Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America.

Saidiya V. Hartman. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. New York: Oxford UP, 1997. 275 pp. $50.00 cloth/$19.95 paper.

Saidiya Hartman's Scenes of Subjection is a prodigiously researched, provocative exploration of racial subjugation and the shaping of black identity during slavery and its aftermath. Her message overall is a profoundly pessimistic one. She contends that there is a tragic continuity in antebellum and postbellum constitutions of blackness, and that the range of liberal, anti-slavery, and reform discourses that were ostensibly used to promote progressive causes actually facilitated violent, symbolic forms of domination in nineteenth-century America. Popular appeals to the humanity of slaves, the invocation of rights, contractarian notions of property, self-possessed individualism, will, agency, responsibility, protection, and so on did not ultimately serve the struggle for black liberation in the U.S. Instead, these discourses tended to obscure a pervasive practice of subjection and, in so doing, paved the way for other newly emerging encroachments of power during the Reconstruction era and the Gilded Age.

As a theorist wrestling with the task of writing revisionary history, Hartman harbors a deep distrust of language, either as a means of ensuring the legal protection and social equality of oppressed people or as a means of representing the everyday experience of slavery and its aftermath. Scenes of Subjection thus opens with an adamant warning against being unwittingly led--whether by the love of absolute distinctions between the categories "slavery" and "freedom" or by the celebratory momentum and logic of liberal nationalist rhetoric--to believe that 1863 was a year marked by the simple triumph of American democratic ideals. Nonetheless, Hartman goes on to recognize the utility and ethical necessity of writing revisionary history. At the same time that she insists that her study is not intended to be a comprehensive examination of slavery and Reconstruction, she nonetheless commits herself to a sustained historical analysis that brings to light how, after the legal abolition of slavery, liberal notions lik e will, agency, responsibility, and individuality were used to create tragic continuities between slavery and freedom.

In her effort to prove that the legacy of slavery lived on in antebellum America, Hartman examines a wide variety of "scenes" that help to convey the terrifying morass of legal and socioeconomic constraints, and the daily rituals of terror, faced by African Americans--both before and after emancipation. She marshals an impressive array of scholarship and primary sources--slave narratives, white amanuenses, plantation diaries and documents, newspaper accounts, missionary tracts, travel writing, amateur ethnographies, government reports, WPA testimonies, fiction, popular minstrel songs, agricultural journals, freedmen's primers, and legal cases--and offers a vivid account of the lives of African Americans during slavery and the postbellum period.

The first half of the book discusses how spectacles of "Negro enjoyment" were, in fact, inextricably entangled with terror--one small part of the vast, obscene theatricality that characterized the slave trade. Chapter one examines scenes involving "jollity" or "simulated contentment" as everyday forms of domination that have generally been overlooked in previous historical accounts. Hartman explains that scenes of enjoyment were actually social rituals that reinforced the dialectic of power. For example, in slave autobiographies like Solomon Northrup's Twelve Years a Slave, even the most ostensibly benign, quotidian forms of coercive cruelty--for instance slaves' being compelled to dance, fiddle, and laugh before their masters--were symbolic reenactments of the original act of transforming free persons into slaves. Articles in popular agricultural journals, such as De Bow's Review and Southern Planter, stressed the importance of contentment and jollity on the plantation as essential indices of domination tha t ensured successful management. The practice of forcing African Americans to sing, dance, and look as though they were having fun--whether on the plantation, in a coffle, in the slave pen, at the auction block, in minstrel shows, or in popular melodrama--was a symbolic tool used by the master class to assert its power and assiduously deny the inherent violence of slavery.

In the second chapter, Hartman examines possibilities for resistance, redress, and transformation embodied in the everyday practices of slaves. She considers the social struggle waged in a range of everyday practices that were associated with good times. Work slowdowns, feigned illnesses, nighttime visits to lovers and family, exchanging stories, the redemptive march to heaven, and popular juba songs and dances were all part of an elaborate vocabulary of symbolic action that allowed slaves to resist the daily constraints of slavery. Hartman acknowledges that, to some extent, enjoyment was a valuable means of redressing the painful experience of slavery. Dancing and other pleasurable activities were important, since they were in and of themselves expressions of resistance against the natal alienation and daily constraints of slavery, and created a sense of community among the slaves. As one ex-slave, John McAdams, recalled, "We made good use of these nights as that was all the time the slaves had together to dance, talk, and have a good time among their own color."

But Hartman also cautions us not to overestimate the extent to which collective identification was generated by enjoyment in these surreptitious gatherings. She is constantly alert to the myriad ways that terror, surveillance, and domination exacerbated conflicts and engendered mutual distrust among the enslaved. A former slave put the matter succinctly when he said that "they taught us to be against one another and no matter where you would go you would always find one that would be tattling and would have the white folks pecking on you. They would [be] trying to make it soft for themselves."

Probing the nature, possibilities, and limits of everyday practice and enjoyment as forms of resistance, Hartman stresses the vexed character of good times. What makes the unpredictable possibilities of resistance associated with everyday practice so interesting, but also so limited in their effects, is the fact that they lie outside the traditional, public, political domain of protest. She argues that slave performance and other everyday practices involving enjoyment were often a source of profound ambivalence for slaves, since the brief reprieve from the horrors of slavery was so bittersweet, and tempered by the haunting fact of bondage. Viewed within the larger context of plantation life, singing, dancing, and a whole range of everyday acts appear in an entirely different light-as symbolic indices of domination, orchestrated by a powerful slaveholder bent on maintaining order. "If 'good times' were an index of the owner's profit and domination," Hartman asks, "what possibilities could pleasure yield?"

Hartman's discussion of everyday practice, pleasure, and resistance leads her, in Chapter Three, to examine the "discourse of seduction," which was called upon again and again throughout the nineteenth century as an ostensible source of power and "ensnaring sexual agency" for weak, dependent slave women.

Hartman argues that, like the antislavery and reform discourses discussed in previous chapters, the discourse of seduction did not empower slave women and was, in actuality, often used to obscure the brutal fact of sexual exploitation and asymmetries of power in the master-slave relation. Drawing on plantation diaries such as Fanny Kemble's Journal of a Residence on a Georgian Plantation in 1838-1839, proslavery treatises such as George Fitzhugh's Cannibals All! or, Slaves without Masters, and a whole series of court cases that involve rape of slave women and assault of slave men--State of Missouri v. Celia, a Slave (1855); Alfred v. State (1859); George v. State (1859), and others--Hartman shows how the appeal to mutual bonds of affection between masters and slaves was linked to the presumption that any sexual relations between them were always reciprocal and consensual. Rape was not just considered unlikely--it was legally unimaginable. Seduction and the ambiguous guise of affection were used to obscure the actual violence of slavery and ensured that the common practice of raping slave women was an offense that was neither recognized nor punishable by law.

Having ascertained that rhetorical appeals to affection and reciprocity between masters and slaves were often used to deny sexually exploitative practices, Hartman then proceeds to ask whether or not seduction ever served as a viable mode of resistance. To answer this question she turns to an extended analysis of Harriet A. Jacobs's fictionalized slave narrative Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, as Written by Herself, focusing on the scenario of seduction that occurs in Incidents when Linda Brent (Jacobs's pseudonymous identity) explains her decision to "give herself" to a white man named Mr. Sands, partly as a means of avoiding the compulsory sexual advances of her master. Hartman explains that, as a slave, Linda is a non-contractual subject--that is, she has no legally recognized freedom to choose the object of her affection, and specifically cannot exercise her right to voluntary consent to a marriage contract. Under such conditions of legal invisibility, Linda's act of giving herself actually consti tutes a form of subjection, since she did not have any real freedom of choice in the matter. "After all," Hartman reasons, "if desperation, recklessness, and hopelessness determine 'choosing one's lover,' absolute distinctions between compulsion and assent cannot be sustained." Even though Linda's act is guided by the yearning to refashion and transform the given, Hartman concludes that, since marriage and freedom of choice are legal entitlements beyond the scope of the enslaved, Linda's small act of resistance leaves her with something akin to freedom that is not freedom. Although Linda's practice of giving herself does to a limited extent express agency, resistance, and self-making, Hartman points out that, by calling on civil rights and the abstract notion of freedom, Linda embraces the same principles of property and contract that were used to justify and perpetuate the institution of slavery.

The entire second half of Scenes of Subjection describes the elaborate burdens of freedom imposed on ex-slaves, and the reign of terror that followed in the wake of slavery. Hartman's main argument is that emancipation did not do away with racial subjection; instead, the nominal extension of civil rights to freedmen was simply a point of transition between different manifestations or modes of subjection. As numerous accounts of the Reconstruction era have already shown, the vast majority of land confiscated during the war years was returned to the previous owners; freedmen were faced with the terrible problem of finding employment on land owned by racist whites during a time when the South was still reeling from the economic and social devastation of Civil War and a declining demand for U.S. cotton; sharecropping, with its constant economic insecurity, became the only means of survival left to many people; and Southern planters opposed and subjugated free labor through various contractual and extralegal mean s.

Hartman adds to this bleak picture of the Reconstruction era by detailing the replacement of the whip with the other forms of racial subjugation, such as lynching, indebted servitude, Black Codes, the contract system, vagrancy statutes, and anti-enticement laws. She argues that the legalization of marriage among ex-slaves, and the resulting privatization of sexuality, did nothing to secure freedom, since black families were still vulnerable to the incursions of capital. Policymakers, Freedmen's Bureau officials, Northern entrepreneurs, and other reformers developed a "discourse of idleness" that was directly aimed at laborers who refused to enter into contracts with former slaveholders and was used to deny the brutality and coercive measures taken against the newly emancipated slaves. Like popular journals that were read by the embittered Southern planters, freedmen's primers effectively recast the history of slavery as dependency rather than captivity, and promoted "responsibility" and a rational work ethic among the ex-slaves--stressing the importance of duty, conscience, selfreliance, industriousness, willingness to endure hardship, and respect for former masters. As the records of Congressional debates on the Civil Rights Act of 1866 and the Fourteenth Amendment show--as do a handful of late-nineteenth-century legal cases that effectively dismantled the civil rights agenda legislatively enacted during the decade 1865-1875--the so-called "equality" of emancipated slaves was tenuous and vastly compromised within a violent, racist, and fiercely exclusive society. Drawing on a wealth of archival materials, including a number of WPA testimonies, Hartman reveals the bitter disappointments experienced by African Americans in the wake of emancipation. As one former slave recalled, "The reconstruction of the negro was real hard on us."

Scenes of Subjection is a cogent reminder of the terror and stark limits of American emancipation that will undoubtedly inspire and guide further research in this area. But I remain unpersuaded by Hartman's suggestion that we dispense with notions of individuality, freedom, and civil rights just because the discourse of democracy has at times been put to bad use. Harriet Jacobs's invocation of rights is part of a protest tradition that includes figures like W.E.B. Du Bois, Martin Luther King, and other leaders who were firmly convinced that African Americans needed to use the word freedom and wield the language of civil rights on their own behalf. We should always remember the extent to which the legacy of slavery and the failures of Reconstruction live on. But in doing so, we cannot forget that, without the discourse of rights, the Civil Rights Movement would never have happened.