THE HOLD
OF SLAVERY
SAIDIYA HARTMAN
First published online in e New York Review October 2022
A version of this essay appears as the preface to the twenty-h
anniversary edition of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and
Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (W.W. Norton, 2022)
Cover artwork by Torkwase Dyson
THE HOLD
OF SLAVERY
Saidiya Hartman
e conviction that I was living in the world created by slavery propelled
the writing of Scenes of Subjection, my rst book. I could feel the force
and disgurement of slavery in the present. e life of the captive and
the commodity certainly wasn’t my past, but rather the threshold of my
entry into the world. Its grasp and claim couldn’t be cordoned o as what
happened then. For me, the relation between slavery and the present was
open, unnished.
In rereading Scenes of Subjection twenty-ve years later, I am struck by
the breathlessness of the prose, by its ardent desire to say it all, to say ev-
erything at once. If it were possible, I might have written it as a 345- page-
long sentence. is sentence would be written in the past, present, and fu-
ture tense. Temporal entanglement best articulates the still open question
of abolition and the long- awaited but not yet actualized freedom declared
over a century and a half ago.
e hold of slavery was what I sought to articulate and convey. e cat-
egory crisis of human esh and sentient commodity dened the existence
of the enslaved and this predicament of value and fungibility would shad-
ow their descendants, the blackened and the dispossessed. I also hoped
to change the terms in which we understood racial slavery, by attending to
its diuse terror and the divisions it created between life and not life. e
scenes of subjection I endeavored to unpack were not those of spectacular
violence— the thirty- three lashes at the whipping post, the torture, rape,
and brutality ubiquitous on the plantation, the public rituals of lynching
and dismemberment, 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 violated body—
5
all of which were endemic to slavery and key to the cultivation of antislav-
ery sentiment and pedagogy.
My interest lay elsewhere. To be subjected to the absolute power of an-
other and to be interpellated as a subject before the law were the dimen-
sions 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. is environment
of brutality and extreme domination aected 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, ospring, dutiful retainer,
or favored nursemaid. By shiing from the spectacular to the everyday, I
aimed to illuminate the ongoing and structural dimensions of violence
and slavery’s idioms of power.
I was determined to name and articulate the character of this power,
which was an assemblage of extreme domination, disciplinary power, bio-
power, and the sovereign right to make die. e dimensions of subjec-
tion traversed the categories of human, animal, and plant. Slavery’s modes
of accumulation and exploitation failed to be explained by precapitalist
modes of production or the factory oor. e character of gendered and
sexual dierence, and negated maternity and severed kinship, bore no
resemblance to the intimate arrangements of the white bourgeois family
and cast out the enslaved from the nomenclature of the human.
At the same time, Scenes endeavored to illuminate the countless ways in
which the enslaved challenged, refused, deed, and resisted the condition
of enslavement and its ordering and negation of life, its extraction and
destruction of capacity. 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 practice. Black performance and quotidian practice
were determined by and exceeded the constraints of domination. is di-
mension has received less attention in the reception of the book. e fo-
cus on its arguments about empathy, terror and violence, subjection, and
social death has overshadowed the discussion of practice.
Yet these everyday practices, these ways of living and dying, of mak-
ing and doing, were attempts to slip away from the status of commodity
and to arm existence as not chattel, as not property, as not wench. Even
when this other state could not be named, because incommensurate or
6
untranslatable within the conceptual eld of the enclosure, the negation
of the given was ripe with promise. e wild thought and dangerous mu-
sic of the enslaved expressed other visions of the possible and refused cap-
tivity as the only horizon, opposed the framework of property and com-
modity, contested the idea that they were less than human, nurtured acts
of vengeance, and anticipated divine retribution.
e subjugated or speculative knowledge of freedom would establish
the vision of what might be, even if it was unrealizable within the prevail-
ing terms of order. It explains why a commodity might describe themself
as human esh, or a fugitive trapped in a garret write letters describing a
free life in the North, or a hand laboring in the eld read the signs and
take note of “the drops of blood on the corn as though it were dew from
heaven” and in the woods discern in the arrangement of leaves a hiero-
glyph of freedom coming, or an ex- slave prove capable of imagining an
“auspicious era of extensive freedom,” as does Olaudah Equiano in e
Interesting Narrative: “May the time come— at least the speculation is to
me pleasing—when the sable people shall gratefully commemorate the
auspicious era of extensive freedom.” It is a curious and prescient formula-
tion. How does one commemorate what has yet to arrive?
In the context of social death, everyday practices cultivated an imagina-
tion of the otherwise and elsewhere, cartographies of the fantastic utterly
antagonistic to slavery. e enslaved refused to accept the order of values
that had transformed them into units of currency and capital, beasts and
crops, breeders, incubators, lactating machines, and sentient tools. At se-
cret meetings and freedom schools, hidden away in loopholes of retreat
and hush arbors, gathered at the river or dwelling in the swamp, the en-
slaved articulated a vision of freedom that far exceeded that of the liberal
imagination. It enabled them to conceive other ways of existing, ee the
world of masters and invite its ery destruction, anticipate the upheav-
al that would put “the bottom rail on top,” nurture a collective vision of
what might be possible when no longer enslaved, and sustain belief in the
inevitability of slavery’s demise.
A messianic vision of the last days and the end of the world was articu-
lated in a range of quotidian practices, from work songs to the ring shout,
a circle dance of worship and divine communion. Such practices shaped
the contours of the day-to-day. An expansive register of minor gestures,
7
ways of sustaining and creating life, caring for one another, undoing slav-
ery by small acts of stealth and destruction, communal dreaming, sacred
transport, redress, and faith in a power greater than master and nation
made it possible to survive the unbearable while never acceding to it. e
arrangement of stars in the night sky, the murmur and echo of songs trav-
eling across a river, the revered objects buried near a prayer tree, the ru-
mors of fugitives in the swamp or maroons in the hills nourished dreams
of a free territory, or an existence without masters, or a plot against the
plantation, or reveries of miraculous deliverance.
—
In the archive of slavery, I encountered a paradox: the recognition of the
slave’s humanity and status as a subject extended and intensied servitude
and dispossession, rather than conferring some small measure of rights
and protection. e attributes of the human— will, consciousness, reason,
agency, and responsibility—were the inroads of discipline, punishment,
and mortication. is paradox foreshadowed the subject of freedom and
the limits of personhood bound indissolubly to property.
e recognition of the formerly enslaved as a newly endowed subject
of rights was not the entry to the promised land. is should not have
been a surprise. Western humanism was born in the context of the Atlan-
tic slave trade and racial slavery. It became apparent that being a subject
was not the antidote to being a slave, but rather that these gures were
intimate, twinned. I wanted for some other end: a true abolition of prop-
erty, 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 elusive. e exclusion and hierarchy of the discourse of rights
and man and the racism of the white republic and the settler nation were
robust and not to be eradicated by acts or proclamations or eld orders or
amendments. e movement from slave to “man and citizen” would be
impeded, thwarted. e restricted vision of freedom oered by the liberal
imagination, a vision even more attenuated and hollowed out by counter-
revolution, economic predation, antiblack violence, and white supremacy,
8
would not transform the plantation, or abolish racial slavery and its badg-
es 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 bond-
age and the exercise and imposition of the contract— this and little more.
In the aermath of slavery’s formal demise, the old relations of servitude
and subordination were recreated in a new guise. e signs of this were
everywhere apparent: e enslaved failed to be compensated for centuries
of unremunerated labor. ey never received the material support or re-
sources necessary to give esh to words like “equality” and “citizen.” e
gulf between blacks, marked and targeted as not human or as lesser hu-
mans and social inferiors, and white citizens only widened.
A wave of revanchism and counterrevolution engulfed the nation. Rac-
ist violence intensied and white citizens committed a series of massacres
with the goal of returning the newly freed to their proper place. e “gi
of freedom” gave birth to the landless tenant and the indebted worker.
e enslaved were transformed into a new kind of property—alienable
labor or property in the self—but in all other ways they were without re-
sources. is property in the self was to be sold and exchanged, at least as
an ideal. Again, one entered the world as fungible object and the social re-
lations of violence and domination congealed as the circulation of goods
and things.
e contract enabled the transition from slavery to involuntary servi-
tude, and the much- lauded exercise of choice was shored up by the threat
of punishment and imprisonment. e liberty to sell one’s labor resulted
in sharecropping, peonage, and immiseration, and the failure to exercise
this liberty led to the chain gang or being leased as a convict. Coercion
rather than consent dened the free market and free labor. Equality was
interpreted and adjudicated to enforce segregation, the regime of separate
but equal, and the hierarchy of racially dierentiated life. e enormity
and tragedy of this stopped me in my tracks.
It was the restricted scope of freedom, especially when contrasted with
what might have been or could be, that made me pause and ask: What,
exactly, were the social arrangements envisioned and desired aer Eman-
cipation? Was captivity the prevailing schema not by default but design?
9
Could an idea of freedom fundamentally bound to property do anything
other than reproduce dispossession and conrm the alienability and dis-
posability of life and capacity? Could democracy built on racial slavery
and settler colonialism ever sustain freedom, repair what has been broken,
return what has been stolen, release land to earth, provide to each accord-
ing to their needs, and enable all to thrive? e answer remains a resound-
ing “no.” As many ex- slaves remarked, freedom without material resourc-
es was another kind of slavery. So when my attention turned to freedom
and its philosophical and legal foundations, I realized how formative and
enduring the hold of slavery continued to be. e liberal conception of
freedom had been built on the bedrock of slavery.
Abolition remained an aspiration, rather than a feat realized and com-
pleted. I didn’t yet have the language of the “aerlife of slavery” to describe
the structural hold of racial slavery. Yet it is clear I was writing toward this
concept, which would be developed in my second book, Lose Your Mother
(2006), and my essay “Venus in Two Acts” (2008). As I wrote,
Black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a
political arithmetic that was entrenched centuries ago. is is the aer-
life of slavery—skewed life chances, limited access to health and educa-
tion, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment. I, too, am
the aerlife of slavery.
—
Scenes of Subjection was a radical departure from the extant historical liter-
ature. Conservative scholarship had minimized the role of racial slavery in
the making of capitalist modernity, failed to theorize race, characterized
slavery as a premodern mode of production, denied the magnitude of the
violence required to produce the human commodity and reproduce the
relations of master and slave, and replicated the assumptions of romantic
racialism and the plantation pastoral by describing slavery as a paternal
institution characterized by reciprocity and consent, an approach which
James D. Anderson has called “Aunt Jemima in Dialectics.”
e work of radical historians and intellectuals was devoted to refut-
ing such assertions and celebrating slave agency, excavating slave culture,
10
demonstrating black resilience in the face of dehumanization, recognizing
the enduring totality of African beliefs and values despite the rupture of
the Middle Passage, and fundamentally challenging the idea of the dam-
aged person or psyche produced by centuries of enslavement. ey did so
by emphasizing the vitality of black culture, the autonomous zones cre-
ated in the slave quarters and the provision grounds, and the strength of
the black family. e goal of these radical scholars was to arm black hu-
manity in the connes of racial capitalism and the plantation’s brutality.
Scenes was indebted to their work, but mine was a dierent task. I set
out to detail the entanglement of humanity and violence, liberal philos-
ophy and racial reason, the human and its devalued others. If the con-
ventional narrative trajectory “from slavery to freedom” failed to capture
the temporal entanglement of racial slavery as our past and our present,
the lasting eects of the slave’s exile from and precarious belonging to the
category of the human, the recursive character of violence and accumula-
tion, and the long duration of unfreedom, then how might I frame and
approach such matters? How might I interrupt the traditional account,
revise historical chronology, cast doubt on the progressive arc and telos of
narrative, and blast open the time of slavery?
I searched for a critical lexicon that would elucidate slavery and its
modes of power and forms of subjection, and challenge the widespread
understanding of the enslaved as a constricted or impaired version of the
worker and the individual—terms which seemed to obscure the state and
condition of enslavement rather than clarify it. is framework, even as
amended for the black worker and newly minted subject, failed to convey
or comprehend the modes of domination, the distribution of death, the
role of reproductive labor, and the forms of gendered and sexual violence
that sustained racial slavery.
So how best to describe this anomalous existence distributed between
the category of subject and object, person and thing? Or the gurative ca-
pacity that enabled the captive to fulll any and every need, from cotton
production to fellatio? e plantation was hell, factory, killing ground,
and Sodom. In attempting to explicate the violence of slavery and its idi-
om of power, Scenes moved away from the notion of the exploited worker
or the unpaid laborer toward the captive and the fungible, the commodity
and the dominated, the disposable and the sexually violated, to describe
11
the dynamics of accumulation and dispossession, social reproduction and
social death, seduction and libidinal economy, and to highlight the vexed
relation of the enslaved to the category of the human. It emphasized the
violence of reciprocity and mutuality in the context of extreme domina-
tion, the ruses of power, and the nonevent of Emancipation. And it ad-
vocated embracing temporal entanglement and arming other ways of
knowing or subjugated knowledge. My peers as well as a generation of
younger scholars have extended and elaborated this critical vocabulary. It
is impossible for me to read the book today without hearing these other
voices, without reading between the lines for the contributions of my in-
terlocutors.
In Scenes, I rst wrestled with questions of the archive—what it en-
abled and what it prevented us from knowing or discerning. Could I use
its statements, yet destroy the master’s tools? It was in these pages that I
initially used the term “fabulation,” but the term was latent, not yet emer-
gent. Even then, I wanted to use the archive to create another order of
statements, to produce a dierent account of what had happened and
what might be possible. Here the work of novelists and poets provided
a model. I sought to create a method that acknowledged and compre-
hended the violence of the archive and the forms of silence and oblivion it
produced, and yet endeavored to use the archive for contrary purposes. It
was an engagement that reckoned with the power of the archive but dared
attempt to exceed the limits it imposed and render a radically dierent
account of black existence. For the archive is also a repository of practices,
a textual trace of the repertoire that transforms and refuses the given.
e matters engaged in Scenes— the domain of practice, the everyday
forms of making and doing, black performance, the imagination of free-
dom, social death and the aerlife of slavery, the violence of the archive
and methods for transposing its statement, involuntary servitude and the
longstanding struggle to elude and defeat it, the antagonism to capitalist
discipline, the refusal of work, the movement of the unsovereign, dispos-
session and racialized enclosure, transguration, and a language for black
existence not bound to property or the subject—would preoccupy me for
two decades. e freighted last paragraph of the book attempted to un-
derscore the incompleteness of freedom and the hold of slavery. What did
it mean to exist between the “no longer” enslaved and the “not yet” free?
12
What awaited us was another century of extreme domination, precarious
life, dispossession, impoverishment, and punishment. What awaited us
were centuries of struggle animated by visions that exceeded the wreckage
of our lives, by the avid belief in what might be.
13
Notes
1 See Frantz Fanon, e Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (1961; Grove, 2005);
and Sylvia Wynter, “Black Metamorphosis” (unpublished manuscript).
2 Small Axe, Vol. 12, No. 2 (June 2008).
3 “Aunt Jemima in Dialectics: Genovese on Slave Culture,” e Journal of Negro History, Vol.
61, No. 1 (January 1976).
4 e work of Orlando Patterson, Hortense Spillers, and Patricia Williams was critical to
thinking beyond this impasse. See Patterson, Slavery and Social Death (Harvard, 1982);
Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” Diacritics, Vol. 17, No. 2 (Summer 1987); and Wil-
liams, “On Being the Object of Property,” Signs, Vol. 14, No. 1 (Fall 1988). As important
were Edouard Glissant, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. J. Michael Dash (Univer-
sity of Virginia, 1989); Toni Morrison, Beloed (Knopf, 1987); and Sylvia Wynter, “Beyond
the Categories of the Master Conception: e Counterdoctrine of the Jamesian Poiesis,” in
Paget Henry and Paul Buhle, eds., C.L.R. James’s Caribbean (Duke, 1992).
5 e work of Paule Marshall, Toni Morrison, Maryse Condé, David Bradley, Jamaica
Kincaid, Caryl Phillips, Derek Walcott, Robert Hayden, Eduoard Glissant, and Kamau
Brathwaite was indispensable to my thinking.
In the archive of slavery, I encountered a
paradox: the recognition of the slave’s humanity
and status as a subject extended and intensified
servitude and dispossession.
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