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isaiahfraley's review against another edition
challenging
dark
informative
reflective
slow-paced
4.25
theoreads_'s review
5.0
i'm not going to act like i will ever have the range to fully understand everything within the 202 pages of this book because i didn't. with that said, Saidiya Harman is remarkable scholar, professor, archivist, and all the above . this was probably one of the most insightful and powerful books i've ever read on black subjectivity/ black suffering (almost unbearable at this time).
reading this definitely changing and helps put into perspective of the black experience. i will be going back to this book for the rest of my life.
reading this definitely changing and helps put into perspective of the black experience. i will be going back to this book for the rest of my life.
miguel's review
5.0
Scenes of Subjection is an encyclopedic text (though Hartman makes no such claim) detailing the means of domination and terror of black men and women in the era of North American chattel slavery and Reconstruction alongside means of resistance and insurgence. Hartman begins with Frederick Douglass (making one of her most memorable and reproduced points — a point precisely about not reproducing sensationalized images of black suffering) and ends with a virtuoso reading of Plessy v. Ferguson.
Her book is split between the period of chattel slavery and the post-emancipating periods. Hartman identifies the quotidian violence punitively heaped upon the enslaved and the involvement of the state. She explores the state's disavowal of its role in white supremacy, the means by which notions of white supremacy are propagated, and the features of language (both legal and social) that are culpable in these formations. Hartman is at her best making incisive readings of legal precedent and social convention that produce serious theoretical points. Hartman also includes important strategic conclusions (such as: "challenges to the inequalities sanctioned in [the private sphere] and the demand for remedies cannot simply seek solutions in state intervention .... Instead remedy depends upon the deconstruction of the private, exposing its overdetermination by the state and making legible the ascription of the state's duties.") Hartman references robust historical detail ranging from pamphlets and public debates to literature and legal transcripts.
Hartman's text is essential both for its content and its method. Scenes is a model of hybrid historical-theoretical work that does not privilege the so-called disinterested historical archive but rather exposes the blindspots by thorough interrogation of that archive and of common sense understandings of history. Hartman is able to not only reveal much of what history effaces, but reveal precisely how that effacement took place.
Her book is split between the period of chattel slavery and the post-emancipating periods. Hartman identifies the quotidian violence punitively heaped upon the enslaved and the involvement of the state. She explores the state's disavowal of its role in white supremacy, the means by which notions of white supremacy are propagated, and the features of language (both legal and social) that are culpable in these formations. Hartman is at her best making incisive readings of legal precedent and social convention that produce serious theoretical points. Hartman also includes important strategic conclusions (such as: "challenges to the inequalities sanctioned in [the private sphere] and the demand for remedies cannot simply seek solutions in state intervention .... Instead remedy depends upon the deconstruction of the private, exposing its overdetermination by the state and making legible the ascription of the state's duties.") Hartman references robust historical detail ranging from pamphlets and public debates to literature and legal transcripts.
Hartman's text is essential both for its content and its method. Scenes is a model of hybrid historical-theoretical work that does not privilege the so-called disinterested historical archive but rather exposes the blindspots by thorough interrogation of that archive and of common sense understandings of history. Hartman is able to not only reveal much of what history effaces, but reveal precisely how that effacement took place.
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