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

African American Review, Winter, 1999 by Anita Patterson

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."