Scenes of Subjection

Redress is sought by “everyday practices” of enslaved people. Twenty-first century discussions of redress center on reparations.

Hartman discusses the ways that the postbellum amendments to the Constitution—by insisting on abstract equality in the granting of rights to emancipated people—assumed a clean slate for emancipated people that denies the legacy of slavery. With the formerly enslaved no longer possessions but instead in possession of rights, equality was supposedly created. Yet this focus on rights does not acknowledge the extreme inequality that remained, and this rhetoric of equality suffocated the need for redress, contributing to the status of emancipation as a “nonevent.”

Liberal humanism is a philosophy and political theory that is grounded in individuality, the individual’s freedom, and individual rights enshrined by a government. The legal subject as a rights-bearing individual is a hallmark of liberal humanism, which theorizes the individual through capacities such as agency and consent. In slavery, however, agency and consent cannot be fully realized. Enslaved people never “consent” to their enslavement, for example, and so consent regarding sexual relations within slavery is necessarily impossible.

Through analyses of the facile ways that historians have nonetheless insisted the possibility of the agency and consent of enslaved people despite the violence of slavery, Hartman argues that enslavement cannot be considered through the framework of liberal humanism. Furthermore, the historian must become aware of these liberal-humanist assumptions so that a recognition of the limitations of enslaved people is possible and new frameworks are created within slavery studies.

Fungibility is a synonym for exchangeability. A fungible commodity is one that is replaceable or easily exchanged for another that is similar or the same, such as a product in a supermarket. Slavery generally insisted on the fungibility of enslaved people. While enslaved people were valued differently on the marketplace (with children generally of lesser value than adults, for example), within age and gender categories there was a general fungibility among enslaved people: Enslaved people were exchangeable as commodities.

Just as one pound of wheat can be exchanged for another pound of wheat, enslaved lives could be exchanged for one another. This fungibility facilitated the dangerous empathy on which abolitionism relied. Even in the abolitionist attempt to refuse the fungibility that commodification enables, the exchangeability of enslaved people persisted: Abolitionists fashioned enslaved people as empty vessels into which the white abolitionist imagination could propel itself, rendering enslaved people fungible once again. Thus, enslaved fungibility enables the white empathy that Hartman insists is dangerous.