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

by Hartman, Saidiya V.

• ISBN13: 9780195089837
• ISBN10: 0195089839
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 1997-09-04
• Publisher: Oxford University Press

Summary

In the tradition of Eric Lott's award-winning Love and Theft , Hartman's new book 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 from anthropology and history as well as literary criticism, she examines a wealth of material, including songs, dance, stories, diaries, narratives, and journals to provide new insights into a range of issues. She looks particularly at the presentations of slavery and blackness in minstrelsy, melodrama, and the sentimental novel; the disparity between actual slave culture and "managed" plantation amusements; the construction of slave culture in nineteenth-century ethnographic writing; the rhetorical performance of slave law and slave narratives; the dimension of slave performance practice; and the political consciousness of folklore. Particularly provocative is her analysis of the slave pen and auction block, which transmogrified terror into theatre, and her reading of the rhetoric of seduction in slavery law and legal cases concerning rape. Persuasively showing that the exercise of power is inseparable from its display, Scenes of Subjection will interest readers involved in a wide range of historical, literary, and cultural studies.

Table of Contents

Introduction	3	(14)
I FORMATIONS OF TERROR AND ENJOYMENT	17	(98)
1 Innocent Amusements: The Stage of Sufferance	17	(32)
2 Redressing the Pained Body: Toward a Theory of Practice	49	(30)
3 Seduction and the Ruses of Power	79	(36)
II THE SUBJECT OF FREEDOM	115	(92)
4 The Burdened Individuality of Freedom	115	(10)
5 Fashioning Obligation: Indebted Servitude and the Fetters of Slavery	125	(39)
6 Instinct and Injury: Bodily Integrity, Natural Affinities, and the Constitution of Equality	164	(43)
Notes	207	(48)
Selected Bibliography	255	(22)
Index	277