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 ALSO BY SAIDIYA HARTMAN

Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments:

Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval

Lose Your Mother:

A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route
 On the cover. Cameron Rowland, Society, 2020. Cattle brands. 35¾ • 51/, • 4¾
inches. Rental. Christopher Codrington was a Barbadian planter whose book col­
lection formed the Codrington Library at Oxford. Codrington died in 1710, leav­
ing his three plantations in Barbados to the Church of England. The Codrington
plantations were operated by the Church to fund the Society for the Propagation of
the Gospel in Foreign Parts. Enslaved people on the Codrington plantations were
branded with the word "society." The word chattel was derived &om "cattle" as the
property relation of livestock was expanded to refer to all moveable property.

Copyright © 2022, 1997 by Saidiya V. Hartman

Notations © 2022 by Saidiya V. Hartman and Cameron Rowland
Cosmogram drawing © 2022 by Saidiya V. Hartman and Samuel Miller

All rights reserved

Printed in the United States of America
Revised and Updated Edition

First published by Oxford University Press, Inc. in 1997, revised and updated paperback
issued in 2022 by W.W. Norton & Company, Inc.

For information about permission to reproduce selections &om this book, write to
Permissions, W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 1ono

For information about special discounts for bulk purchases, please contact
W.W. Norton Special Sales at [email protected] or 800-233-4830

Manufacturing by Lakeside Book Company

Book design by ChrisWelch
Production manager: Julia Druskin

W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. IOIIO
www.wwnorton.com

W.W. Norton & Company Ltd., 15 Carlisle Street, LondonW1D 3BS

I 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
For those who made the way
 CONTENTS

Foreword KEEANGA-YAMAHTTA TAYLOR XIII

Preface: The Hold of Slavery XXIX

Introduction
Human Flesh 3

Metamorphosis 5

Figurative Capacities 8

A Note on Method 11

I
FORMATIONS OF TERROR AND ENJOYMENT

I Innocent Amusements:
THE STAGE OF SUFFERING 21

The Property of Enjoyment 32

(In)sufferable Pleasures 36

The Coffie 48

Disavowing the Claims of Pain 55

The Pleasant Path 65

 Fraught Pleasures 74

Notation: Transit in the Flesh,

On Being the Object of Property 78

2 Redressing the Pained Body:

TOWARD A THEORY OF PRACTICE 81

The Centrality of Practice 83

The Closures of Sentiment 86

The Character of Practice 90

Performing Blackness 93

Defamiliarizing the "Negro's Enjoyment" 98

Politics without a Proper Locus 103

Stealing Away, the Space of Struggle, and the

Nonautonomy of Practice 110

Embodied Needs and the Politics of Hunger 118

Memory and History 121

The Body of Memory 127

Redress::How the Broken Body Moves 129

Notation: Black Antagonism 134

3 Seduction and the Ruses of Power 137

The Violence of the Law 141

The Bonds of Affection 150

A Brutal Hand, a Yielding Heart 156

The Measure of Humanity 165

Rape and Other Offenses to Existence 169

The Shadow of the Law 178

The Narrative of Seduction: Slave and Paramour 181

The Seduction of the Reader 184

Deliberate Calculation 191

 II
THE SUBJECT OF FREEDOM

4 The Burdened Individuality of Freedom 201

Notation: Cycles of Accumulation and Dispossession 218

5 Fashioning Obligation:
INDEBTED SERVITUDE AND THE LEGACY OF SLAVERY 221

Idle Concerns 223

The Debt of Emancipation 230

The Encumbrance of Freedom 236

Possession by Contract 242

The Will and the Whip 247

Unbecoming Conduct 256

Every Man Is a Master 268

A Curious Domesticity, an Uncertain Form 278

Proximate Dangers, Habitual Intercourse 285

6 Instinct and Injury:

THE JUST AND PERFECT INEQUALITY OF THE COLOR LINE 291

An Obscurity Blacker Than Poverty 299

The Ambivalence of Freedom 304

The Most Representative Person, or a Man Like Any Other 310

Blood and Sentiment 323

The Place of Race 337

Plessy v. Ferguson 341

An Asylum of Inequality 354

Notation: Theses on the Nonevent of Emancipation

or the Graphic Registers of a Moan 364
Afterword MARISA J. FUENTES AND SARAH HALEY 369

Acknowledgments 379

Postscript for the New Edition 381

Notes 385

Selected Bibliography 455

Annotations 484

Index 491
 FOREWORD

Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor

I n the United States, we like to discuss the distortions of the

nation's history as amnesia, when it is more appropriate to under­
stand our affliction as selective memory clotted with omissions
intended to obscure the raw truth about our society. A few years
ago, I traveled to New Orleans for a family vacation after a semester
of teaching about slavery in the United States. I was anxious to visit
the city knowing that by the time the United States ended its role in
the transatlantic slave trade, New Orleans had become the center of
a robust, internal marketplace for enslaved labor. Today, Americans
think of New Orleans as a cultural capital known for its street par­
ties and its Cajun and Creole cuisine, and some may even be familiar
with its history of jazz and other Black artistic creations. But there
is almost no trace of its vital role in the history of American slavery.
There have been more recent efforts in New Orleans to place a
plaque here or there, near areas where tourists traverse, but only
to be found by the most adroit. Today, Jackson Square, located in
the French Quarter, is at the heart of local tourist attractions and
restaurants, but there is hardly any mention or marker of its for­
mer function as an open-air marketplace for buying and selling
enslaved men, women, and children. There is no public memory of
it as the site of the public execution of slaves who participated in an
1811 slave rebellion, the largest in American history. Nor is there
xiv FOREWORD

any recollection that in its grisly aftermath, the heads of executed

slaves were hoisted upon the pikes of the wrought iron gates adorn­
ing the park.
New Orleans is hardly unique as a site of selective memory
when it comes to the public reckoning with its local history of slav­
ery. From the local to the national, our history of slavery has been
recast as part of our narrative of forward progress. Where slavery is
depicted as our founding "national sin," it is as quickly dispatched
as having been exorcized through the carnage of the Civil War, set­
ting the United States upon its essential course toward a more per­
fect union. Slavery's essential role in building the nation's treasure
that would, in turn, facilitate its rise as the most powerful nation
on earth has been minimized, if not wholly ignored. As have been
the roots of slavery to the nation's enduring crisis of racism and its
attendant impacts within the lives of Black people thereafter.
Saidiya Hartman's powerful exploration of slavery and freedom
in the United States, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self­
Making in Nineteenth-Century America, first appeared in print in
1997, during the last period of spoiled "race relations" in the twen­
tieth century. Just a few years prior to its publication, the United
States had experienced the Los Angeles rebellion, the largest urban
insurrection in American history. In response to the uprising, the
American state rallied its political forces around crime legislation
and a prison-building bonanza. The draconian response provoked
the unprecedented outpouring mobilized in the form of the Million
Man March, organized by Louis Farrakhan and led by the Nation
of Islam. The march was not conceived of as a protest, but became
a massive gathering of Black men dejected and marginalized within
an increasingly repressive United States. The mounting instability
of racial politics in the late 1990s precipitated then-president Bill
Clinton's poorly conceived "conversation on race," to be facilitated
by a new commission to study "race relations" in the United States.
 FOREWORD xv

Shortly after its formation, that commission produced a dubiously

titled report called, the "One America Initiative." The remedies
that emerged for healing the "racial divide" in the United States
included a heated debate over whether the president should apol­
ogize for slavery. In 1998, when Bill Clinton traveled to Africa,
the intensifying debate over the apology continued, even as his
spokesperson assured the American public, "He certainly is going
to talk about the legacy of slavery and the scar that it represents
on America," but an apology would be, "extraneous and off the
point." In lieu of an apology, he eventuaHy conceded the painfuHy
obvious: "Going back to the time before we were even a nation,
European Americans received the fruits of the slave trade, and we
were wrong in that."
Twenty-five years later, the United States is embroiled in new
turmoil in its latest iteration of a national reckoning about the con­
tinuing role of racism in American society. In the summer of 2020,
the cumulative weight of the Trump presidency's embrace of white
supremacy, coupled with the horrific carnage produced by the
unprecedented onslaught of a novel coronavirus chewing its way
through Black communities, gave way to unprecedented protests,
when an explosive video captured a modern-day lynching of George
Floyd at the hands of a white police officer. It provoked the latest
national awakening about the continued power of racism within
American society, which has returned us to old and unresolved dis­
cussions about the role of slavery in American history as a way of
understanding the longevity of racism in the United States. This has
included a renewed discussion about reparations for African Ameri­
cans as compensation for a history of unpaid labor. To that end, the
only federal legislation to emerge from the rebellions and protests of
the summer of 2020 has not been for police reform or in the estab­
lishment of new programs intended to improve the life chances of
Black people; it has been the establishment of Juneteenth, a new
xvi FOREWORD

national holiday to commemorate when federal troops arrived in

Texas and freed the enslaved.
This kind of national celebration of the symbolic, while leaving
undisturbed the architecture of oppression that has made African
Americans disproportionately vulnerable to premature death and a
"travestied" freedom, has been a hallmark of the Black experience
since the abolition of slavery. This is not to say that the national
recognition of the end of slavery is unimportant, but it does serve to
reinforce what formally concluded, while paying almost no atten­
tion to what carried on after slavery. Instead, the celebrations of
the abolition of slavery and the misassumption that it inaugurated
Black people into personhood and then citizenship have served to
mute other conversations about the ways that one form of bondage
gave way to new coercive relationships. This is less about cynicism
concerning the immutability of racism or even anti-Blackness than
it is an expression of extraordinary pessimism about American lib­
eralism and all of its haughty conceits about its universalism, auton­
omy, and justice.
Neither a historian nor social scientist, Saidiya Hartman is a
scholar of criticism, law, cultural history, and slavery. Scenes was
a pioneering achievement of interdisciplinary scholarship just as
such work was being called upon to provide differing insights while
applying varied methodological applications as a means to invoke
different kinds of interventions. Here, Hartman's work breathed
new life into scholastic understanding of performance studies,
as well as prescient analyses of racial capitalism in cultural stud­
ies and criticism. Indeed, Scenes should be considered among the
texts that have spelled out the mutually constitutive relationship
between racism and capitalism in American history. Hartman has
become a master at cracking through disciplinary and genre road­
blocks and facades that for years have acted as gatekeepers around
specific bodies of knowledge. Yet Scenes and subsequent work from
 FOREWORD xvii

Hartman upholds scholarly standards of rigor based in evidence and

command of scholarly debates, including where one fits and departs
from the conversations. Indeed, Scenes of Subjection does not retell
the history of slavery and emancipation; instead Hartman is asking
us to think differently about these events. Not as part of the narra­
tive arc of justice and progress in American history, but as affirma­
tion of a kind of deeply constrained and compromised conception of
democracy and liberty in the first place, which inevitably then gave
way to constrained and compromised visions of freedom in slavery's
aftermath. Hartman is challenging the assumption that the contin­
ued forms of subjugation endured by ordinary Black people after
slavery's end are only the result of ongoing patterns of exclusion
from the governing and financial institutions of the country, leaving
inclusion as the solution. Instead, Hartman has asked us to consider
different questions, namely, what is meant by freedom? If freedom is
simply the opposite of bondage, while affording nothing other than
the right to compete with other free people in a human scrum for
income, food, clothing, and housing, then it is an exceedingly thin
and narrow conception of liberty. If, however, we think of freedom
as a right to move through life with genuine self-possession that can
only be rooted in the satisfaction of basic human needs and desires,
then Black emancipation in the United States was something alto­
gether different. Indeed, how could a conception of freedom that
was so intimately conjoined with enslavement produce any other
outcome, when the only thing separating slavery from freedom was
the declaration that it was over? With no effort to address the past,
to heal the deformation cast unto Blackness that had been used to
rationalize and legitimize slavery, and with no effort to ease the
transition from property to person with freedom dues, then, as Du
Bois lamented, the freedpeople enjoyed an ever-brief moment in the
sun only to return to a condition as near to slavery as slavery itself.
It is also important to convey that the historical omissions and
xviii FOREWORD

the occurrences of unfreedom that shape the Black entry into per­
sonhood in the United States and that have been perpetuated there­
after, are not simply oversights, unfortunate slips, or other kinds of
accidental erasures born of ignorance and, essentially, innocence.
They are contrived, mean-spirited, and deliberate. The United
States' self-idealization as an "exceptional" country in its demo­
cratic founding and promises of unfettered social mobility necessar­
ily diminishes the centrality of slavery and racism in the country's
ascendance as a world power. Indeed, the country's periodic return
to slavery as a metaphorical "original sin" not only creates an origin
story for racism in the United States, but it also explains its persis­
tence after slavery as a hangover or vestige in an otherwise narrative
arc bending toward progress. Where racism does reoccur, it is the
work of backward individuals who see color. Where disparities in
jobs, housing, education, and beyond exist, the problem is with the
individual unable to assimilate into the affluence that America has
to offer. The notion of "systemic racism" is rejected, while lapsed
personal responsibility is assumed. And where white poverty is hid­
den, and thus exoticized upon discovery, Black poverty is ubiqui­
tous, expected, and ultimately, paradigmatic.
Hartman is suggesting that instead of thinking of America's
persisting crises of racial inequity, domination, and subjugation as
the accumulated toll of missed opportunities, failed programs, and

policy conundrums, that perhaps we consider a deeper, existential

problem with American democracy itself. American freedom, lib­
erty, justice, and ultimately democracy came into being through
slavery, genocide, rape, dispossession, murder, and terror. Indeed,
it was the actual existence of slavery that crystalized the moral
valence of liberty and freedom for the founders. It is well known that
the leading lights of the American Revolution compared their status
as colonial subjects of the British Parliament to enslavement. The
founders invoked slavery as a rallying cry to marshal their forces.
 FOREWORD xix

It was part rhetoric and metaphor, but it was also buttressed by a

reality that, in fact, they intimately understood that slavery meant
an abject absence of freedom and total subordination to another
person's will. The deep understanding of slavery, as slaveholders,
formed their understanding of freedom and liberty. Moreover, the
enslaved embodied abject Blackness, thus providing a negative mir­
ror for white men to imagine their lives in sharp contrast to. Con­
sider the insights of a white lawyer from South Carolina who wrote
in 1775, "Liberty ...is a principle which naturally and spontane­
ously contrasts with slavery. In no country on earth can the line of
distinction ever be marked so boldly.... Here there is a standing
subject of comparison, which must be ever perfect and ever obvi­
ous....The constant example of slavery stimulates a free man to
avoid being confounded with the blacks ....Slavery, so far from
being inconsistent, has, in fact, a tendency to stimulate and perpet­
uate the spirit of liberty." It is not only that slavery provided a nega­
tive meaning for American liberty, but its realization within private
property, possessive individualism, and its eventual glorification of
the so-called free market, narrowed its benefits to an even smaller
number, initially to be shared among wealthy white men with land
and eventually to white men of any standing.
Given the symmetry between slavery and freedom, then, for
Hartman, the persistence of unfreedom in the aftermath of slavery
was predictable. The voices of those African Americans who lived
within and then after slavery could attest to this confounding reality
as clearly as anyone. In 1937, a woman who had lived in slavery and
was later interviewed in the controversial Works Progress Admin­
istration project that recorded survivors of slavery could speak to
these continuities.Her name was Patsy Mitchner, and she perfectly
captured the riddle of American freedom in Black hands. She said,
"Slavery was a bad thing, and freedom, of the kind we got, with
nothing to live on, was bad. Two snakes full of poison. One lying
xx FOREWORD

with his head pointing north, the other with his head pointing south.
Their names was slavery and freedom. The snake called slavery lay
with his head pointed south, and the snake called freedom lay with
his head pointed north. Both bit the nigger, and they was both bad." 1
It is important to note that Hartman's examination is not a new
tributary feeding the larger pools of critical race theory that have
examined the ways that American law has been a tool in stripping
the meaning and substance out of Black achievement of civil rights.
As she writes in her endnotes:

Legal liberalism, as well as critical race theory, has examined

issues of race, racism, and equality by focusing on the exclu­
sion and marginalization of those subjects and bodies marked
as different....The disadvantage of this approach is that the
proposed remedies and correctives to the problem-inclusion,
protection, and greater access of opportunity-do not ulti­
mately challenge the economy of racial production or its truth
claims or interrogate the exclusions constitutive of the norm,
but instead seek to gain equality, liberty, and redress within its
confines.

In other words, by simply examining the regime of exclusions that

has been at the heart of liberal critiques of the American state, the
nature of the state has gone underexamined. This is especially true
of mid-twentieth-century racial liberalism, which held the assump­
tion that the central problem in the United States was that of exclu­
sion, as opposed to extraction, accumulation, and dispossession
as organizing principles for the American state and the political
class that facilitates its function. In other words, the racial liber­
als assumed that the inclusion of Black Americans into the Ameri­
can mainstream would produce a large Black middle class, as had
been done among white Americans. While it is undoubtedly true
 FOREWORD XXI

that some portions of Black Americans were incorporated into

the mainstream of American society, different modes of inclusion
also included new opportunities for economic exploitation, dispos­
session, and extraction from African Americans as well. It was a
well-rehearsed pattern, even if in different eras, different intentions
motivated the rhetoric of inclusion. For example, after Emancipa­
tion, the inclusion of African Americans into contract-making­
a document joining together parties based on their own will and
volition-did not only create new opportunities for autonomy, but
also for new forms of coercion as the elite of the white South raced
to reconstitute their labor force under conditions as close to slavery
as they could legally finagle.
It is the nature of the liberal American state to which Hartman
returns, and its particularly pernicious effects in the lives of Black
people. But the absence of self-determination afforded to freedpeo­
ple meant that even when they were formally accepted into the body
politic or civic society, inclusion existed within a web of coercive
inducements masquerading as sovereign individualism. Capitalist
societies like the United States prosely tized the virtues of autonomy
and self-possession, while simultaneously organizing an economic
order that produced class differences that impaired unfettered
access to rights, property, and other forms of wealth and possession.
As Hartman points out, after slavery, there were two freedoms in
the United States: freedom from bondage and the freedom to starve.
Freedoms correlated with the market produced enormous wealth
and power for some, but immiserating poverty for others, and in the
process, undermined the autonomy, liberty, and self-possession of
the poor and working classes. In other words, post-Emancipation
American freedom was imagined as consistent and the fulfilment of
a market-based economy, thus valorizing individualism and auton­
omy as products of personal success, in contrast to what historian
Thomas Holt observed: "Throughout most of human history the
xxii FOREWORD

highest value or good has been to achieve a sense, not of autonomy,

but of belonging, that psychic and physical security of incorporation
into the group." Nevertheless, these were the conditions of freedom
into which Black freedpeople were liberated. Their situation was
then compounded by color and utter dispossession, thereby height­
ening the coercive measures undertaken to compel Black people to
return to the work that had previously defined their existence.
Hartman is also suggesting something beyond the deficiencies of
the American state to understand the continuing patterns of subju­
gation that define the Black experience. Part I of Scenes is dedicated
to interrogating the ways that the Black subject is constructed and
how this construction contributes to their marginalization in the
aftermath of slavery. Indeed, the insistence that Black freedpeople
could simply slip into the garments of American citizenship with no
trace of the "badges or incidents" of slavery as garish adornments
upon their person, was to ignore the ways that Blackness had been
cast as abject in the hands of buyers and sellers of Black bodies. This
blind spot obscured the ways that slavery, race, and racism marked
the Black body, then ignored how those etchings placed the Black
subject outside of and beyond the rationale and logic of universal­
ism, including the legal frameworks that had been built to govern
a republic conceived of as only for white men. Within the regime
of slavery, slave subjectivity did not exist in any formal capac­
ity beyond the ways that the state could define the crimes of the
enslaved and enumerate punishment against the enslaved. But with
no punishment by the nineteenth century for the rape or murder
of the enslaved, Black women, men, and children were effectively
excluded from the liberal framework of personhood and all its atten­
dant rights and responsibilities.
The absence of legal protections made the enslaved vulnerable
to the forms of depraved violence that pervaded the institution of
slavery. The display of violence against the enslaved to engender
 FOREWORD xxiii

sympathy or empathy as a means to gather opposition to slavery

called upon white sympathizers to put themselves in the place of the
slave to form an opposition to slavery. In doing so, the experience of
the enslaved person is lost again, while the emotional drama of the
white sympathizer is the action that must be assuaged. The result
may, in fact, be the end of slavery, but nothing has been done to
repair or restore the harm done to the enslaved. In fact, the experi­
ences of the enslaved have barely been attended, because the focus
has been trained on the emotional experience of white witnesses.
It is also an example of the ways that, within the liberal frame­
work, even abolitionists were complicit in reinforcing conceptions
of abject Blackness while decrying slavery. For Hartman this is not
a morality play; it is simply to say that slavery was so closely sutured
to freedom in America that it was impossible to imagine the social
relations of Black and white outside of its paradigm.
Hartman argues for a different approach in distilling the bru­
tality of slavery. By looking at what she describes as the "quotidian
routines of slavery," Hartman suggests that we can see something
even more insidious about the institution. In this way, she exam­
ines the demand of slaves as entertainment for white audiences as
a potentially more fruitful place to understand slavery as a site of
domination. Here, Hartman's delve into performance and the mul­
tiple meanings of "embodiment" in her discussion of Blackness as
an invention of white society not only draws attention to a different
kind of brutality during this period, but it also prefaces the extraor­
dinary complexity of Black freedom after slavery. The forced jocu­
larity created through the command of white audiences, but also
as deception deployed by the enslaved, in both cases as a means to
dissimulate either terror or disobedience, was also evidence of the
brutality of slavery. Whether making the enslaved dance through
the Middle Passage, charm on the auction block, or minstrel to
brighten the doldrums of white workers, Blackness is construed as
xxiv FOREWORD

irrevocably joy ful, carefree, lascivious, and impervious. Even where

enslaved people slipped into the affectations of Blackness to com­
fort an owner with their submission, there was no greater evidence
of subjection.
But the misunderstanding of Black participation within these
formal and informal routines could also be touted as evidence of
volition, will, and agency within the framework of slavery. These
perceptions reinforced ideas that remained popular about Ameri­
can slavery well into the twentieth century, namely that the institu­
tion was familial and pastoral, thereby assuming the complicity of
the enslaved, albeit with periodic eruptions of patriarchal violence.
Where those ideas don't necessarily prevail, we still find their trace.
Consider the school of the new social historical studies of slavery
that emerged in the 1960s and '70s. A feature of the new social
history was the search for slaves' resistance to their condition as
evidence to challenge the perception that slaves were so dominant
that they had no conceivable lives outside of the direction of their
owners. The new social historians, many of whom had been influ­
enced by the social movements of the 1960s, wanted to show that
slaves had their own lives independent of slavery, where examples
of their autonomy and self-possession could be identified. Hart­
man, in anticipation of Walter Johnson's later and well-known and
critical essay "On Agency," cautions against the easy invocation
of "slave's agency" as a means of capturing "slave humanity."2 If
agency is an expression of free will and volition-the very essence
of liberal self-making and self-possession-then how do we locate
these expressions in the actions of human property? The notion
of the consent or autonomy of slaves to opt in or out of any thing
essentially "neutralizes the dilemma of the object status and pained
subject constitution of the enslaved and obscures the violence of
slavery." Well-intended efforts to "humanize" the enslaved by
pointing to disparate moments of activity can assume consent with
 FOREWORD XXV

enslavement elsewhere. Conflating agency with activity imposes a

kind of autonomy and freedom in the choices made by the enslaved
that obfuscates the conditions of subjection and abjection under­
stood in a system of slavery. As Hartman argues, "If agency is sim­
ply about the capacity to act, it does not tell us nearly enough about
the conditions within which one is acting, the material makeup of
the forces that one is acting against, or the wider contexts within
which these actions take place." Implied in the hunt for slave agency
is an implicit representation of slavery as a negotiated relationship
where the enslaved could haggle over the terms of their bondage. In
the end, the notion that slaves wielded choice or had agency in their
daily negotiations within slavery softens our perceptions of the sys­
tem while humanizing its architects. This, of course, doesn't mean
that the enslaved did not resist their enslavement. As Hartman
points out: "Strategies of domination don't exhaust all possibilities
of intervention, resistance, escape, refusal, or transformation." The
question is how to understand the constraints shaping resistance
without reinscribing enslavement as a normative condition.
The domination and subordination at the core of American
enslavement shaped the afterlife of Black Americans as freedpeople.
The continuation of abuse and recurring efforts across the South to
reimpose the conditions of slavery on the freed were enshrined into
law with the Black Codes in slavery's immediate aftermath. The
codes were ultimately abolished and replaced with a new federal
law, the 1866 Civil Rights Act, which along with the Reconstruction
Amendments, was passed to allow for African Americans to become
citizens of the United States. Black people were no longer formally
excluded from the rights endowed by citizenship, but they were also
freed with almost no discernible means to create new lives outside of
bondage. Their newfound poverty was now mapped onto an existing
antipathy of Blackness that had not only built up over two centu­
ries of legal enslavement, but that had also been reinforced by new
xxvi FOREWORD

expertise and pseudoscience that elocuted the inferiority and social

and scientific deformation of Black people. Moreover, not only had
conceptions of freedom like autonomy and possessive individualism
only ever been imagined as quintessentially white, the 1866 Civil
Rights Act used whiteness as the baseline standard for understand­
ing the rights available to Black people. In the legislation, the enu­
meration of the rights of citizenship is followed by the phrase "as is
enjoyed by white citizens." The efforts to base new laws, rights, and
citizenship on a concept of white universalism obscured more than
it clarified. It created the conditions where specific Black demands
for redress, repair, or standing could only be construed as "special
rights." The law performed colorblindness in a country where the
color-conscious subordination of Black people had been a core fea­
ture since its eighteenth-century founding.
In this sense, the modern United States came into formation
when the U.S. Supreme Court, in the 1883 Civil Rights Cases, hol­
lowed out the Civil Rights Act of 1875, which had relied upon an
expansive reading of the Thirteenth Amendment as abolishing slav­
ery and all of its requisite "badges and incidents," invariably includ­
ing the private sector, where racism could rage like wildfire. The
Civil Rights Cases ruling was the final wedge necessary to separate
the laws governing the supposed public sphere from the private. The
ruling declared the private sphere to be free from the legal require­
ments to recognize the rights of Black citizens, effectively reconsti­
tuting Black citizenship to an exceedingly small set of locations. The
justices wrote:

The Xlllth Amendment relates only to slavery and involun­

tary servitude (which it abolishes); ... yet such legislative
power extends only to the subject of slavery and its incidents;
and the denial of equal accommodations in inns, public con­
veyances and places of public amusement (which is forbidden
 FOREWORD xxvii

by the sections in question), imposes no badge of slavery or

involuntary servitude upon the party, but at most, infringes
rights which are protected from State aggression by the XIVth
Amendment.

Justice Joseph P. Bradley continued:

When a man has emerged from slavery, and by the aid of benef­
icent legislation has shaken off the inseparable concomitants
of that state, there must be some stage in the progress of his
elevation when he takes the rank of a mere citizen, and ceases
to be the special favorite of the laws, and when his rights as a
citizen, or a man, are to be protected in the ordinary modes by
which other men's rights are protected. There were thousands
of free colored people in this country before the abolition of
slavery, enjoying all the essential rights of life, liberty and
property the same as white citizens; yet no one, at that time,
thought that it was any invasion of his personal status as a free­
man because he was not admitted to all the privileges enjoyed
by white citizens, or because he was subjected to discrimina­
tions in the enjoyment of accommodations in inns, public con­
veyances and places of amusement. Mere discriminations on
account of race or color were not regarded as badges of slavery.
If, since that time, the enjoyment of equal rights in all these
respects has become established by constitutional enactment,
it is not by force of the Thirteenth Amendment (which merely
abolishes slavery), but by force of the Thirteenth and Fifteenth
Amendments.

With the court abdicating any legal responsibility for the defense
and protection of Black citizens, while preserving a socially permis­
sible private sphere of racism, the eventual Plessy v. Ferguson ruling
xxviii FOREWORD

in 1896 was inevitable. This is not the discourse of fatalism, but it is

at the core of the actual reckoning we must grapple with. The legal
tools inscribed by the most powerful court in the country reflected
the deteriorated status of Black people, while also working to fur­
ther degrade their condition. The lack of power inherent in not even
being able to accurately define your social position is an affront to
any notion of self-determination, self-possession, autonomy, and
is certainly not liberty. It is a state of subjection, different from
enslavement, but unfree, nonetheless.
Scenes ofSubjection is not a dour lament on the fixity of this condi­
tion, but it is an unrelenting argument that these conditions cannot
be changed by tinkering with laws that never address the root of the
affliction in the first place. We must look at the totality of the soci­
ety and the foundation upon which it was built to understand why,
even more than one hundred and fifty years after slavery, ordinary
Black people continue to suffer from the vicious entrapments of rac­
ism. Twenty-five years after this spectacular book first appeared, a
twenty-first-century social movement evincing the most elemental
recognition of humanity calls itself Black Lives Matter in hope to
make it so. It is a centuries-long quest that may only be recognized
with the realization that it may require a completely different soci­
ety, where inclusion and humanity are understood expansively and
broadly, where freedom is the absence of coercion, and human need
and fulfilment are the bottom upon which our lives can be rebuilt.
 PREFACE
The Hold of Slavery

T he conviction that I was living in the world created by slavery

propelled the writing of this book. I could feel the force and
disfigurement of slavery in the present. The life of the captive and
the commodity certainly wasn't my past, but rather the threshold of
my entry into the world. Its grasp and claim couldn't be cordoned
off as what happened then. For me, the relation between slavery and
the present was open, unfinished.
In rereading Scenes of Subjection, I am struck by the breathless­
ness of the prose, by its ardent desire to say it all, to say everything
at once. If it were possible, I might have written it as a 345-page­
long sentence. This sentence would be written in the past, present,
and future tense. Temporal entanglement best articulates the still
open question of abolition and the long-awaited but not yet actu­
alized freedom declared over a century and a half ago. The hold of
slavery was what I sought to articulate and convey. The category
crisis of human flesh and sentient commodity defined the existence
of the enslaved and this predicament of value and fungibility would
shadow their descendants, the blackened and the dispossessed.1 I
also hoped to change the terms in which we understood racial slav­
ery, by attending to its diffuse terror and the divisions it created
between life and not life. The scenes of subjection I endeavored to
unpack were not those of spectacular violence-the thirty-three
XXX PREFACE

lashes at the whipping post, the torture, rape, and brutality ubiqui­
tous on the plantation, the public rituals of lynching and dismem­
berment, the vast arsenal of implements employed to harm and
maim, the Sadeian pursuits, the endless variations of humiliation
and dishonor, and the compulsive displays of the broken and vio­
lated body-all of which were endemic to slavery and key to the
cultivation of antislavery sentiment and pedagogy. My interest lay
elsewhere. To be subjected to the absolute power of another and to
be interpellated as a subject before the law were the dimensions of
subjection that most concerned me. I intended to bring into view
the ordinary terror and habitual violence that structured everyday
life and inhabited the most mundane and quotidian practices. This
environment of brutality and extreme domination affected the most
seemingly benign aspects of the life of the enslaved and could not be
eluded, no matter the nature of one's condition, whether paramour,
offspring, dutiful retainer, or favored nursemaid. The shift from the
spectacular to the everyday was critical in illuminating the ongoing
and structural dimensions of violence and slavery's idioms of power.
No less important was the domain of practice. In creating an
inventory of ways of doing and a genealogy of refusal, I tried to
account for extreme domination and the possibilities seized in prac­
tice. Black performance and quotidian practice were determined
by and exceeded the constraints of domination. This dimension has
received less attention in the reception of the book. The focus on its
arguments about empathy, terror and violence, subjection and social
death has overshadowed the discussion of practice. Scenes endeav­
ored to illuminate the countless ways in which the enslaved chal­
lenged, refused, defied, and resisted the condition of enslavement
and its ordering and negation of life, its extraction and destruction
of capacity. The everyday practices, the ways of living and dying,
of making and doing, were attempts to slip away from the status of
commodity and to affirm existence as not chattel, as not property, as
 PREFACE XXXI

not wench. Even when this other state could not be named, because
incommensurate or untranslatable within the conceptual field of
the enclosure, the negation of the given was ripe with promise. The
wild thought and dangerous music of the enslaved gave voice to
other visions of the possible and refused captivity as the only hori­
zon, opposed the framework of property and commodity, contested
the idea that they were less than human, nurtured acts of venge­
ance, and anticipated divine retribution.
This subjugated knowledge or speculative knowledge of free­
dom would establish the vision of what might be, even if unrealizable
within the prevailing terms of order. It explains why a commodity
might describe themself as human flesh, or a fugitive trapped in a
garret write letters describing a free life in the North, or a hand
laboring in the field read the signs and take note of "the drops of
blood on the corn as though it was dew &om heaven" and in the
woods discern in the arrangement of leaves a hieroglyph of freedom
coming, or an ex-slave prove capable of imagining "an auspicious
era of extensive freedom," as does Olaudah Equiano in The Inter­
esting Narrative: "May the time come-at least the speculation is
to me pleasing-when the sable people shall gratefully commem­
orate the auspicious era of extensive &eedom."2 It is a curious and
prescient formulation. How does one commemorate what has yet
to arrive?
In the context of social death, everyday practices explored the
possibility of transfigured existence and cultivated an imagination of
the otherwise and elsewhere, cartographies of the fantastic utterly
antagonistic to slavery. The enslaved refused to accept the order of
values that had transformed them into units of currency and cap­
ital, beasts and crops, breeders, incubators, lactating machines,
and sentient tools. At secret meetings and freedom schools, hidden
away in loopholes of retreat and hush arbors, gathered at the river or
dwelling in the swamp, the enslaved articulated a vision of freedom
xxxii PREFACE

that far exceeded that of the liberal imagination. It enabled them to

conceive other ways of existing, flee the world of masters and invite
its fiery destruction, anticipate the upheaval that would put "the
bottom rail on top," nurture a collective vision of what might be
possible when no longer enslaved, and sustain belief in the inevita­
bility of slavery's demise. A messianic vision of the last days and the
end of world was articulated in a range of quotidian practices, from
work songs to the ring shout, a circle dance of worship and divine
communion. Such practices shaped the contours of the day-to-day.
An expansive register of minor gestures, ways of sustaining and
creating life, caring for one another, undoing slavery by small acts
of stealth and destruction, communal dreaming, sacred transport,
acts of redress, and faith in a power greater than master and nation
made it possible to survive the unbearable while never acceding to
it. The arrangement of stars in the night sky, the murmur and echo
of songs traveling across a river, the revered objects buried near a
prayer tree, the rumors of fugitives in the swamp or maroons in the
hills nourished dreams of a free territory, or an existence without
masters, or a plot against the plantation, or reveries of miraculous
deliverance.

In the archive of slavery, I encountered a paradox: the recognition

of the slave's humanity and status as a subject extended and intensi­
fied servitude and dispossession, rather than conferring some small
measure of rights and protection. The attributes of the human­
will, consciousness, reason, agency, and responsibility-were the
inroads of discipline, punishment, and mortification. This foreshad­
owed the subject of freedom and the limits of personhood bound
indissolubly to property. The recognition of the formerly enslaved
as a newly endowed subject of rights was not the entry to the prom-
 PREFACE xxxiii

ised land. This should not have been a surprise. Western humanism
was born in the context of the Atlantic slave trade and racial slav­
ery. It became apparent that being a subject was not the antidote to
being a slave, but rather that these figures were intimate, twinned.
I wanted for some other end: a true abolition of property, a leveling
of the vertical order of life, a messianic cessation, a way of keeping
terror at bay, a rampart against devastation and the dangers of what
lived on.
Any certainty about the historical divide between slavery and
freedom proved to be increasingly elusive. The exclusion and hier­
archy constitutive of the discourse of rights and man and the rac­
ism of the white republic and the settler nation were robust and not
to be eradicated by acts or proclamations or field orders or amend­
ments. The movement from slave to "man and citizen" would be
impeded, thwarted. The restricted vision of freedom offered by the
liberal imagination, a vision even more attenuated and hollowed out
by counterrevolution, economic predation, antiblack violence, and
white supremacy, would not transform the plantation, or abolish
racial slavery and its badges or indices, or eradicate caste, or negate
the legacy and stigma of having been chattel.
With the advent of Emancipation, only the most restricted and
narrow vision of freedom was deemed plausible: the physical release
from bondage and the exercise and imposition of the contract­
this and little more. In the aftermath of slavery's formal demise,
the old relations of servitude and subordination were recreated
in a new guise. The signs of this were everywhere apparent: The
enslaved failed to be compensated for centuries of unremunerated
labor. They never received the material support or resources nec­
essary to give flesh to words like "equality" and "citizen." The gulf
between blacks, marked and targeted as not human or as lesser
humans and social inferiors, and white citizens only widened. A
wave of revanchism and counterrevolution engulfed the nation.
xxxiv PREFACE

Racist violence intensified and white citizens committed a series of

massacres with the goal of returning the newly freed to their proper
place. The "gift of freedom" gave birth to the landless tenant and
the indebted worker. The enslaved were transformed into a new kind
of property-alienable labor or property in the self; but in all other
ways they were without resources. This property in the self was to
be sold and exchanged, at least as an ideal. Again, one entered the
world of objects and social relations congealed as the circulation of
goods and things. The contract enabled the transition from slavery
to involuntary servitude, and the much-lauded exercise of choice
was shored up by the threat of punishment and imprisonment.
The liberty to sell one's labor resulted in sharecropping, peonage,
and immiseration, and the failure to exercise this liberty led to the
chain gang or being leased as a convict. Coercion rather than con­
sent defined the free market and free labor. Equality was interpreted
and adjudicated to enforce segregation, the regime of separate but
equal, and the hierarchy of racially differentiated life. The enormity
and tragedy of this stopped me in my tracks.
It was not hindsight but the restricted scope of freedom, espe­
cially when contrasted with what might or could be, that made me
pause and question: What, exactly, were the social arrangements
envisioned and desired after Emancipation? Was captivity the pre­
vailing schema, not by default but design? Could an idea of freedom
fundamentally bound to property do anything other than repro­
duce dispossession and confirm the alienability and disposability
of life and capacity? Could democracy built on racial slavery and
settler colonialism ever sustain freedom, repair what has been bro­
ken, return what has been stolen, release land to earth, provide to
each according to their needs, and enable all to thrive? The answer
remains a resounding "no." As many ex-slaves remarked, freedom
without material resources was another kind of slavery. So, when
my attention turned to freedom and its philosophical and legal
 PREFACE XXXV

foundations, I realized how formative and enduring the hold of slav­

ery continued to be. The liberal conception of freedom had been
built on the bedrock of slavery.
With striking ease and facility, new modalities of involuntary
servitude emerged to replace and replicate the old one. Abolition
remained an aspiration, rather than a feat realized and completed. I
didn't yet have the language of the "afterlife of slavery " to describe
the structural hold of racial slavery. Yet, it is clear I was writing
toward this concept, which would be developed in Lose Your Mother
and "Venus in Two Acts."3
If the conventional narrative "from slavery to freedom" failed to
capture the temporal entanglement of racial slavery as our past and
our present, the lasting effects of the slave's exile from and precari­
ous belonging to the category of the human, the recursive character
of violence and accumulation, and the long duration of unfreedom,
then how might I frame and approach such matters? How might
I interrupt the traditional account, revise historical chronology,
cast doubt on the progressive arc and telos of narrative, and blast
open the time of slavery? I searched for a critical lexicon that would
elucidate slavery and its modes of power and forms of subjection,
and challenge the prevailing understanding of the enslaved as a
constricted or impaired version of the worker and the individual,
terms which seemed to obscure the state and condition of enslave­
ment rather than clarify it. This framework, even as amended for
the black worker and newly minted subject, failed to perceive or
comprehend the modes of domination, the distribution of death, the
role of reproductive labor, and the forms of gendered and sexual
violence that sustained racial slavery.4 So how best to describe this
anomalous existence distributed between the category of subject
and object, person and thing? Or the figurative capacity that ena­
bled the captive to fulfill any and every need, from cotton produc­
tion to fellatio. The plantation was hell, factory, killing ground, and
xxxvi PREFACE

Sodom. In attempting to explicate the violence of slavery and its

idiom of power, Scenes moved away from the notion of the exploited
worker or the unpaid laborer toward the captive and the fungible,
the commodity and the dominated, the disposable and the sexually
violated, to describe the dynamics of accumulation and disposses­
sion, social reproduction and social death, seduction and libidinal
economy, and to highlight the vexed relation of the enslaved to the
category of the human.
In striving to describe the context of racial slavery, what quickly
became apparent was the insufficiency of the prevailing concepts of
power, subjection, exploitation, and politics. Slavery was the blind
spot in critical theory.5 I was determined to name and articulate the
character of power, which was an assemblage of extreme domina­
tion, disciplinary power, biopower, and the sovereign right to make
die. The dimensions of subjection traversed the categories of human,
animal, and plant. The modes of accumulation and exploitation
failed to be explained by precapitalist modes of production or the
factory floor. The character of gendered and sexual difference, and
negated maternity and severed kinship, bore no resemblance to the
intimate arrangements of the white bourgeois family and cast out
the enslaved from the nomenclature of the human.
Scenes of Subjection was a radical departure from the extant his­
torical literature. Conservative scholarship had minimized the role
of racial slavery in the making of capitalist modernity, failed to
theorize race, characterized slavery as a premodern mode of pro­
duction, denied the magnitude of the violence required to produce
the human commodity and reproduce the relations of master and
slave, and replicated the assumptions of romantic racialism and the
plantation pastoral by describing slavery as a paternal institution
characterized by reciprocity and consent, an approach which has
been characterized as "Aunt Jemima in Dialectics." 6 The work of
radical historians and intellectuals was devoted to refuting such
 PREFACE xxxvii

assertions and celebrating slave agency, excavating slave culture,

demonstrating black humanity and re&iiic:nce in the face of dehu­
manization, recognizing the enduring totality of African beliefs and
values despite the rupture of the Middle Passage, and fundamen­
tally challenged the idea of the damaged person or psyche produced
by centuries of enslavement. They did so by emphasizing the vitality
of black culture, the autonomous zones created in the slave quarters
and the provision grounds, and the strength of the black family. The
goal of these radical scholars was to affirm black humanity in the
confines of racial capitalism and the plantation's brutality. Scenes
was indebted to the work of these radical scholars, but mine was a
different task. I set out to detail the entanglement of humanity and
violence, liberal philosophy and racial reason, the human and its
devalued others.
The matters engaged in Scenes-the domain of practice, the
everyday forms of making and doing, black performance, the
imagination of freedom, social death and the afterlife of slavery,
the violence of the archive and methods for transposing its state­
ment, involuntary servitude and the longstanding struggle to elude
and defeat it, the antagonism to capitalist discipline, the refusal of
work, the movement of the unsovereign, dispossession and racial­
ized enclosure, transfiguration, and a language for black existence
not bound to property or the subject-wouid preoccupy me for two
decades.
In Scenes, I first wrestled with questions of the archive-what
it enabled and what it prevented us from knowing or discerning.
Could I use its statements, yet destroy the master's tools? It was in
these pages that I initially used the term "fabulation," but the term
was latent, not yet emergent. Even then, I wanted to use the archive
to create another order of statements, to produce a different account
of what had happened and what might be possible. Here the work of
novelists and poets provided a model.I I sought to create a method
xxxviii PREFACE

that acknowledged and comprehended the violence of the archive

and the forms of silence and oblivion it produced, and yet endeav­
ored to use the archive for contrary purposes. It was an engagement
that reckoned with the power of the archive but dared attempt to
exceed the limits imposed and render a radically different account
of black existence. For the archive is also a repository of practices, a
textual trace of the repertoire that transforms and refuses the given.
I feel extremely fortunate that the contribution of Scenes has
been significant enough to merit its republication on its twenty­
fifth anniversary. My peers as well as a generation of younger schol­
ars have embraced Scenes and extended and elaborated its critical
vocabulary: empathy, fungibility, subjection, black performance,
the property of enjoyment, the attenuation of consent and agency,
the figurative capacities of blackness, sexual violence and negligi­
ble injury, redress, the violence of reciprocity and mutuality in the
context of extreme domination, the ruses of power, the nonevent
of Emancipation, infidelity to the timeline of history or embrace of
temporal entanglement, affirming other ways of knowing or sub­
jugated knowledge. It is impossible for me to read the book today
without hearing these other voices, without reading between the
lines for the contributions of my interlocutors.
The freighted last paragraph of the book attempted to underscore
the incompleteness of freedom and the hold of slavery. What did it
mean to exist between the "no longer" enslaved and the "not yet"
free? What awaited us was another century of extreme domination,
precarious life, dispossession, impoverishment, and punishment.
What awaited us were centuries of struggle animated by visions
that exceeded the wreckage of our lives, by the avid belief in what
might be.
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