Abstract

Staging slavery

This article discusses the book "Scenes of Subjection," by Saidiya Hartman. The book's most original and provocative analysis of slavery's wounds is probably its discussion of slave humanity. Slaves were treated as at once subjects and objects, persons and property. American historians have tended to view the necessary recognition of slave personhood as a restraint on slaveholder power. Some studies have painted a more ambiguous picture of this recognition, suggesting that it fueled paternalistic reforms that improved material conditions and family lives but also fortified the institution as a whole. Hartman pushes well beyond this position, arguing that the acknowledgment of slaves' humanity often worked, perversely, to harshen the texture of daily life and intensify their subjection.