53 pages • 1 hour read
Saidiya V. HartmanScenes of Subjection
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 1997A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Introduction-Part 1, Chapter 1Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Formations of Terror and Enjoyment”
Introduction Summary
Content Warning: This section of the guide refers to the commodification and extreme violence of slavery, indentured servitude, debt peonage, sexual violence, rape, graphic torture, and systemic racism.
The Introduction begins with a discussion of the pivotal, early scene of the whipping of Frederick Douglass’s Aunt Hester in Douglass’s abolitionist 1845 Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. Hartman will not reproduce Douglass’s account of this whipping because she wants to underscore how easily this scene of torture is reproduced by academics and how “participation” in this torture ensues in this reproduction. Hartman claims that we are not rendered witnesses in such a reproduction but, instead, voyeurs.
Hartman is broadly critical of the possibility of empathy, which the abolitionist reproduction of these scenes of torture attempted to elicit in white readers in Douglass’s time. Hartman is also suspicious of the supposed ideals of “humanity” and “individuality” espoused by liberal humanism. Rather than assuming, as most scholars have done, that violence lies in the refusals of humanity and subjectivity for the enslaved person, Hartman relocates this violence in the very construction of personhood and recognition of the enslaved person as subject. Along these same lines, she is interested in violence that occurs within “notions of reform, consent, reciprocity, and protection” (5), demonstrating how the abuses of power and violence were often exacerbated by the recognition—not the refusal—of enslaved humanity. Hartman argues that the “barbarism” of slavery is not relegated to the objectification of the enslaved person but also the subjectification of the enslaved person. In other words, the violence of slavery is grounded just as much in the way that slavery pretends to acknowledge the humanity of the enslaved person as in the way that it denies enslaved humanity—the idea of “humanity” is itself a tool of slavery, Hartman argues. Similarly, she says that the postbellum failures of Reconstruction are also located in “the very language of persons, rights, and liberties” (4).
Hartman outlines her approach as one that will examine the violence enabled by legal definitions of personhood and the recognition of humanity, the “narcissistic” nature of empathy, and the ways that such empathy “consumes” Black subjects.
As a result of Hartman’s concerns about using dramatic scenes of torture to elicit empathy, Hartman sets out instead to examine much more subtle, mundane acts of resistance. She insists these acts are never separable from or external to the domination that they (with great limitation) resist and thus “acquire their character” from existing within violent relations (10). She is interested in the “ambivalence” of supposedly free, postbellum states of Black existence, too, which are simultaneously spaces of restriction and captivity.
Hartman also discusses her methods and her reliance on, in particular, testimonies gathered by the Works Progress Administration (WPA) in the early 20th century. These sources are problematic, she notes, because they generally involve white interviewers who were often the children of enslavers. At the same time, Hartman insists that there is no access at all to the “subaltern consciousness” outside such a context of domination. While relying on these sources, she has nonetheless tried to read these documents against the grain, even as she recognizes the impossibility of ever “fully recovering” the voices of enslaved people and does not attempt to do so. She insists that she does not attempt to separate these documents from the context out of which they emerge and describes her process as a “combination of foraging and disfiguration” (14), looking for fragments within larger texts out of which alternative narratives can be created and “deforming” the testimony in these WPA narratives through new emphases that “disfigure” the original texts.
Part 1, Chapter 1 Summary: “Innocent Amusements: The State of Suffering”
Chapter 1 opens with Hartman’s analysis of abolitionist John Rankin’s letter to his brother, who is an enslaver. Hartman is interested in the ways that Rankin attempts to describe slavery through the theatricality of human trafficking, using words such as “stage” and “spectacle” in his descriptions. Hartman draws attention to the ways that slavery is staged by Rankin—and by anti-slavery rhetoric in general—so that its horrors could be witnessed. This staging is done to bring suffering “near” so that it might be felt—in Rankin’s case, by his brother. In attempting to bring suffering near to his brother, Rankin presents a scenario in which his own family is enslaved. By presenting this scenario, Rankin is not simply advocating for enslaved people but, Hartman stresses, taking their place.
This maneuver opens the “Pandora’s box” that is the “difficulty and slipperiness of empathy” (24). If empathy is a projection of oneself into the experience of the other, then empathy frustrates Rankin’s attempts to identify with enslaved people because he begins to feel for himself and his family rather than for enslaved people. Thus, this experience revolves around the self rather than extending to the other.
Empathy is particularly “slippery” in the context of slavery, raising the question why Rankin must abase his own family, imaginatively, for the abasement that is slavery to be witnessed. Hartman argues that this attempt by a white person to refuse indifference to Black suffering demands the substitution of a white body for a Black one in order to make this suffering apparent. Yet if such a substitution is required, then Black suffering is ironically erased. Thus, empathy destroys the other rather than illuminating the other. Hartman asks, then, why suffering is the means by which identification is attempted in the first place. She asks why pain is so crucial in this identification, focusing on the insistent move within abolitionist literature in the attempt to “bring pain close” (26).
According to Hartman, this “empathic identification” has to be considered in the context of chattel slavery as an economic system in which an enslaved person is property. While the projection of one’s feelings onto and into enslaved people is not the same as the ownership of an enslaved person, there is a related “occupation of the captive body” (28), even if this occupation occurs with opposed intentions. Black suffering, seemingly highlighted, is actually obscured by the other bodies who occupy the enslaved body imaginatively.
In addition to the obfuscation of enslaved pain, Hartman is interested in the pleasure that occurs in the imaginative occupation of the enslaved person’s pain. How might this imagined pain be pleasurable, even for those who are attempting to end slavery? Part of Rankin’s rhetoric, observes Hartman, reflects the context of the legal refusal of free and enslaved Black people as witnesses against whites: Rankin attempts to be both enslaved and witness in his white occupation of pained enslavement. At the same time, the pleasure of imagining this whitened pain invokes the “enmeshing of terror and enjoyment” that is central to the history of slavery (32), as demonstrated by the Sambo figure, seemingly happy in his subjugation.
Black terror was thus often obscured not only by white empathy but by the staging of Black pleasure. Since enslaved people were legally considered human only in terms of their culpability, they were objects of property that could be used by all white people, regardless of whether these whites legally owned them. White “enjoyment” defined the meaning of Black subjection, where innumerable uses of enslaved people assumed that they could be “everything and nothing” for white people (35), and enjoyment of subjection was assumed to be an inherent trait within Blackness. Spectacles, such as of the coffle, were designed to display enslaved contentment within slavery. Hartman asks whether this constructed display of enjoyment reveals an indifference to suffering or an investment in this suffering.
According to Hartman, the “elasticity” and “figurative capacity” of Blackness was directly linked to enslaved people’s “fungibility” in which Blackness became a means of white exploration. Blackness could not only be occupied imaginatively but “put on,” as in blackface performances. The connection between melodrama and minstrelsy, argues Hartman, demonstrates how pain ensures the subjectivity of Blackness, with minstrelsy exemplifying the enjoyment of the pain of Blackness.
The coffle, a line of enchained enslaved people being forced to march to their enslavers, was represented by white abolitionists as a spectacle of horror. Yet even these abolitionist narratives often move from the horror of the scene to the seeming contentment and docility of enslaved people. Hartman examines this narrative movement, which she finds particularly disturbing because it is so prevalent among abolitionists. Citing Abraham Lincoln’s witnessing of a coffle, she traces the ways that these narratives shift from the intolerable to the tolerable, presumably based on a witnessing of the affect of enslaved people. For instance, Hartman observes that much of the insistence on enslaved docility and contentment is attributed to the fact that enslaved people would sing. This, however, was forced on enslaved people, and Hartman stresses that this song is an “opacity” that “troubles the distinctions between joy and sorrow and toil and leisure” (54).
These songs, however, are the means by which enslaved people are forced to represent a denial of loss, seemingly by way of their own articulation. Mourning is disavowed through forcing enslaved people to “step it up lively” (march) or “strike it up lively” (55) (sing): They were forced to stage a scene of pleasure to obscure their unbearable pain, which enforced the notion that enslaved people did not experience sorrow or loss in their enslavement. Similarly, they were often forced to participate in their own commodification by presenting an amiable countenance to potential buyers at auctions. Hartman defines this as a forced “self-betrayal” in the assistance of one’s own commodification, making an enslaved person the “agent of his or her dissolution” (56). This was a “simulation of consent” (59).
These staged, demanded performances of supposed pleasure enact domination, and thus Hartman argues that the most “invasive” violence of slavery lies not in extreme, graphic, suffering—in spectacularly visible violence—but, instead, in what we do not see, so that the “slave would be made to appear as if born to dance in chains” (74).
Hartman returns to Douglass and his desire that enslaved people form a system of resistance in the midst of the forced “enjoyment” of surveilled “parties” and other staged forms of enjoyment. Douglass theorized the songs of enslaved people as songs of sorrow, wanting to create a division between diversion and protest, even as Douglass understands, too, that pleasures within enslavement sometimes were simultaneously, though rarely, a means of limited protest.
Introduction-Part 1, Chapter 1 Analysis
Chapter 1 explores the “staging” of slavery on the parts of both abolitionists and those involved in maintaining slavery. Through her analysis of this “staging,” Hartman traces a throughline between pro-slavery and anti-slavery perspectives that lays the groundwork for her claim that whiteness erases Black suffering. Abolitionist texts insistently represent the graphically violent abuses of slavery, as in the whipping of Aunt Hester that Frederick Douglass reproduces, with which Hartman begins the Introduction. Those invested in maintaining slavery, however, staged slavery as pleasurable, requiring enslaved people to present themselves as content in their unbearable subjection. Enslaved people were coerced into this staging, for example, by being forced to move with enthusiasm in chained coffles, sing as a form of entertainment that seemingly dismissed the horrors of slavery, or present themselves as “appealing” to potential buyers through an affect of docility that did not seek to resist their commodification and degradation under slavery. Thus, Hartman introduces Part 1’s titular “formations of terror and enjoyment.”
The staging of Black pleasure as a refusal of Black pain underscores the context for the abolitionist insistence on the graphic (and disavowed) display of Black pain in such graphic portrayals as that of Aunt Hester’s whipping. Abolitionists used these portrayals to refute the prevalent notion of Black contentment within slavery. While this contextualizes the abolitionist presentation of Black pain, Hartman also explores how the staging of Black pleasure turns enslaved people against themselves, so that they are forced to participate in what she calls “self-betrayal” in participating, for example, in their own commodification. They were told to look “bright,” as a sullen countenance or pained expression might decrease their value on the marketplace and at auction. Thus, they were forced, at this dramatic moment of commodification and public view, to act the role of happy enslaved person rather than terrified, mournful, or suicidal. Slavery thus forced them to turn against themselves. The iconic figures of Sambo and Aunt Jemima enact this pleasure and are the effects of this stagecraft, created out of pro-slavery imaginations. These figures are therefore a refusal of the reality of slavery, not a representation of that reality.
Hartman begins with the abolitionist representation of slavery’s violence, on the part of both Black and white people, in order to introduce her concern with the erasure of Black suffering in these well-meaning attempts to elicit white empathy. Hartman distinguishes her own focus from that of 19th-century abolitionists. Rather than focusing on the spectacularly violent, Hartman turns her attention to the mundanely and seemingly tolerable—and even pleasurable—“practices” of slavery. This alternative focus constitutes a practical application of Hartman’s theoretical claims in the text about how stagings of the graphic violence of enslavement—even for the sake of abolitionist or liberatory ends—ultimately reinscribes the erasure of Black suffering upon which enslavement is built. She maintains that one implication of this claim is that the methodology of slavery studies itself must change to avoid reinscribing this erasure of Black suffering, something she attempts to do in the text by focusing instead on the more mundane forms of enslaved suffering and resistance.
Hartman concludes with Douglass’s description of the “sorrow songs” of slavery that sounded different to him while enslaved than they do after his emancipation. Hartman presents Douglass as yearning for an enslaved culture of more resistance—one that does not become distracted by the “freedom” of the holiday between Christmas and New Year’s, for example, which he argues is only a “safety valve” to draw off energies of resistance and protest. Yet Hartman also argues that Douglass recognizes that there are pleasures within enslavement that sometimes are also resistant. The possibility of some kind of resistance occurring within pleasure—and what kind of pleasure, if any, can be made within slavery—is the question with which Hartman concludes Chapter 1, anticipating the “theory of practice” that attempts to redress, albeit in temporary and non-revolutionary ways, the atrocity of slavery.
The Introduction and Chapter 1’s discussion of the violence of an empathy that consumes Black pain is one of the more influential arguments that Hartman makes, challenging historical and literary scholarship regarding abolitionist rhetoric and genre studies of the slave narrative. Ultimately, Hartman’s analysis here calls into question conventional understandings of the concepts of pleasure, pain, agency, redress, and freedom. By troubling these concepts, not only does Hartman’s text serve as a critique of other work in the field of slavery studies, it also undergirds the strongest claims of the book, such as Hartman’s analysis of emancipation as a “nonevent” as well as her notion of The “Burdened Individuality” of Emancipation that she explores later in the book.
