Scenes of Subjection
Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America
Format:Paperback
Publisher:Profile Books Ltd
Published:3rd Oct '24
£12.99
This title is due to be published on 3rd October, and will be despatched as soon as possible.
The groundbreaking debut by the award-winning author of Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments now revised and updated
In this radical re-evaluation of American history, Saidiya Hartman uses her singular talents to create a striking portrait of nineteenth century slavery and its many afterlives. By turning critical attention away from the 'terrible spectacle' of the popular imagination, a fuller understanding of the atrocity can be reached by looking instead toward its characteristic forms of routine terror and quotidian violence. Scenes of Subjection examines these forms of domination that usually go undetected: the encroachments of power that take place through notions of humanity, enjoyment and consent and the roots of Enlightenment ideals in racial subjugation. Delving into what has been withheld and overlooked at the margins of the historical archive, Hartman starkly illuminates the interconnected nature of enslavement, image-making and present-day racism - and the possibilities for Black resistance, redress and transformation. In a work as resonant today as it was on first publication, the updated edition features a new preface by the author, a foreword by Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor, an afterword by Marisa J. Fuentes and Sarah Haley, notations with Cameron Rowland, and compositions by Torkwase Dyson.
One of our most brilliant contemporary thinkers -- Claudia Rankine * New York Times Book Review *
A lodestar for a generation of students and, increasingly, for politically engaged people outside the academy -- Alexis Okeowo * the New Yorker *
What Hartman has to say about both slavery and its continuing resonances should be heard as widely as possible ... A major scholarly contribution to the project of expanding and refining the nation's political memory. * the Nation *
Meticulously researched .... The 25th-anniversary edition of this pathbreaking work of scholarship is a gift to those interested in thinking deeply and expansively about slavery's ever-running machinations. -- Omari Weekes * Vulture *
The brilliance of the book - a brilliance that is considerable, formidable and rare - is present in the space Hartman leaves for the ongoing (re)production of [black] performance in all its guises and for a critical awareness of how each of those guises is always already present in and disruptive of the supposed originality of that primal scene [of violence] -- Fred Moten, author of The Consent Not to Be a Single Being
Innovative ... [Hartman's] writing is impassioned and even lyrical at times ... This is a powerful and thought-provoking examination of slavery's far-reaching legacy * Publishers Weekly *
Sharpens our understanding of whiteness, property, and happiness in startling ways -- David Roediger, author of Wages of Whiteness
ISBN: 9781800819962
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
528 pages
Main