Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America. By Saidiya V. Hartman. Race and American Culture. (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997. Pp. x, 281. Paper, $19.95, ISBN 0-19-508984-7; cloth, $45.00, ISBN 0-19-508983-9.) Saidiya V. Hartman's Scenes of Subjection interrogates the apparent transformation from slavery to freedom in nineteenth-century America by paying particular attention to the antebellum and postbellum South. The author hopes to explicate the ambivalence of emancipation in order to address the issues raised by the continuing subjugation of blacks in a liberal nation. Hartman gives particular attention to the role of force and violence in constructing and perpetuating subjugation. She speaks importantly to such major historiographical debates as the question whether antebellum southern slavery was a paternalistic institution. Paternalism has been presented as recognizing the humanity of the enslaved, in part as a response to northern liberalism and abolitionism. In contrast to claims that the master/slave relationship was based upon reciprocal ties of mutual responsibilities and affection, however, Hartman supports those who argue that slavery was fundamentally based upon dehumanizing white physical force and violence. What Hartman's postmodernist analysis perhaps particularly contributes to such debates is her creative use of both traditional and nontraditional historical sources of evidence to interrogate and deconstruct the meaning of the ordinary "scenes of subjection." She thereby reinterprets such routine practices as slave dancing and singing, seemingly encouraged by paternalistic masters, as required demonstrations of white dominance that were epitomized by the forced performance of terrified slaves on the auction block. Hartman's deconstruction of the legal non-existence of the rape of a slave woman also emphasizes the dehumanizing violence of the law of slavery. But, at the same time, the personhood of the enslaved was recognized in the sense that they could be charged and found criminally responsible and blameworthy for wrongdoing. The argument that the association of black agency with blameworthiness comprised a lasting legacy of slavery leads on to the book's second section, in which Hartman focuses on the South after emancipation. Hartman's extended deconstruction of meanings, and her prose, can at times be so convoluted that the reader might at times wonder what she means to say; however, the book's second section helps to clarify her thesis that emphasizing the damaging legacies of slavery to emancipation is central to her critique of an American liberalism that defines "liberty" as the self-mastery of the man who--owning himself--could freely exercise reason, choice, and consent. …

Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America

Bow, Common Sense in the Scottish Enlightenment

The title under review is a translation of an abridgement and revision of Silvia Sebastiani's I limiti del progresso: Razza e genere nell'Illuminismo scozzese (2008). It offers a compelling and gro...

The Scottish Enlightenment: race, gender, and the limits of progress

The Anatomy of Blackness: Science and Slavery in an Age of Enlightenment

Historians have long struggled to comprehend the ways that the enslaved understood the boundaries of their social and affective worlds, seeking to pay the requisite attention to both the intensely local horizons that slavery’s repressive regime imposed on its victims, and the evidence that slaves developed an extra-local racial identity. Of course all historians have portrayed an ongoing tension between the local and the racial, and the dialectic between plantation-based identities mediated through paternalism and a broader national vision rooted in Christianity provides the driving force behind Eugene Genovese’s interpretation of the world the slaves made. Anthony Kaye seeks to change the terms of this discussion by altering the unit of analysis. Kaye thinks that the revisionist historiography that has developed since the 1960s has been too wedded to the concept of the ‘slave community’. That term allows historians to elide the movement from local to trans-local – the slave community can be anything from the community of a single plantation to the community of all of the enslaved – but Kaye’s dissatisfaction lies elsewhere. Sidestepping the degree to which historians turned to community, sometimes gemeinschaft, to counter emphasis on individualism, Kaye argues that the ‘community paradigm’ has left the ‘historiography of antebellum slavery ensconced in’ a ‘liberal framework’ inappropriate to the slaves’ world (9). It has allowed us to recognise that ‘day-to-day resistance’ was more than the childishly nihilistic actions that earlier racist historians had seen, but that insight has come at a cost. As every action by every slave, including decisions about how to dress, what to wear, when to work and how to play have been interpreted under the rubric of resistance, the concept has lost meaning. If everything is resistance, then we gain little analytical purchase on any action by seeing it as resistance. Kaye roots this problem in the anachronistic liberal paradigm that foregrounds individual autonomy as the goal of each of the resisting slaves. He turns from the endlessly selffashioning resisting slave and oppressing master to the tissue of relationships that made up southern neighbourhoods. ‘Everyday resistance’ was, he insists, about something other than the slaves’ autonomy; its struggles were ‘waged on the grounds of another battle for control over social space, a terrain that slaves were compelled to share with owners’ (10), and, as such, one that involved shifting patterns of alliance and enmity. Joining Places moves simultaneously outward from the texture of relationships in slave neighbourhoods in the Natchez region in Mississippi to connections beyond those neighbourhoods, and chronologically forward from settlement during the Slavery and Abolition Vol. 30, No. 3, September 2009, pp. 467–489

The Grateful Slave: The Emergence of Race in Eighteenth-Century British and American Culture

This article makes a case that disability, particularly visual, hearing, and speech impairments, played a significant role in Scottish Enlightenment thought. Focusing on the work of Dugald Stewart, and in particular on his essay ‘Some account of a boy born blind and deaf’, we argue that disability was a deep preoccupation of Scottish Enlightenment thinkers who used it as a test case for various important philosophical questions including those concerning ‘human nature’ and the limits of humanity. The article starts by situating the philosophical debate in the context of lived experiences of, and proximity to, impairment. The second part offers a close reading of Stewart's text ‘Some account’, about James Mitchell, a fourteen-year-old deafblind boy living in the Scottish Highlands. The third part examines how disability operated in relation to other hierarchies of difference that have been demonstrated to have been central to Enlightenment thought, in particular that of race. Overall, the contribution this article makes is to introduce disability as an important, if currently overlooked, category in Scottish Enlightenment thought that needs further investigation.

/pdf/disability-as-a-problem-of-humanity-in-scottish-4wqpzxigoz.pdf

Disability as a Problem of Humanity in Scottish Enlightenment Thought

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Disability as a Problem of Humanity in Scottish Enlightenment Thought