brutal violence of enslavement in favor of an analysis of the human condition.
These innocent amusements of melodrama, minstrelsy, white witnessing and self-reflection reveal the slipperiness of empathy. As Hartman notes: “Innocent amusements were designed to promote gaiety by prudent means, ameliorate the harsh conditions of slavery, make the body more productive and tractable, and secure the submissions of the enslaved by the successful harnessing of the body.” [42] The employment of empathy to contort the object of witness with the intent of dissimulating a scene of violence for the benefit of the white witness is an act that reinforced black subjugation under hegemonic white supremacy. Furthermore subjection, encouraged as entertainment “harnessed pleasure as a productive force, and regulated the modes of permitted expression.” [43] Lastly, what makes these acts so terrifying is the way “violence becomes neutralized and the shocking readily assimilated to the normal, the everyday, the bearable” [34]. Upon understanding this, how can we employ the power of empathy that avows the witnessing of suffering and further propels us into acts of compassion and kindness within our own capacities of giving?
Redressing the Pained Body: Toward a Theory of Practice
In the event of subjection, a state of objectification whereby actions are closely monitored and policed under dominion. How do you consider, or construct a frame of resistance whereby as we have noted the physical as well as emotional registers are circumscribed and policed around the white gaze. Hartman works towards outlining resistance through defining ‘practice’ and presenting scenes and acts in which black resistance is held as an opening for agency, while considerate of the deleterious constraint subjugation acts on the body to reproduce the condition rather than resist it. By examining the limitations of fun & frolic, performing blackness as a site for counterinvestment, as understanding the challenge of enacting resistance without a political locus, while considering memory investment as possibility for redress, Hartman examines the limitations, possibilities and opportunities for breach under the institution of slavery.
Hartman propounds that “exploiting the limits of the permissible, creating transient zones of freedom, and reelaborating innocent amusements were central features of everyday practice. Hartman notes a definition of practice as “a way of operating [defined by] the non-autonomy of its field of action, internal manipulations of the established order, and ephemeral victories.” Explicating this definition within enslavement, action does not secure the enslaved a “territory outside the space of domination” nor do they carry “power to keep or maintain what it is won in fleeting, surreptitious, and necessarily incomplete victories” [50]. Considerate of the transient quality of practice within domination, acts of resistance still count as possibility for willful redress.
Hartman notes the importance of addressing enslavements operation on the body as pained. The pained body in this sense must be recognized “in its historicity—the history that hurts—and as the articulation of a social condition of brutal constraint, extreme need and constant violence; in other worlds [a] perpetual condition of ravishment” [51]. Hartman argues that this pained status is due to the denial of black sentience—and essential to the “spectacle of contented subjection [and] discredited claims of pain” [51]. - reached char limit.
Review: Slavery - Scenes of Subjection by Saidiya Hartman
Coincidentally this review was written over 6 years ago, during an extremely painful time in my life. I had lost so much of myself at that time. There was so much pain, suffering and loneliness that felt so normal and it psychotically became comfortable. I read terrifying books on racism, sexism, homophobia, the holocaust etc as some psychotic salve to the horrors that I was experiencing in the ordinariness of my own life. I don’t know what left a larger scar… these books or my lived experiences of collapse. Anyways here is an excerpt from that review.
This book came about and into my life from a karmic path that eventually led me to taking humanities courses at the University of Amsterdam. When we become ignorant to the ordinariness of structural injustice that might not be felt or seen affectively by the privileged but lived ordinarily by the oppressed, we require a reading in history to understand our collective humanity. Many people in this world live with debilitating mental health issues like depression and anxiety. We might desire to medicate, to confront, or to draw out some kind of story to alleviate ourselves from its grasp. Intergenerational trauma could also find its way into our present, and yet tracing out the truth was always going to be messy. Scenes of Subjection by Saidiya Hartman is a brave attempt to elucidate the limits of historical redress and to find a pathway from continuing structural racism to its roots in the American slave trade.
I have a little story. In University, I had the privilege of being able to study abroad in the Netherlands. Somehow through a string of coincidental events, the opportunity arose and with slight hesitation, I went ahead. Living abroad for half a year was a difficult challenge about independence and embracing discomfort. As an introvert, it requires exhausting strength to engage in social spaces as they often feel enervating rather than rejuvenating. However I embarked.
Before the trip, I had insightful conversations about traditional festivals within Dutch culture before the eve of Christmas. I ended up having a heated debate about the tradition of Zwarte Pete. This caricature was a local historical re-imagining of the tale of Sinter Klaus. Pete was a black helper who provided support for Sinter Klaus along his journey. However contemporary representations of Sinter Claus felt uneasy as white dutch people often painted their faces black in order to represent the historical figure. There are many videos online about this issue, but many Dutch people felt it was a tradition that should not be challenged as it was deeply embedded within the childhood imaginary of the country.
Coming into the country we coincidently made our way to a few historical museums tracing out proud ventures of the Dutch people–the european slave trade and colonial conquest. Now what made these museums significant was the perspectives organized around these traumatic ruptures within our collective global historical continuum. The Dutch and europeans' voices were illuminated with stories that built a sense of empathy and compassion for their struggles of human development that felt necessary for the progress of humanity. A particular atmospheric affect about how the Dutch left a positive impact through their brave travels was produced. On the other hand, images of the enslaved were often assembled as inhuman animals being civilized or treated as they were–less than human. This particular structure of feeling was curiously malicious and left a tinge of sourness on my mouth as I navigated its halls of pride.
At another museum I was also startled by depictions of blackface that went beyond my surprise of Zwarte Pete. These displays showed caricatured depictions of white people in painted blackface, exaggerated features. Their physical activity and expressions clearly depicted a sense of comedic currency, and often included animalistic attributes like tails with monkey-like behavior. Franz Fanon’s concept of ‘thingification’ speaks truths to these racist narratives as the collective affective structure posited colonizers as virtuous progressives and the colonized as submissive saved subjects toward a collective world-building project. These felt upon me as distortions to my liberal conceptual understanding of progress. I was greatly impacted by these malicious constructions of a collective global historical continuum of ‘progress.’
Thus came this book. Trigger warning to those who might deal with depression and racial trauma. However reading or even reading a review of this book helps to realize the important implications of human subjugation to realize the potential of physical, material and psychological harm to marginalized populations.
Book Review: Scenes of Subjection by Saidiya Hartman
I found it important for myself to unpack why it is so important that the world to consider the black historical account, to elucidate the present with further clarity. To allow perspective arguing against a linear progressive idealism that effaces the ongoing struggle of people of color in the face of white-supremacy, capitalism and cis-heteropatriarchy. To comprehend the struggles of people who share a collective identity marker, even as that identity has been historically shaped to violently carry dominion over another. I chose to read “Scenes of Subjection” by Saidiya Hartman, in light of reading Achille Mbembe’s essay, Necropolitics, and upon Americanist intellectual Lauren Berlant’s recommendation. Scenes of Subjection asks its readers to critically question the recognition of humanity granted to freedmen considerate of historical epoch’s and the licensing of rights during the 19th century, such as the abolition of slavery, Emancipation, Reconstruction, the fourteenth amendment and the civil rights act.
What if this recognition of humanity was effectual only in so far as it intensified black suffering and subjugation? What if affective and expressive capacities that commonly produce inroads towards positive relations such as sentiment, enjoyment, affinity, will and desire further facilitated subjugation, domination and terror? From my understanding, what this book is attempting to communicate is the difficulties and challenges faced by a nation of people, whose constitutional ideas of liberty, individualism and rights is built upon an institutional foundation of slavery and contingent systems of white supremacy, capitalism and cis-heteropatriarchy. Primarily, Hartman is concerned with ordinariness, or the quotidian. She displaces the monolithic integrity of the historical event to pinpoint how everyday acts have tended toward reproducing the vestiges of slavery and insidious structures of power.
Chapter 1: Innocent Amusements: The Stage of Sufferance
One of the most painful considerations of existence under the institution of slavery is “the subjection of the slave to all whites [that] defined their condition in civil society. Effectively this made the enslaved an object of property to be potentially used and abused by all whites.” Under the pained situation of object-status, the enslaved were contingently mired as instrument to the desires of the dominant in addition to being economically fungible as an exchangeable commodity under capitalist relations. Thus, to be enslaved entailed a reality of being socially dead—operating outside and barred from societal inclusion—and criminally culpable—submission being paramount to the constitution of (white) society, and any acts in contestation to that formation are subject to ‘law’.
The enslaved status as object produced attributes of fixedness, instrumentality and commodification. This orientation can be understood as a painful impasse, whereby intractable subjection ruptures possibility for freedom. Here, I aim to pinpoint that “pain provides the common language of humanity; it extends humanity to the dispossessed and in turn, remedies the indifference of the callous” [18]. Empathy is the conduit, by which a witness gestures toward placing a projection of one’s own personality into an object, with the “attribution to the object, of one’s own emotion.” [18] Hereby explanation oddly confirms, a sort of reinforcement of objectification through what is commonly considered an exemplary form of compassion. The subject of empathic witness, as Hartman notes: “exploits the vulnerability of the captive body as a vessel for the: uses, thoughts, and feelings of others.” The humanity extended to the slave, inadvertently confirms the expectations and desires definitive of the relations of chattel slavery. This is not to unilaterally discount the value of empathy, as it is an important linkage to the condition of human suffering that I believe, holds space toward acts of healing reciprocity. In the chapter Innocent Amusements, Hartman illustrates the fungibility of the black body, considerate of acts of enjoyment, sentiment and pleasure in scenes of minstrelsy, melodrama, the coffle and literature.
Hartman first, deconstructs the genealogy of the word enjoyment. Beyond its common understanding as a scene of pleasure, and happiness, Hartman finds corollary between enjoyment and the inexorable citizen’s rights to their objects of enjoyment. Here she examines enjoyment as property, noting enjoyment as: “the exercise of a right, privilege or incorporeal hereditament, beneficial use, interest and purpose to which property may be put implies rights to profits and incomes there from” [24]. Relative to the propertied state of the enslaved, the enjoyment of property additionally entails “the use of one’s possession [and] the value of whiteness (an incorporeal hereditament or illusory inheritance of chattel slavery)” [24]. Further expanding on whiteness as value, the enslaved are held as white hereditary property, thus employed as supremacist currency. The enslaved therefore become displaced as willful agents, whereby their acts produced in scenes of pleasure are mired in their usage as objects of white property, resulting in acts of violence being effaced.
Melodrama & Minstrelsy
When I had studied abroad in the Netherlands, I was first confused, and then fervently upset at the discordant act of blackface as a cultural and historical artifact. First encountered within the historical scene of Sinterklaas and his (black) helpers, I then discovered toys and other preserved objects, reproducing blackness to incite enjoyment, reinforce stereotypes of questionable black sentience, and deployed as an object of fungible, contented, boisterous, and happy subjectivity. Engaging in conversation with a dutch individual, this form of subjugation was reinforced as an important historical artifact, that held sentimental currency, . Rather it was dissimulating the historical legacy of colonialism, engendering the innocence of a nation, and a marker colonialism and black subjugation as necessitated duty for the common good and prosperity of the nation. As depressing as this sounds, people hold onto images that appear as symbolic markers of a collective identity that in their very (re)construction disavows the brutal contortion from their truthful conditions of violence and deprived humanity of which they came.
Even when I navigated spaces that avowed Netherlands and its legacy of slavery at TropenMuseum of Amsterdam, interpretations, voices, and perspectives of whiteness, engendering empathy (such as ‘the plight’ of having to bear living in a ‘foreign country’) were amplified while the enslaved were remembered in scenes of emaciation, silence and subjugated labor in proximity to the eye of supervisory whiteness. Here I felt the melancholy of a displaced humanity, and effacement of evil amidst the act of attempting to reveal a shameful national memory. This brings to question why historical scenes such as Museums, and national events end up effacing evil and violence in that act of ‘protection.’ And this protection appears in the situation of a reputation, an impressionable public or upholding a form of sentimental expectation. What is being protected? And for whose interests? Surely the botched seams of these fabrications would eventually reveal the bludgeoned reality that has so evidently soaked through.
Minstrelsly “was an American form of entertainment developed in the 19th century. Each show consisted of comic skits, variety acts, dancing, and music.” (Wikipedia 2017). Blackface was another form of entertainment where white folks put on blackness through makeup and dress, to project blackness in the form of a dim-witted, lazy, buffoonish, superstitious and happy-go-lucky being (2017). In an attempt to counter these representations, melodrama was employed by abolitionists in the context of minstrelsy to alter the reproduction of black abasement. According to Hartman, Melodramatic Minstrelsy was an “essential language of good and evil [that] armed antislavery dissent with the force of moral right and might.” While brim with good intent, blackface was reproduced and only an illusory agency was to be found in the staging (mis)representation of black freedom. On the minstrel stage, what is left is the scene of white subjects seemingly necessitated as placeholders for the depiction of black emancipation. Anti slavery minstrelsy wasn’t capable of exceeding the fear of disavowing white enjoyment.
The slave coffle is another scene of examination in which Hartman elucidates its production as a site employed for white self-reflection, and a display of socially tolerable violence. Hartman describes the coffle as “the pageantry of the trade, the unabashed display of the market’s brutality, the juxtaposition of sorrow and mirth, and the separation of families” [32]. Accounts of the coffle by 19th century observers such as George W. Featherstonhaugh, exclaim that it was “the most striking spectacle ever witnessed.” The incongruity of the coffle laid bare by enforcing the enslaved to sing minstrel tunes for basic necessities. The intent of this distortion of reality was to attenuate the brutality of the scene and uphold the limits of socially tolerable forms of violence necessitated for the normalization of slavery. Furthermore Featherstonhaugh notes that “the poor negro is naturally a cheerful, laughing animal, and even when driven through the wilderness in chains, if he is fed and kindly treated, is seldom melanchole” [33]. Featherstonhaugh’s reflection defines for a white audience an empathic relation to the enslaved that produces black subjection as natural, its embodiment as animalistic, and defines for the enslaved their condition as contented, if not enjoyed. Additionally, is this not to relieve citizens the responsibility of defining for themselves, how they feel about the institution of slavery?
In the coffle, the enslaved are fettered with chains, concomitant with their emotional state; which is defined through the white spectacle. Unlike Featherstonhaugh, even depictions that are produced with seemingly good intention reproduce objectification. Abraham Lincoln, encountering a slave coffle aboard the steamboat Lebanon en route to St. Louis, shifted the scene as witness of the crimes of the trade to “consider ‘the effect of condition upon human happiness.’” [34]. He notes:
“In this condition they were being separated from the scenes of their childhood, their friends, their fathers and mothers, and brothers and sisters, and many of them, from their wives and children, and going into perpetual slavery where the slash of the master is proverbially more ruthless and unrelenting than any other where; yet amidst all these distressing circumstances, as we would think them, they were the most cheerful and apparently happy creatures on board...How true it is that “God tempers the wind to the shorn lamb’ or in other words, that He renders the worst of the human condition tolerable, while He permits the best, to be nothing but tolerable.” [34]
From what appears to be a staging of tragedy toward empathizing with the dehumanizing condition of the enslaved, what we are instead left with is the “establish[ed] suitedness of the slave’s nature to the condition of slavery [and] mus[ing] about the adequacy of the human condition” [34]. Lincoln’s analyses displaces focus from the brutal violence of enslavement in favor of an analysis of the human condition.
These innocent amusements of melodrama, minstrelsy, white witnessing and self-reflection reveal the slipperiness of empathy. As Hartman notes: “Innocent amusements were designed to promote gaiety by prudent means, ameliorate the harsh conditions of slavery, make the body more productive and tractable, and secure the submissions of the enslaved by the successful harnessing of the body.” [42] The employment of empathy to contort the object of witness with the intent of dissimulating a scene of violence for the benefit of the white witness is an act that reinforced black subjugation under hegemonic white supremacy. Furthermore subjection, encouraged as entertainment “harnessed pleasure as a productive force, and regulated the modes of permitted expression.” [43] Lastly, what makes these acts so terrifying is the way “violence becomes neutralized and the shocking readily assimilated to the normal, the everyday, the bearable” [34]. Upon understanding this, how can we employ the power of empathy that avows the witnessing of suffering and further propels us into acts of compassion and kindness within our own capacities of giving?
Redressing the Pained Body: Toward a Theory of Practice
In the event of subjection, a state of objectification whereby actions are closely monitored and policed under dominion. How do you consider, or construct a frame of resistance whereby as we have noted the physical as well as emotional registers are circumscribed and policed around the white gaze. Hartman works towards outlining resistance through defining ‘practice’ and presenting scenes and acts in which black resistance is held as an opening for agency, while considerate of the deleterious constraint subjugation acts on the body to reproduce the condition rather than resist it. By examining the limitations of fun & frolic, performing blackness as a site for counterinvestment, as understanding the challenge of enacting resistance without a political locus, while considering memory investment as possibility for redress, Hartman examines the limitations, possibilities and opportunities for breach under the institution of slavery.
Hartman propounds that “exploiting the limits of the permissible, creating transient zones of freedom, and reelaborating innocent amusements were central features of everyday practice. Hartman notes a definition of practice as “a way of operating [defined by] the non-autonomy of its field of action, internal manipulations of the established order, and ephemeral victories.” Explicating this definition within enslavement, action does not secure the enslaved a “territory outside the space of domination” nor do they carry “power to keep or maintain what it is won in fleeting, surreptitious, and necessarily incomplete victories” [50]. Considerate of the transient quality of practice within domination, acts of resistance still count as possibility for willful redress.
Hartman notes the importance of addressing enslavements operation on the body as pained. The pained body in this sense must be recognized “in its historicity—the history that hurts—and as the articulation of a social condition of brutal constraint, extreme need and constant violence; in other worlds [a] perpetual condition of ravishment” [51]. Hartman argues that this pained status is due to the denial of black sentience—and essential to the “spectacle of contented subjection [and] discredited claims of pain” [51]. - reached char limit.
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
June 7, 2026
This book is such supreme dogshit. The book's mission is admirable enough:
This is all well and good. However, it goes to hell almost immediately in Chapter 1 when Hartman tries to go after abolitionist John Rankin. We get a background about Rankin's activities and the character of his writing, which attempts to establish a humanity in black slaves. There's a variety of means one could go for with this. What of the predicate, for example, that a humanity needs to be established at all for black people? Hartman chooses among all these the funniest possible answer:
Hartman finds the usage of empathy as a device here troubling. I will note that she defines empathy as "projection of oneself into another in order to better understand the other or 'the projection of one's own personality into an object, with the attribution to the object of one's own emotions.'" (19) This definition is fair enough, but what immediately follows it marks the book's descent from interesting literary analysis into utterly hilarious pomo nonsense. I have decided to quote the entire page at length to capture the absurdity of the argument in all its becoming, with bold indicating points of interest:
Hartman's attack on Rankin only works because she takes this comment into a vacuum in which it becomes the entirety of Rankin's life work both in literature and activism. These critiques would perhaps have more water to stand on if the only thing Rankin ever did in his life to comment on the issue of slavery was the remark he made. Of course Rankin feels for himself, is that not the point of those feelings, to inquire about how they now make you feel knowing that it isn't a hypothetical but an inescapable and all-consuming reality for others? It's the first step in a larger process. The 'selflessness', we might call it, doesn't come from the act of empathizing but what you do with that empathy. Rankin claims to expose anti-blackness in Rankin but can only do so by effectively circumcising his argument. Of course without the calls for (and actual acts of) action it becomes anti-black. That's why you have to take the whole thing into account.
As for the whole "putting whiteness in black situations", Hartman doesn't sufficiently explain that this is what Rankin is doing. Firstly, does elevating blackness to the level that it can even be compared to whiteness at all not innately add humanity to it? Far from obliterating blackness, Rankin's argument builds bridges to it by tying him and his family members directly to the struggles of actually real black people. Their blackness is not obliterated because it is the thesis of the argument, that blackness is comparable and indeed 1 to 1 with whiteness in terms of the rights it should demand. Without the implication that black people have the same rights and dignities as Rankin's family members, the argument would be nonsense. It structurally can't work without elevating blackness. Furthermore, having read the original context in which Rankin wrote, I can hardly believe this to be the case. The very first letter that Rankin wrote stated that "it is most absurd to imagine that beings created with capacity for liberty were designed for bondage" (pg 15 of the 1969 Claremont republishing of Rankin's letters, or use Ctrl-F for whatever PDF you have I don't care). When considering the entirety of Rankin's writings, the usage of imagination and self-projection as an empathic device against slavery comes up only once in the entire work and Hartman fixates on it as proof of some deep anti-blackness. I don't see how empathy obliterates otherness when ironically Hartman has to obliterate the entirety of everything else Rankin ever wrote in those letters to make this argument work. By this same metric do I get to hone in on Hartman's strategic silence on Palestine to preserve her academic career in order to write off everything Hartman has ever written? That'd sure be convenient! Let's go there for a second. I find Hartman's attacks on the basic concept of empathy especially interesting considering this deliberately enforced silence and indifference as a Columbia-tenured academic, no doubt aware of the encampments and brutalizations faced by what would have likely been her own students sitting in classrooms with her. I don't usually like to armchair analyze authors I don't like, but think about it for a second. If you can find a failing in an abolitionist as accomplished as Rankin, some literary imperfection that collapses his whole project into a reification of anti-blackness then doesn't it go to show the importance of words? If, therefore, you don't do much to actually help your students facing oppression, can you assuage your guilt because at least your writings could theoretically further their cause? After all, you didn't fuck it up like Rankin did. Disagree with me? Want to point out that this book was written in 1997 and not 2023? Well, mind you, everything Saidiya did led to 2023 so it doesn't actually matter.
Anyways this reads less like a measured critique of Rankin's work and more like an awkward attempt to superimpose 21st century discourse about depictions of slavery in movies onto a guy who was writing two centuries ago. Is this an analysis of white abolitionists or an analysis of Tyler Perry? I find the usage of bodies language telling in that we have to render the whole thing as "black bodies" and de-emphasize their actual humanity, the big thing that informed the religious Christian beliefs of white abolitionists like Rankin. It demonstrates ironically a refusal to engage with what White Christian Abolitionists really said and believed.
Furthermore, I can't take this seriously because Rankin was not only an abolitionist but one of the most prolific ones. He freed so many slaves that his house was sometimes referred to as Ohio's "Grand Central Station", and this act came with significant threat and consequences to his life and well-being. Such threats are no doubt nothing in the face of what the escaping slaves were facing should they have been recaptured, but still! The question of whether Rankin was a witness or a spectator to slavery can surely be witnessed in what his writings actually contributed to, which was the mass awakening of a white abolitionist movement that freed thousands of slaves and worked with a number of black abolitionists to eventually instigate the war that would end mass institutionalized slavery. This is where the argument naturally goes next, that freedmen existed in such socially depreciated circumstances that the nadir was practically inevitable. It would look badly on Rankin after all if this secret patrimonial attitude towards blackness in general was so universal that it practically doomed Reconstruction on its own. Will Hartman invent much more than DuBois' wheel?
Well, you're gonna have to pay me to continue this review any further but I'll tell you upfront that she cites Foucault more times than she cites DuBois, so the answer is fuck no. The sweeping socioeconomic analysis that would be necessary to explore the futility of Rankin's work is supplanted in favor of more sloppy lit analysis and meandering philosophical nonsense. It doesn't even come close to Black Reconstruction, let alone the notion of challenging it. This book's legacy is white people citing it in essays to look worldy. God I hate modern academia so much
What interests me are the ways we are called upon to participate in such scenes [in reference to scenes of violent abuse against black slaves]. Are we witnesses who confirm the truth of what happened in the face of the world-destroying capacities of pain, the distortions of torture, the sheer unrepresentability of terror, and the repression of the dominant accounts? Or are we voyeurs fascinated with and repelled by exhibitions of terror and sufferance? What does the exposure of the violated body yield? Proof of black sentience or the inhumanity of the''peculiar institution"? Or does the pain of the other merely provide us with the opportunity for self-reflection? (3-4)
Therefore, rather than try to convey the routinized violence of slavery and its
aftermath through invocations of the shocking and the terrible, I have chosen to look elsewhere and consider those scenes in which terror can hardly be discerned-slaves dancing in the quarters, the outrageous darky antics of the minstrel stage, the institution of humanity in slave law, and the fashioning of the self-possessed individual. By defamiliarizing the familiar, I hope to illuminate the terror of the mundane and quotidian rather than exploit the shocking spectacle. (4)
This is all well and good. However, it goes to hell almost immediately in Chapter 1 when Hartman tries to go after abolitionist John Rankin. We get a background about Rankin's activities and the character of his writing, which attempts to establish a humanity in black slaves. There's a variety of means one could go for with this. What of the predicate, for example, that a humanity needs to be established at all for black people? Hartman chooses among all these the funniest possible answer:
So intent and determined is Rankin to establish that slaves possess the same nature and feelings as himself, and thereby establish the common humanity of all men on the basis of this extended suffering, that he literally narrates an imagined scenario in which he, along with his wife and child, is enslaved. The "horrible scenes of cruelty that were presented to [his] mind" as a consequence of this imagining aroused the ''highest pitch of indignant feeling." In addition, this scenario enables Rankin to speak not only for but literally in the place of the enslaved. (18)
Hartman finds the usage of empathy as a device here troubling. I will note that she defines empathy as "projection of oneself into another in order to better understand the other or 'the projection of one's own personality into an object, with the attribution to the object of one's own emotions.'" (19) This definition is fair enough, but what immediately follows it marks the book's descent from interesting literary analysis into utterly hilarious pomo nonsense. I have decided to quote the entire page at length to capture the absurdity of the argument in all its becoming, with bold indicating points of interest:
Yet empathy in important respects confounds Rankin's efforts to identify with the enslaved because in making the slave's suffering his own, Rankin begins to feel for himself rather than for those whom this exercise in imagination presumably is designed to reach. Moreover, by exploiting the vulnerability of the captive body as a vessel for the uses, thoughts, and feelings of others, the humanity extended to the slave inadvertently confirms the expectations and desires definitive of the relations of chattel slavery. By making the suffering of others his own, has Rankin ameliorated indifference or only confirmed the difficulty of understanding the suffering of the enslaved? Can the white witness of the spectacle of suffering affirm the materiality of black sentience only by feeling for himself? Does this not only exacerbate the idea that black sentience is inconceivable and unimaginable but in the very ease of possessing the abased and enslaved body, ultimately elide an understanding and acknowledgment of the slave's pain? Beyond evidence of slavery's crime,what does this exposure of the suffering body of the bondsman yield? Does this not reinforce the "thingly' quality of the captive by reducing the body to evidence in the very effort to establish the humanity of the enslaved? Does it not reproduce the hyperembodiness of the powerless? The purpose of these inquiries is not to cast doubt on Rankin's motives for recounting these events but to consider the precariousness of empathy and the thin line between witness and spectator. In the fantasy of being beaten, Rankin must substitute himself and his wife and children for the black captive in order that this pain be perceived and experienced. So, in fact, Rankin becomes a proxy and the other's pain is acknowledged to the degree that it can be imagined, yet by virtue of this substitution the object of identification threatens to disappear. In order to convince the reader of the horrors of slavery, Rankin must volunteer himself and his family for abasement. Put differently, the effort to counteract the commonplace callousness to black suffering requires that the white body be positioned in the place of the black body in order to make this suffering visible and intelligible. Yet if this violence can become palpable and indignation can be fully aroused only through the masochistic fantasy, then it becomes clear that empathy is double-edged, for in making the other's suffering one's own, this suffering is occluded by the other's obliteration. Given the litany of horrors that fill Rankin's pages, this recourse to fantasy reveals an anxiety about making the slave's suffering legible.This anxiety is historically determined by the denial of black sentience, the slave's status as object of property, the predicament of witnessing given the legal status of blacks, and the repression of counter discourses on the "peculiar institution." Therefore, Rankin must supplant the black captive in order to give expression to black suffering, and as a consequence, the dilemma-the denial of black sentience and the obscurity of suffering-is not attenuated but instantiated. The ambivalent character of empathy-more exactly, the repressive effects of empathy-as Jonathan Boyarin notes, can be located in the "obliteration of otherness" or the facile intimacy that enables identification with the other only as we "feel ourselves into those we imagine as ourselves." And as a consequence, empathy fails to expand the space of the other but merely places the self in its stead. This is not to suggest that empathy can be discarded or that Rankin's desire to exist in the place of the other can be dismissed as a narcissistic exercise but rather to highlight the dangers of a too-easy intimacy, the consideration of the self that occurs at the expense of the slave's suffering, and the violence of identification. (19-20)
Hartman's attack on Rankin only works because she takes this comment into a vacuum in which it becomes the entirety of Rankin's life work both in literature and activism. These critiques would perhaps have more water to stand on if the only thing Rankin ever did in his life to comment on the issue of slavery was the remark he made. Of course Rankin feels for himself, is that not the point of those feelings, to inquire about how they now make you feel knowing that it isn't a hypothetical but an inescapable and all-consuming reality for others? It's the first step in a larger process. The 'selflessness', we might call it, doesn't come from the act of empathizing but what you do with that empathy. Rankin claims to expose anti-blackness in Rankin but can only do so by effectively circumcising his argument. Of course without the calls for (and actual acts of) action it becomes anti-black. That's why you have to take the whole thing into account.
As for the whole "putting whiteness in black situations", Hartman doesn't sufficiently explain that this is what Rankin is doing. Firstly, does elevating blackness to the level that it can even be compared to whiteness at all not innately add humanity to it? Far from obliterating blackness, Rankin's argument builds bridges to it by tying him and his family members directly to the struggles of actually real black people. Their blackness is not obliterated because it is the thesis of the argument, that blackness is comparable and indeed 1 to 1 with whiteness in terms of the rights it should demand. Without the implication that black people have the same rights and dignities as Rankin's family members, the argument would be nonsense. It structurally can't work without elevating blackness. Furthermore, having read the original context in which Rankin wrote, I can hardly believe this to be the case. The very first letter that Rankin wrote stated that "it is most absurd to imagine that beings created with capacity for liberty were designed for bondage" (pg 15 of the 1969 Claremont republishing of Rankin's letters, or use Ctrl-F for whatever PDF you have I don't care). When considering the entirety of Rankin's writings, the usage of imagination and self-projection as an empathic device against slavery comes up only once in the entire work and Hartman fixates on it as proof of some deep anti-blackness. I don't see how empathy obliterates otherness when ironically Hartman has to obliterate the entirety of everything else Rankin ever wrote in those letters to make this argument work. By this same metric do I get to hone in on Hartman's strategic silence on Palestine to preserve her academic career in order to write off everything Hartman has ever written? That'd sure be convenient! Let's go there for a second. I find Hartman's attacks on the basic concept of empathy especially interesting considering this deliberately enforced silence and indifference as a Columbia-tenured academic, no doubt aware of the encampments and brutalizations faced by what would have likely been her own students sitting in classrooms with her. I don't usually like to armchair analyze authors I don't like, but think about it for a second. If you can find a failing in an abolitionist as accomplished as Rankin, some literary imperfection that collapses his whole project into a reification of anti-blackness then doesn't it go to show the importance of words? If, therefore, you don't do much to actually help your students facing oppression, can you assuage your guilt because at least your writings could theoretically further their cause? After all, you didn't fuck it up like Rankin did. Disagree with me? Want to point out that this book was written in 1997 and not 2023? Well, mind you, everything Saidiya did led to 2023 so it doesn't actually matter.
Anyways this reads less like a measured critique of Rankin's work and more like an awkward attempt to superimpose 21st century discourse about depictions of slavery in movies onto a guy who was writing two centuries ago. Is this an analysis of white abolitionists or an analysis of Tyler Perry? I find the usage of bodies language telling in that we have to render the whole thing as "black bodies" and de-emphasize their actual humanity, the big thing that informed the religious Christian beliefs of white abolitionists like Rankin. It demonstrates ironically a refusal to engage with what White Christian Abolitionists really said and believed.
Furthermore, I can't take this seriously because Rankin was not only an abolitionist but one of the most prolific ones. He freed so many slaves that his house was sometimes referred to as Ohio's "Grand Central Station", and this act came with significant threat and consequences to his life and well-being. Such threats are no doubt nothing in the face of what the escaping slaves were facing should they have been recaptured, but still! The question of whether Rankin was a witness or a spectator to slavery can surely be witnessed in what his writings actually contributed to, which was the mass awakening of a white abolitionist movement that freed thousands of slaves and worked with a number of black abolitionists to eventually instigate the war that would end mass institutionalized slavery. This is where the argument naturally goes next, that freedmen existed in such socially depreciated circumstances that the nadir was practically inevitable. It would look badly on Rankin after all if this secret patrimonial attitude towards blackness in general was so universal that it practically doomed Reconstruction on its own. Will Hartman invent much more than DuBois' wheel?
Well, you're gonna have to pay me to continue this review any further but I'll tell you upfront that she cites Foucault more times than she cites DuBois, so the answer is fuck no. The sweeping socioeconomic analysis that would be necessary to explore the futility of Rankin's work is supplanted in favor of more sloppy lit analysis and meandering philosophical nonsense. It doesn't even come close to Black Reconstruction, let alone the notion of challenging it. This book's legacy is white people citing it in essays to look worldy. God I hate modern academia so much
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