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ALSO BY SAIDIYA HARTMAN
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
W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 500 Fifth Avenue, New York, N.Y. IOIIO
www.wwnorton.com
I 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 0
For those who made the way
CONTENTS
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
(In)sufferable Pleasures 36
The Coffie 48
Performing Blackness 93
5 Fashioning Obligation:
INDEBTED SERVITUDE AND THE LEGACY OF SLAVERY 221
Acknowledgments 379
Notes 385
Annotations 484
Index 491
FOREWORD
Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor
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
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:
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
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
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
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