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.
Part 1, Chapter 3Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Part 1: “Formations of Terror and Enjoyment”
Part 1, Chapter 3 Summary: “Seduction and the Ruses of Power”
Rape against enslaved women was not recognized as such and not punishable by law. To be recognized as a legal subject under slavery provided no protection for enslaved people. In her discussion of sexual assault and rape, Hartman insists that men were sexually violated as well and maybe as often as women, though we will probably never know the scope of this violation. The sexual violation of women on which slavery depended and the castration of men used to both discipline and punish are violations that do not “count” as rape, and Hartman questions how we can think about rape outside racist and heteronormative frameworks.
She sets out to examine what she calls the “discourse of seduction” in slavery (140). Within this discourse, since the enslaved person is unable to legally resist (which would be criminal) or consent (which is fundamentally impossible as an enslaved person, since one’s life is already taken and commodified), the question of “seduction” must be considered.
State of Missouri vs. Celia, a Slave is a legal case that was not reported or published, and it was not found until 145 years after its verdict. This is typical of cases involving sexual assault against enslaved people, Hartman notes. In this case, Celia killed her enslaver after he raped her for four years, striking him with a stick after she warned him not to come to her cabin and that she would hurt him if he did. While the very fact of Celia’s repeated rapes was legally denied, as rape of enslaved people was legally deemed impossible, her killing of her enslaver was legally recognized, and she was found guilty and executed. Thus, the only legal recognition of her subjectivity, Hartman states, was the verdict that killed her.
Many mutilations of a sexual nature were only reported in the context of the enslaver suing for their own damages of property: Sexual violence as damage only registered legally for the enslaver. Damage to enslaved people did not “count.” Moreover, the legal mandate was that the enslaved person was subject not just to their enslaver but to all whites, and any “white culpability was displaced as black criminality” (144), so that Celia, not her enslaver, was found guilty.
This legal disavowal of the rape of enslaved people works in concert with the legal refusal to recognize Black familial relations and marriage between enslaved people. In the case of Alfred v State, for example, the wife of Alfred, Charlotte, was raped by her enslaver, whom Alfred then killed. The legal argument against the enslaver was made in the name of Alfred, who was considered the violated party in his wife’s rape. While the gendered dimensions of this legal representation are clear (Alfred, not Charlotte, was harmed in Charlotte’s rape), the law refused to recognize the lived marital relation between Alfred and Charlotte, and thus a double disavowal occurred: The rape of Charlotte as damaging to her was unrecognized, and the marital relation between Alfred and Charlotte was also unrecognized.
In the period from 1830-1860 there was an increasing emphasis placed on enslaved “personhood.” Although this concept was deployed to contest the lack of rights given to enslaved people, who were legally rendered property, Hartman observes: “[Y]et the figuration of the human in slave law was totally consonant with the domination of the enslaved” (163). In other words, this affirmation of enslaved personhood did nothing to challenge slavery: To be approached as a “subject” under slavery was no better than to be approached as an object.
Appeals to sentiment and feeling, and the slavery apologists’ insistence on the familiarity and “familial” nature of domestic slavery presented it in a “heart-warming light” (161). The argument that concern for the welfare of the enslaved person was internal to slavery was often made in the face of abolitionist arguments regarding slavery’s inherent violence. Pro-slavery rhetoric insisted that the welfare of the enslaved person was supposedly in the interest of the enslaver, therefore ensuring the enslaved person’s protection: According to this argument, the commodification of enslaved people ensured the humaneness of the enslaver. According to Hartman, this appeal to the enslaved person’s welfare in the context of enslavers’ humaneness was completely detached from any rights of enslaved people. Indeed, this appeal depended on enslaved people not having rights but, instead, having property status (and thus commercial value that warranted “protection”). Appeals to sentiment, affect, and feeling—arguments that reciprocity and even love existed between enslaver and enslaved—served to maintain the commodification of enslaved people.
Part 1, Chapter 3 Analysis
Hartman’s arguments in this chapter are notable for the way they criticize affirmations of the enslaved person’s subjectivity and personhood. Hartman notes that the enslaved person was legally considered a person only within the legal parameters of criminality (i.e., only to the extent that they were considered culpable for criminal activities) or, by 1830, in instances of spectacular degradation of the flesh (of which the condition of slavery itself was immune, thus detaching the intrinsic degradation of slavery from spectacular, graphic violence). This construction of personhood, then, refuses existence within liberty and consent and renders enslaved people only partial persons, existing as legal subjects only within their crimes and their extreme, graphic woundedness of the flesh. Personhood itself did not exist outside of the context of violence. This deficient definition of personhood thus enabled violence and created additional suffering for enslaved people. Hence, Hartman calls into question claims that the affirmation of enslaved personhood marked any sort of progress for the condition of enslaved people. She upends this perspective by suggesting that it was precisely the delimited and selective conception of enslaved personhood that enabled such violence against enslaved people.
This chapter relies on a range of texts, beginning with legal cases, especially those that were never filed, in its investigation of the ways that enslaved people were considered both subject and object in legal proceedings, focusing on cases involving rape. This exemplifies the violence and silence of the archive that Hartman highlights earlier in the book: It is only by looking at legal cases that went unfiled and reading them against the text’s own logical framing that Hartman can begin to access a point-of-view that would otherwise go undocumented. Looking at rape cases, Hartman demonstrates how subjectivity was weaponized against enslaved people in the refusal of rape as a harm and thus the refusal of rape as existing for enslaved people, which entails a refusal of sentient enslaved existence.
This chapter’s examination of legal cases constitutes an extensive consideration of The Weaponization of the Legal Subjectivity of Enslaved People. In the case of Missouri v Celia, a Slave, Celia drew a line at the doorstep of her cabin, claiming her body and her domestic space as her own, and for enforcing this against her enslaver, she was killed by the state. In Alfred v State the violence of rape again did not register, and Charlotte, whose rape was the catalyst for Alfred’s killing of her rapist and enslaver, is written out of the case as irrelevant in the context of rape and, more broadly, in the context of subjectivity.
Hartman concludes with an analysis of Harriet Jacobs’s 1861 Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, bringing full circle questions of empathy and identification that are raised in the introduction and Chapter 1. In Jacobs’s text the challenge is not only to describe the sexual violence that exists within slavery but also to demonstrate how Jacobs attempted to move within sexual registers in a way that, as she describes it, is “akin to freedom” (183). She does so by way of a “calculation” that sexual relations with a white man who is not her enslaver will afford protection from her enslaver, who attempts to rape her. Hartman is interested in the nature of this “seduction” within the “calculation” that arises out of subjection. Such “seduction” in being “akin to freedom” is nonetheless not freedom, and the identification that Jacobs attempts to forge between herself and the white woman reader is one that similarly is akin to the empathy that Rankin attempts to create but is not an empathy that obscures Blackness. Moreover, Jacobs’s appeal to the reader, in which she repeatedly pauses and directly addresses white women, insists that sexual relations and life in general exists on a different plane in slavery than outside of slavery. What might be defined as Jacobs’s “fall” from “virtue,” then, must be deconstructed and the notion of “virtue” reconsidered in the context of the “calculations” required for survival in slavery. Thus, Jacobs appeals to the reader from within her own enslaved context, one which the reader cannot obscure in their identification. Moreover, the reader’s identification with Jacobs as “slave girl” simultaneously recognizes both her subjection and her subjectivity.
