Scenes of Subjection

Chapter 4 begins the discussion of “the refiguration of subjection” that occurs with emancipation (203). In other words, Hartman argues that emancipation is a “nonevent” because it merely “refigures” the basic conditions of enslavement. The insistence on extreme pain and simultaneous denial of pain in Blackness that characterizes slavery now, with emancipation, metamorphoses to the “burdened individuality” of the freed person who is held to impossible standards of “responsibility.”

The chapter revolves around the defining and describing this state of “burdened individuality,” which attempts to convey the movement out of property and into Lockean property-in-self that occurs with emancipation: The formerly enslaved are now “owners” of themselves. Yet, this ownership is troubled—thus generating a “burdened individuality”—since this new Black subject was legally “equal” but nonetheless socially inferior, “free” yet still subjugated.

This new individuality was a form of conscription that ensured that the newly liberated became indebted and thus beholden. The central question of the chapter is thus: “How did emancipatory figurations of a rights-bearing individual aimed at abolishing the badges of slavery result in burdened individuality?” (213). Theoretically, emancipation created equality, yet Hartman notes that this is too “clean” an interpretation, as there is a “gap” between the endowment of rights and the exercise of those rights. This raises the question of whether the newly emancipated could ever truly occupy the role that they were attempting to enact.

Emancipation technically endowed the Black subject with rights, but this same endowment of rights—legal freedom—obscured the abuses in what was supposedly “free labor.” Thus, if slavery’s modus operandi was to control the Black body by way rendering it property—and, by extension, employing mundane and spectacular forms of violence—this gives way to a new form of control following emancipation: “free” contracts that ensured debt peonage, and the weaponization of rights and individuality, which were turned against freed people. These new rights functioned similarly to the legal subjectivity of the enslaved person: Freed people in their individuality were always on the verge of if not trapped within their supposed criminality, forced to be impossibly “responsible” in taking on extreme amounts of debt, extreme amounts of labor, extreme amounts of obligation, and extreme amounts of humility. According to Hartman, the emancipated freedom of individuality was a trap that mirrored Jacobs’s “loophole of retreat.”