Scenes of subjection : terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America
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Bibliographic Information
Scenes of subjection : terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century America
（Race and American culture）
Oxford University Press, 1997
- : cloth
- : pbk
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Note
Bibliography: p. 255-275
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
- Volume
-
: cloth ISBN 9780195089837
Description
Hartman shows how the violence of captivity and enslavement was embodied in many of the performance practices that grew from, and about, slave culture in antebellum America. Using tools of anthropology, history, and literary criticism, Hartman examines a wealth of material, including songs, dance, stories, diaries, narratives, and journals. Hartman analyses the presentations of slavery and blackness in minstrelsy; the constructions of slave culture in 19th century
ethnographic writings and the political consciousness of folklore.
- Volume
-
: pbk ISBN 9780195089844
Description
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.
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