Scenes of Subjection

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.

“At issue here is the precariousness of empathy and the uncertain line between witness and spectator. Only more obscene than the brutality unleashed at the whipping post is the demand that this suffering be materialized and evidenced by the display of the tortured body or endless recitations of the ghastly and the terrible.”

Hartman introduces Douglass’s reproduction of the whipping of his Aunt Hester. She argues that, as a scene demanded by abolitionism, it is second in its violence only to the violence of physical torture and abuse in slavery. This sets the tone for the book, in which Hartman critiques what has been assumed to be liberatory: abolitionist rhetoric, legal subjectivity, and liberal humanism more generally. Hartman argues that the context in which slavery studies has positioned liberatory rhetoric, action, and politics has been shortsighted in its failure to approach the embodied reality of the experience of slavery.

“[H]ow does one give expression to these 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? This was the challenge faced by Douglass and other foes of slavery, and this is the task I take up here.”

Hartman takes up the challenging question of whether Black pain can be witnessed without participating in that pain by becoming a voyeur. This is a question that abolitionists, Black and white, have had to contend with and that anti-racist work must continue to consider as it finds new ways of responding ethically to Black pain.

“I am interested in the ways that the recognition of humanity and individuality acted to tether, bind, and oppress.”

Hartman refuses what she sees as the worn-out and myopically privileged ways of approaching and recognizing enslaved people. Hartman’s refusal challenges the notion that slavery only modifies personhood or humanity: “Enslaved person” does not adequately represent the rupture, break, and violence of slavery, and Hartman argues that new frameworks that exceed