BOMB Magazine - Saidiya Hartman

02/11/2022 14:20 BOMB Magazine | Saidiya Hartman
Saidiya Hartman
by
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson
An early release from BOMB's Winter 2023 issue: a conversation between Saidiya Hartman
and Zakiyyah Iman Jackson on the twenty-fifth anniversary and republication of Scenes of
Subjection.
The occasion of this conversation is the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary

and republication of the landmark text Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and
https://bombmagazine.org/articles/saidiya-hartman/?fbclid=IwAR12SOKOWgcwebTCBnyLGjxVrvkFZ_3Cw4IScfnZSjfescPoV9MKJknP0rU 1/21
Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America by eminent scholar and writer Saidiya

Hartman. Not simply a reissue of a previously published work, the anniversary
edition includes a foreword by renowned scholar, author, and activist Keeanga-
Yamahtta Taylor; a jointly authored afterword by innovative black feminist readers
of the historical archive, Marisa J. Fuentes and Sarah Haley; as well as original
works by two gifted artists, Cameron Rowland and Torkwase Dyson—a selection of
that work will be shared here. Dyson’s compositions gesture to enclosure as well
as unforeseen geometries of existence and Rowland’s pointed, graphic notations
of the taut but not predestined processual dynamics of domination contribute to
the sense that the book-as-object is being experimented with and up for
reimagining. What’s at stake in the challenge posed by Scenes is the potential for
unsettling—and constellating anew—modes of thinking and writing about
domination and black life.
That the anniversary and republication of the work would attract inventive
contemporary artists to participate is no surprise. Scenes is a rare work of
scholarship, in that it has travelled far beyond ivory towers and had incalculable
impact on the collective thought of those disparately located but jointly concerned
with what Hartman terms “the afterlife of slavery.” While Scenes is a text some
might construe as a history of slavery, it is better understood as an analysis of the
foundations and profound limitations of the liberal political tradition of rights and
protections, and an invitation to speculate on what might exist if there were to be
a working through rather than a disavowal of the hold that slavery has on
contemporary daily life, economies of desire, and imaginations of freedom.
Twenty-five years ago, Scenes introduced a new framework for thinking about/of
the foundational structure of racial slavery and the ongoing past it set in motion.
Today, Hartman’s trenchant elaboration of the paradoxes of slave personhood
remains a pressing allegory for what marks and constrains the structural social
characteristics which distinguish the present.
Zakiyyah Iman Jackson

The very first thing a reader of the republication might notice are the powerful
compositions by Torkwase Dyson and notations by Cameron Rowland. Dyson’s
first visual composition is titled a gesture toward other planes. The work is not
quite a frontispiece; it is not an informative illustration nor an author’s portrait nor
an allegory for the content, but something else. How would you describe that
something else?
Saidiya Hartman
It was such a pleasure to collaborate with Torkwase and Cameron. You are correct
that the visual components are not illustrative. The compositions and notations
articulate the conceptual framework of Scenes. They elaborate the issues of
captivity, enclosure, flight, accumulation, and the afterlife by other means. It
begins on the cover with the work, Society by Cameron Rowland. The piece
addresses the entanglement of chattel and cattle, but the pivot of the work isn’t
the brutalization of the enslaved but the cattle brand as a pillar or instrument of
society. Christopher Codrington, the Barbadian slave owner (and yes, he is the
eponymous Codrington of the former Codrington Library of Oxford), branded his
slave property with the word society.
Dyson’s compositions convey the dynamic spatial relations of the built

environment and the histories of enslavement, conquest, settlement, and capitalist
extraction embedded in form. What I appreciate about Dyson’s composition is the
activation of these relations in her practice of abstraction. Where I might see a
fixed form, a border, a wall, a triangle, or a circle, she sees a relation of forces; if I
could explain by way of analogy, I would say that where I see trees, Dyson
envisions an energetic field in constant flux and transformation. Where I see a
circle, she sees a curvilinear form that connects the hold to the shipping container
to the state house. Again, these “hyper shapes,” in her terms, are dense with time
and history. So contrary to what might appear to the naïve eye as a flat surface
traversed by lines and shapes is an abstraction of the social forces that have
produced the world order, the traces of black flight and movement, and a set of
propositions for undoing that order. Her geometry is deployed against the
violence of capitalist abstraction. The compositions are architectural renderings of
the plantation and its futures, and sentient existence in motion. a gesture toward
other planes addresses the character of practice inside the space of enclosure. Yet
it is an incitement to see and think beyond the biplanar toward other planes, to
escape the imposed grid of perception, to shift our thinking from stasis to
movement and relation. The compositions are a project for reconstruction in
manifold dimensions. At least, this is one aspect of it.
ZIJ
Rowland’s contributions are described as “notations,” a system of symbols or
abbreviated expressions used in art, science, mathematics, or logic to express or
represent another system, in this case, a social system: slavery. Rowland’s
notations are poignant spatial renderings of competing values and investments.
One is even titled Black Antagonism, but the locus of that antagonism is not black
people but a system of antiblack arrangement and ordering.
SH
That is a great observation. First, Cameron was very aware of being involved in a
translation of Scenes from one plane to another. How does one articulate or
transpose or render the power relations and structural relations of racial slavery in
a series of visual diagrams or schemas? How does one interpret textual arguments
with images? We approached the notations as scores for thought. Cameron and I
spent so many hours in conversation trying to figure out how this might be done. I
wish we had recorded those conversations. The notations are a trace of the
process of exploring and failing and starting out again. We looked at W.E.B. Du
Bois’s visual data graphics, Fluxus charts, Cecil Taylor’s scores, as well as the work
of artists like Adrian Piper and Jack Whitten as models. How could we create a
robust visual conceptual statement? The first question: What range of themes and
concepts should we address? We generated so many pages together. Cameron’s
practice is text-based, so often we augmented and amplified rather than distilled.
We created one notation that was so dense no one could make sense of it.
(laughter) As you noted, the notation Black Antagonism was a way to convey
particular aspects of black poesis and to provide an itinerary of practices of
resistances and refusal that emphasized the fundamental antagonism of these
practices to chattel slavery, ongoing dispossession, and racial capitalism. The
practice of reaching for another plane is devoted to undoing and destroying the
prevailing arrangements and the ordering of the master’s world. It does not
require that this be an explicit intention, yet it is a significant dimension of
practice.
Notation: Black Antagonism
Above all, we wanted the notations to be useful in reading and thinking with the
text. Let me be clear, the notations are in conversation with Scenes; they translate,
extend, distill, and recalibrate its arguments. The goal was to clarify the
conceptual vocabulary, but without creating a shorthand that sacrificed the
complexity of the ideas. Like the compositions, the notations were an attempt to
activate the text and open it to variant readings. We wanted the notations to
operate in this way too. The lines are directional, porous; they are interfaces rather
than barriers. We wanted there to be several ways of reading the notations: down
a column, across a page, on a diagonal. In Cycles of Accumulation and
Dispossession, there are multiple axes of relation, the internal rotation or
revolution of the circular bands—myriad articulations are possible. The notations
are snapshots of a structure in motion.
Notation: Cycles of Accumulation and Dispossession
ZIJ
Too often, our conception of antiblackness is equated with “dehumanization,”
“denied humanity,” or “exclusion,” yet, as you identified in your path-breaking
study, the process of making the slave relied on the abjection and criminalization
of the enslaved person’s humanity rather than merely the denial of it. Selective
recognition—of conscience, will, sentiment, and reason—presumed unique
human endowments and was a pretext for the intensification of terror, not a
prelude to rights or freedom. As you stress in the text, the dual invocation of the
slave as person and commodified object does not constitute an ethical
contradiction but “an expression of the multivalence of subjection.” This argument
might be counterintuitive for some. Would you elaborate it further?
SH
A commonly held view is that the enslaved was not recognized as human nor as a
person and that the violence of slavery resided in this failure or withholding of
recognition. In fact, statute law did recognize the slave as human in the terms of
sentience, injury, agency, and responsibility and this recognition served to
intensify, not diminish, the brutal arrangements of slavery. Rather than conceive
the “human” as the exalted category to which we need seek entry, Scenes
disenchants the category of the human. What we come to realize is that the
human as a category is not the antidote to the violence of the slave’s existence as
property, or the fungibility of black life, but a way of extending and codifying what
may and may not be done to property, what the enslaved may and may not do or
feel, what are the limits of what may be done to person and body within the scope
of the law. Can you take a life for insolence? Is mayhem reasonable and
justifiable? Is torture within the purview of possession? Is rape a crime when the
violated are black women? Plainly put, the distribution of violence and death and
the recognition of human capacity are inextricably linked. This selective
recognition is also essential in establishing the hierarchy of the human, less as a
stark division characterized by those who are included and excluded from the
category, than in creating a taxonomy of the human which serves to justify the
uses to be made of life, the forms of socially necessary violence, the extraction of
capacity and the distribution of death. All in the name of recognition.
In Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, you make a

related argument in your engagement with Enlightenment thought, noting that it
does not exclude or deny black humanity, but rather by including and recognizing
blackened humanity, plasticizes that very humanity, making it "infinitely malleable
lexical and biological matter." So that blackness is a form where form shall not
hold; it is everything and nothing.
ZIJ
In my view, human recognition is not a benevolent universalism but an imperial
imposition that installs racial hierarchy. This is an argument I couldn’t have arrived
at without your incisive critique of the violence of humanization. In Becoming
Human, I investigate blackness’s relation to the cultural construction of “the
animal” rather than presuppose either black people’s exclusion from the category
“human” or relative power and privilege as human, vis-à-vis animals. While
scholars of race have investigated and critiqued the conflation of black people
with animals found in everything from philosophical discourses in the
Enlightenment to its afterlife in recent political speeches of elected officials,
ontologized plasticization reframes the confluence of race and animality. I
reinterpret Enlightenment thought not as black “exclusion” or “denied humanity”
but rather as the violent imposition and appropriation—inclusion and recognition

—of black humanity in the interest of plasticizing that very humanity, whereby
“the animal” is one among many possible forms black humanity is thought to
encompass. The argument, however, is not about correcting an unnatural ordering
of man and beast, whereby blackness petitions for recognition.
Ontologized plasticization refers to a mode of transmogrification whereby the

fleshy being of blackness is experimented with as if it were "infinitely malleable
lexical and biological matter"—a form where form shall not hold—such that
blackness is produced as human, subhuman, and suprahuman at once. The at
once here is important: it denotes immediacy and simultaneity. Blackness, in this
case, functions not simply as negative relation but as a plastic fleshy being that
stabilizes and gives form to “human” and “animal” as categories—precisely via
blackness’s inability to access conceptual and material stability other than that of
functioning as ontological instability for the reigning order. To put it another way,
the concept of ontologized plasticity maintains that black people are not so much
dehumanized, cast as nonhumans or as in between human and animal, nor are
black people framed as animal-like or machine-like or simply exchangeable with
these nonhuman forms; rather, black people are cast as subhuman, suprahuman,
and human simultaneously and in a manner that puts black people in peril
because the operations of simultaneously being any-thing and no-thing for a given
order constructs black humanity as the privation and exorbitance of form.
Ontologized plasticization has an aesthetic component. Racism is an aesthetics

and a politics of aesthetics. Racism debilitates and seeks to transmogrify and
produce blackness as grotesque—to make black people embody its image of us.
Racism targets the beauty of blackness. As I explored in the book, artists and
writers like Wangechi Mutu and Audre Lorde are invested in a counterclaim of
beauty in what would otherwise be perceived as antithetical to beauty, namely
irregularity and atypicality.
One way to track the aesthetic project of antiblackness is to observe the mass
media circulation of images of black people. Ghastly images of debilitated and
petrified black people circulate casually across media platforms and at such a rate
that they can anesthetize, pleasure, or gratifyingly assure spectators that they are
safe from such harms and traumatize those who are not able to gain that kind of
distance. Their looping circulation in the name of evidencing harm has itself
become a modality of terror.
Your refusal to reproduce Frederick Douglass’s account of the beating of Aunt

Hester from My Bondage and My Freedom has been highly influential in debates
about representation within and beyond the walls of academia. Rather than
retrace or outline this and other oft-repeated spectacular scenes of pain and terror,
you turn to scenes that are also routine—but whose violence and violation is
perhaps less readily discernible and often preemptively contained by self-
righteous outrage. Twenty-five years later, have your ideas about depicting terror
shifted? Would you make the same decision regarding the Douglass account
today?
SH
Good question. Yes, I would make the same decision today. I did make that choice
again. Absolutely. For me, the question stands: To what end does one circulate
these images of black death and suffering? Why is that required to make some
people aware of the brutal structures they inhabit and the privileges they enjoy? I
believe there is a libidinal investment in black suffering, which most spectators are
unwilling or unable to acknowledge or own. Black pain is the substrate of national
fantasy and white pleasure. This was especially so in the antislavery culture of the
eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Others have written about the pornography
of this humanitarianism.
I would add that what is different in my work now is a greater awareness

regarding the terms of address and the multiple addressees of the work. In short,
there is also the role of the black witness. How we see us. For example, the
community of slaves who tend to Solomon Northup as he is suspended from the
rope. (In the narrative Twelve Years a Slave, the community is not indifferent to his
suffering, but it is trying to relieve his suffering without inviting further violence.)
Michael Brown’s parents tending to their son’s body, attempting to counter the
desecration with their looks, or Darnella Frazier forced to be a witness to George
Floyd’s murder. Mind you, I am not saying that we are not injured and hurt by this
looking, because of course we are, how could we not be, and yet we do look. We
are bruised and held in this looking.
ZIJ
Scenes’s critical meditation on empathy has rightfully gotten a lot of attention and
fundamentally impacted how scholars think about the relationship between
identification and intervention. Empathy is defined in Scenes as “a projection of
one’s own personality into an object, with the attribution to the object of one’s own
emotions.” However, your argument troubling empathy does not simply concern
the risk of displacement of the other, imagining yourself in the place of the other
and then feeling not for the imperiled and besieged other, but for yourself—not
targeted, in this instance, by terror. The argument is also about assimilating the
other into a phantasy of yourself. In other words, through empathizing, there is a
risk of extending, via projection, a phantasmic humanity and subjectivity to the
other, as a bestowal. This fraudulent self-reflection, and bestowal, is a component
of domination that casts itself as benevolent and ethical but is rather imposing.
SH
Yes, it is the violence of incorporating the other, whether its obliteration of the
other takes place via standing in the place of the other or making their suffering
your own through assimilation and identification or utilizing the captive body as a
vessel for one's feeling and self-awareness. The forms of idiopathic identification
obscure and negate the suffering of others. When Hortense Spillers says “the
flesh gives empathy,” in Arthur Jafa's Dreams Are Colder Than Death, I
understand her words as a description of black capacity. What does it mean to be
present in the flesh, especially when violence and the threat of death condition
this openness, this availability to others? This seems to be qualitatively different
than the matter of identification.
ZIJ
In the chapter “Seduction and the Ruses of Power,” you argue that capture and
inhabitation are eroticized in the racist imaginary in a manner indifferent to
categories of male and female. You also describe a female subject whose injury is
foreclosed upon by myths of her sexuality, precisely as vulnerability to violation is
being codified as peculiarly “female.” “The captive female does not possess a
gender as much as she is possessed by gender.” In “Fashioning Obligation:
Indebted Servitude and the Legacy of Slavery,” you describe a femininity with an
atypical relation to the domestic due to the mandate of work but nevertheless
enclosed by a newly emancipated patriarchy, one that would be imagined as the
measure of racial progress and uplift, even if dismissively viewed from the outside
as a mere mimic—that outside forcing itself in, as it did not reliably observe the
sanctity of black homes. Scenes seems to suggest that the terms gender and
sexuality hold the potential to both obscure and clarify enslaved and black
personhood, more generally. If we are to understand these terms as operating
differentially rather than normatively, what does this paradoxical picture suggest
about black investment in “gender” and “sexuality” and the investment of gender
and sexuality in blackness?
SH
It is such a complex web of issues. I am wrestling with the differentiation of
gender for the enslaved female, sentient commodity, unfree laborer, and incubator
of future increase. How is this differentiation marked? It is certainly marked
regarding the reproduction of property, in the calibration of injury, in determining
what is a reasonable or unreasonable response to bodily violation, in maintaining
and reproducing a subjected population, in the calibration of value. In Reckoning
with Slavery, Jennifer L. Morgan writes that racial capitalism introduces the
human body to the marketplace (not labor-power) and “in its starkest terms it
situates African women at the heart of the structural logics of the business of
slavery.” The labor and reproductive capacity of African women transformed them
into “the commodity form on which Atlantic economies were founded.” In this
instance, gender differentiation is not about the symbolic endowments of women
or any presumed commonality of experience based on female gender, or
inhabiting a shared category or structural position, but about the particular forms
of violence and extraction that mark and distinguish the captive female. Even if
this difference is restricted to variations in increments of value and the magnitude
of violence to be tolerated for purposes of future increase and social reproduction.
Reproductive capacity was the site at which the human was marked and
differentiated, and the gulf between the free and the not free established. Black
mothers produced persons who were to be enslaved. The captive body is
inhabited and harnessed by the market. In Scenes, I attempted to address the
points at which this differentiation was most pronounced and brutally
overdetermined.
The cultivation or imposition of the norms of cis-heteropatriarchy, bourgeois

domesticity, and private property are critical to the training of the formerly
enslaved, the formation of the working class and the making of the self-possessed
acquisitive individual. These are the aspirational terms of the liberal project of
emancipation. I would underscore aspirational because this project was supported
only to the extent that it enabled the sharecropping economy and relieved white
fathers of the financial burden of their black children and families. Even Christian
missionaries were quick to remind Mrs. Freeman that she needed to labor in the
fields alongside her husband. Black elites more fully inculcated these standards as
the measure of race progress. In a text like The Negro American Family, produced
by Du Bois’s laboratory in sociology at Atlanta University, this patriarchal

developmental schema is illustrated by a series of houses. The orderliness and the
size of dwellings, the status of wives and mothers (whether they are devoted to
the domestic sphere or working outside the home), the presence or absence of a
male head of the household, and the possession of a piano are the measures of
racial progress. From the vantage of the racial state, these norms have as well to
do with notions of hygiene and public health, righteous propagation, and the
managing and policing of racialized populations.
ZIJ
One of the lessons Scenes teaches us is how entrenched the proprietary is and
how difficult it is to imagine and desire outside of its logics and economies of
value. In reading Scenes, I wondered if you might have thoughts about the
encroachment of the proprietary into the language of black people’s social
demands. That is, I wondered what if the proprietary language of (cultural)
appropriation was replaced with a more thoroughgoing reckoning with the
violation of what you call enjoyment? Dionne Brand, in A Map to the Door of No
Return, describes a corporeal field—the black body—that is put to a societal
function that negates capacity beyond its instrumental use, a psychically and
physically open space, “not simply owned” but “constructed and occupied by
other embodiments.” Brand refers to this inhabitation as a “domestic, hemispheric
pastime, a transatlantic pastime, an international pastime. There is a playing
around in it.” Brand’s claim that this indeterminate field operates as a
“transgressive trope” parallels Toni Morrison’s assertion in Playing in the Dark that
black people function as a “surrogate and enabler” of white self-reflection and
self-definition and even of freedom itself, as the two are coextensive. Your concept
of enjoyment seems to be a fellow traveler in this line of thinking. You define
enjoyment as “to have, possess, and use with satisfaction; to occupy or have the
benefit of.” You elaborate further, “It [antebellum enjoyment] made blackness a
material to be utilized and exploited for whatever ends. The myriad uses of the
captive as tool, implement, prosthetic, and amusement cultivated and reinforced
the idea of black excess, blackness as excess, as surfeit.” Could the protestation on
the part of black people in the face of what’s called cultural appropriation spring
from something deeper than a proprietary claim? At times, I suspect, these
conversations are searching for a language that could critically indict the
rapacious and indefatigable implementation of the reflexive and figurative
capacities of blackness on the part of non-black people, the indiscriminate

enjoyment of an incarnate yet wide open territory.
SH
Yes, the corporeal field that Brand describes as being "constructed and occupied
by other embodiments,” I describe as the figurative capacities of blackness and the
fungibility of the captive. In Becoming Human, it is described as ontologized
plasticization. You have stated it quite eloquently. I would just echo your words
about the corporeal field or enjoyment being defined by the “rapacious and
indefatigable implementation of the reflexive and figurative capacities of
blackness on the part of non-black people.” It is an indiscriminate use predicated
on the command of black life and capacity, and undergirded by the deeply held,
even if unconscious, belief that our existence is nothing more than a prop or
implement for fashioning and enabling the sovereign subject. The focus on
enjoyment provides the means to address the material and affective dimension of
racial slavery.
ZIJ
There is a moment in the chapter on redress when you suggest the intertwined
conditions of master and slave in the context of domination make it impossible to
distinguish an “authentic” performance of blackness from a “derivative” one:
performance, you argue, is inseparable from “the brute force that brands, rapes,
and tears open the flesh in the racial inscription of the body.” This assertion would
unsettle any claim to an essential blackness observable in performance or in
cultural production more generally. Performance, art, or expressive culture would
then become a terrain of struggle over the articulation of blackness, whereby the
trace of struggle is expressed in and as the work.
SH
It was very important for me to engage the complexity of black performance
practice, especially since this “expressive culture” was so central to romantic
racialism and the scholarly representation of slavery in the pastoral mode.
Performing blackness encompasses a vast terrain, from the blackface mask and
“going before the master” to the elaboration of blackness and its affirmative
negation. I was interested in what performance enabled and what it failed to do.
Blackness was delineated in terms of social relation and structural position,
gestural language and movement vocabulary. I state explicitly that these
performances were not the possession of the enslaved, but enactments of social
struggle and contending articulations of blackness.
ZIJ
Your work is known for providing a language for the longue durée of slavery, the
“afterlife of slavery,” as you have famously put it. The phrase evolved from your
second book, Lose Your Mother, and pivotal article “Venus in Two Acts.” But
Scenes also offers a meditation on the evanescent, ephemeral, and transient,
particularly as it relates to alternate modes of living and possibility emerging from
everyday practices. The word for this in Scenes is “redress.” Redress is limited, in
that it is incapable of fully rescuing one from the circumscription of antiblack
arrangements, but it does recognize and articulate terror and the need for a
remedy in the process of enacting other modalities of existence and arrangements
directed toward or desirous of flourishing, neither reducible to the given terms of
domination nor able to vanquish them either. It seems that you see these practices
as speculative modalities that emerge in the midst of domination.
SH
I appreciate your emphasis on the speculative character of redress and its reach
for what might be. Redress is necessarily incomplete. How could we work through
the breach and crisis, the extreme violence and social death, without a
revolutionary transformation of the order or a substantive abolition of slavery and
its legacy? Redress provides a way of attending to the ravished body and loving
the flesh, and it articulates the needs and desires that could only be realized by the
end of racial slavery and the world it spawned. I wanted both to convey the
richness of what unfolds in practice and the inevitable incompleteness of any
attempt at repair or remedy within the state of domination and the prevailing
antiblack order. What drives redress also deems it inadequate. Redress is a
ceaseless and ongoing practice within the brutal enclosure. In the revised version
of Scenes, I wrestle with how to articulate more precisely the relation of redress
and the movement of the broken body. I have learned much about performance
and redress from my friend Okwui Okpokwasili who so fully inhabits the “broke
body” in her performance practice. I also try to situate redress within the structure
of captivity or what Fred Moten has described in a self-declared deviant reading of
Scenes as the “the durational field” of captivity and enslavement. There is a scalar
difference between the available means of redress and the violence of racial
slavery and capitalist accumulation. I attempt to register the violence of the
plantation as racialized enclosure and, at the same time, attend to what unfolds
inside the enclosure, the other planes, the flight, the transient and ephemeral
openings. Redress attunes itself to social life in the context of social death. The
“afterlife of slavery” emerges as concept in Scenes, but it is implicit. I was in

search of a language to convey the structure and duration of slavery.
ZIJ
It is easier to see what is already legible or lends itself to the given terms of
legibility, heroic narratives of agency, and the monumental event. It is harder to
discern and gauge the significance of what is less recognizable or what resists the
terms of the given order of representation in politics and reigning systems of
meaning. Reading Scenes this time around, I was struck by your insistence that
practice is not politics. Is the value or intervention of practice embedded in
practice, specifically in it not being politics?
SH
I think the fidelity to certain notions of politics has made it impossible to think
productively about blackness and the character of racial slavery. The commitment
to politics proper has often meant that black existence must be assimilated and
translated into the prevailing vocabulary of the possible. Whether this is liberal
democracy or socialism (uninflected by the history of racism and coloniality).
Often, politics has made it impossible to analyze or address the particularities of
racism, colonialism, and antiblackness. It has forced us to undertake the
interminable labor of analogy, to narrate our dispossession in borrowed terms.
What I appreciate about practice is that thought isn’t privileged over deed or
doesn’t happen in advance of deed. Thought is the act; it is the making and doing,
black revelry and riotous disorder, fugitivity and temporary autonomous zones
without a fidelity to the prevailing or imposed script of the possible. Such practice
animates radical movement, but when the movement becomes politics, too often
radical practice is exhausted or quashed or censured.
ZIJ
Scenes seems to suggest that a cessation of antiblack ordering could only come
about through a general upheaval. From our location, inside an antiblack order, is
it even possible to outline what that upheaval would entail, its features and scope?
SH
I no longer think it is possible to outline what that would entail. Surprisingly, this
makes me hopeful.
ZIJ
I am with you. And, I think like you, others, too, might be surprised that this
perspective makes you feel hopeful. (laughter) What do you find hopeful about it?
SH
If I could describe it, it would not be a general upheaval or radical break.
Everything I would want is so far beyond what I can imagine now. As we know,
descriptions of utopia invariably reproduce significant elements from the
oppressive order that it seeks to undo. From Thomas More to Wakanda. So I
accept the finitude of what we might imagine and readily embrace something
beyond what we can know or conceive right now. There is so much that has to be
undone or destroyed before we can imagine the otherwise. Our tools for thinking
bear the imprint of the raciality and coloniality we would hope to abolish. Denise
Ferreira da Silva in Toward a Global Idea of Race and Achille Mbembe in Critique
of Black Reason make this clear, as does Édouard Glissant in Caribbean Discourse
and Poetics of Relation, as does Moten in The Universal Machine. How do we
relinquish the transparent I and abandon the dispositions and values that have
made the human the most destructive predator on the planet?
ZIJ
Yeah, that sounds right to me and is a major factor in why the human is not
something I’m trying to reform or preserve in any way.
Scenes’s deliberation on agency and practice opens onto an emphasis on

contestation not only of power, but inside of conditions of domination and on the
part of the dominated. Michel Foucault is famous for his conceptualization of
power’s lability and distributed agency, but sidesteps the question of agency
under conditions of domination, for instance in “The Subject and Power.” Prior to
quickly shifting and remaining with the question of power’s relational forms and
dynamics, Foucault vacillates. He argues in one place that domination is the
calcification of relation and therefore can neither be the proper site of an inquiry
into the dynamics of power nor of relationality but rather their disablement. But
elsewhere, in “The Ethic of Care for the Self as a Practice of Freedom,” he allows
for some modicum of relational capacity and distributed agency to exist in
domination.
SH
Yes, the question of agency is prominent in the text. Thanks for addressing this.
Agency is a category often tethered to notions of will, volition, and individuality, if
not heroic action. I wanted to attenuate the category of agency because the
celebration of agency in the scholarship of slavery most often failed to offer a

rigorous account of the structural violence and extreme domination of racial
slavery or the non-autonomy of the field of action. While reading “The Ethic of
Care” I experienced a critical turning point because of what I might describe as the
limits of Foucault’s thinking about domination. In his description, extreme
domination was theorized as a field in which relations of power were blocked or
immobilized, preventing the reversibility or lability of power. Moreover, in such a
state, practices of freedom do not exist or are extremely constrained. There was
little more than this. Yet, this extreme state of domination defined the existence of
the enslaved. I wanted the thinker/philosopher, who I respected tremendously and
had informed my understanding of power and discourse, who had described
brilliantly the order of knowledge, the birth of the clinic, the rise of disciplinary
power and biopower, subterranean knowledge, and the relation of history and
genealogy, to assist me in critically engaging the issues of structure and power in
the context of racial slavery, to provide me with a vocabulary for explicating the
state of domination, yet he failed to do so. We must remember Scenes was written
before Achille Mbembe’s Necropolitics, which addressed the insufficiency of
Foucault’s conception of biopower and remapped the relation of sovereignty and
the right to kill, and, like Paul Gilroy, emphasized that slavery was essential to
accounting for modern forms of terror and biopolitical experimentation.
Reading “The Ethic of Care” alongside “The Subject and Power,” I realized that
slavery and racialization were largely unthought in critical theory and when
addressed, racism was belatedly narrated as emerging in the nineteenth century
and reaching its apogee in the context of the Nazi genocide. The full weight of this
realization set me on a different course and made me aware that I would have to
offer an account for the forms of power and domination at work.
In “The Ethic of Care,” it is the free man who has an ethos that implies the care or
governance of wife, children, and slaves. Is this the relational capacity to which
you are referring? Or the generic women in eighteenth or nineteenth century
marriage who could refuse sex or pilfer money from their husbands even in a
state of domination? In my mind, this sounded too much like George Fitzhugh or
Eugene Genovese. I was struck much more by “in such a situation of domination,
all these questions (about where resistance will emerge and what form will it take)
demand specific answers that take account of the kind and precise form of
domination in question.” What was overwhelmingly clear to me was that in
Foucault there was no precise account of the kind of domination that I was
struggling to explicate. I also recognized that the state of domination of the wife
was not the same as the extreme domination and social death of the enslaved.
ZIJ
Even at the level of the writing, at moments, I would describe your style in Scenes
as a durational, iterative performance of the “on the one hand” and “on the other
hand” structure. This structure does not yield a neat resolution or dialectical
synthesis; it just unfurls and unfurls as irresolvable or uncertain in its terminus.
Throughout, there is an unfolding of contending values and investments, an
unfinished history, not just that of slavery but of contestation itself between the
dominated and the given order. So, in this respect, the form mirrors or takes its
lead from the phenomena being investigated.
SH
Yes. The durational performance of paradox. The argument unfurls with the
unrelenting intensity of the mad first book. (laughter) In the new preface, I write,
"If it were possible, I might have written the book as a 345-page-long sentence. In
the writing, I need to work on a large canvas to figure things out and the question
of form is always at the forefront. I am thinking and discovering and stumbling
through the form.
ZIJ
Formal experimentation is often associated with or thought to be introduced in
your work, starting with “Venus in Two Acts,” and to date most thoroughly
explored in Wayward Lives. However, you can see modalities of experimentation
even in Scenes, your first book. Have you always felt it was necessary to invent
new modalities of investigation and writing?
SH
I will say that the exploration with the forms of telling and describing was present
at the beginning. With Scenes, I attempted to topple the hierarchy of voices and
authority that governed knowledge production and overturn the division between
theory, understood as European thought, and narration, understood as the
testimony or autobiographical account of the enslaved. There are lyric passages in
the book that push against the grain of scholarly discourse. I would read passages
aloud and listen for the cadence or the music that resided in the erudition of the
“unlettered.” At my desk, I also experienced the forms of direct communication
between writers and their subjects that only novelists dare admit. I strived to enact
rhetorically the problematic that I was explicating. Lose Your Mother was the
creative departure that allowed me to push against disciplinary protocols and to

become freer in the work, so that I too might produce what Douglass described as
dangerous thought.
ZIJ
Black studies is always in a state of evolution, and at present we are witnessing a
reemergence of critical theory within the field. We are seeing black scholars doing
critical theory on our own terms and with a shared zeal for thought, overrunning
the boundaries of politely circumscribed rings of possibility for black thinkers. I
see our graduate students engaged in some of the most innovative work in their
fields. So, it really feels like a collective project. When I think about your work, for
instance, I not only see novel ways of doing theory but also an invitation to
reimagine how we do theory and the forms it takes—I see an invitation to invent
new forms of scholarship. In my own way, I hope my work participates in this
collective project by letting my thinking dictate the form rather than try to fit it into
the conventions of cultural criticism or philosophy. While contemporary black
critical theorists are heterogeneous in their ideas, they share a refusal of the
received rules of the scholarly academic monograph—which makes me excited to
see where this work collectively takes us.
SH
Zakiyyah, this seems like a great place to end, with the invention of new forms,
with black poesis.
ZIJ
Agreed!
This interview will appear in print in BOMB's Winter 2023 issue. Preorder it here.
BOMB Magazine
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Zakiyyah Iman Jackson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern

California and the author of the multi-award-winning book, Becoming Human: Matter and
Meaning in an Antiblack World. Professor Jackson is at work on a new book, Obscure Light:
Blackness and the Derangement of Sex/Gender. Her articles can be found on her website:
zakiyyahimanjackson.com.
Saidiya Hartman is the author of Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in
Nineteenth-Century America; Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route,
and Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments, which received the National Book Critics Circle
Award for Criticism, and the PEN/John Kenneth Galbraith Award for Nonfiction. She received
a MacArthur Fellowship in 2019 and was elected a member of the American Academy of Arts
and Sciences in 2022. She is University Professor at Columbia University.
African Diaspora
slavery
critical theory
history
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The End of White Supremacy, An American Romance by Saidiya Hartman

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02/11/2022 14:20 BOMB Magazine | Saidiya Hartman

The occasion of this conversation is the celebration of the twenty-fifth anniversary

Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America by eminent scholar and writer Saidiya

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson

Dyson’s compositions convey the dynamic spatial relations of the built

Notation: Black Antagonism

Notation: Cycles of Accumulation and Dispossession

In Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World, you make a

but rather as the violent imposition and appropriation—inclusion and recognition

Ontologized plasticization refers to a mode of transmogrification whereby the

Ontologized plasticization has an aesthetic component. Racism is an aesthetics

Your refusal to reproduce Frederick Douglass’s account of the beating of Aunt

I would add that what is different in my work now is a greater awareness

The cultivation or imposition of the norms of cis-heteropatriarchy, bourgeois

by Du Bois’s laboratory in sociology at Atlanta University, this patriarchal

capacities of blackness on the part of non-black people, the indiscriminate

“afterlife of slavery” emerges as concept in Scenes, but it is implicit. I was in

Scenes’s deliberation on agency and practice opens onto an emphasis on

celebration of agency in the scholarship of slavery most often failed to offer a

creative departure that allowed me to push against disciplinary protocols and to

Support Local Bookstores

Zakiyyah Iman Jackson is Associate Professor of English at the University of Southern

The End of White Supremacy, An American Romance by Saidiya Hartman

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