Reviews
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 originarity of that primal scene [of violence]., 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., 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., In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman prepared an intellectual ground for the phrase [the afterlife of slavery] to take root. Insisting that the conventional wisdom that slavery had died with legal emancipation was wrong, and that slavery was, as she put, 'transformed rather than annulled by the 13th amendment of the US constitution,' Hartman challenged us to consider that slavery didn't just have a lingering trace or a shadowy aftereffect in the post-emancipation moment., Audacious. Original and provocative. What Hartman has to say about both slavery and its continuing resonances should be heard as widely as possible. A major scholarly contribution.
