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This document provides an introduction to the book Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America by Saidiya V. Hartman. The introduction discusses how depictions of violence during slavery often desensitize readers and reinforce black suffering as a spectacle. It focuses on less sensationalized scenes that illuminate the terror of mundane aspects of slavery, like slaves dancing or the legal constitution of slaves' humanity. The introduction examines how recognizing slaves' humanity could intensify suffering by justifying punishment and binding slaves more tightly, rather than liberating them. It explores how slavery contradicted by recognizing slaves as both property and persons.

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Subjection: Scenes

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Marília Lima
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This document provides an introduction to the book Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America by Saidiya V. Hartman. The introduction discusses how depictions of violence during slavery often desensitize readers and reinforce black suffering as a spectacle. It focuses on less sensationalized scenes that illuminate the terror of mundane aspects of slavery, like slaves dancing or the legal constitution of slaves' humanity. The introduction examines how recognizing slaves' humanity could intensify suffering by justifying punishment and binding slaves more tightly, rather than liberating them. It explores how slavery contradicted by recognizing slaves as both property and persons.

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This document provides an introduction to the book Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America by Saidiya V. Hartman. The introduction discusses how depictions of violence during slavery often desensitize readers and reinforce black suffering as a spectacle. It focuses on less sensationalized scenes that illuminate the terror of mundane aspects of slavery, like slaves dancing or the legal constitution of slaves' humanity. The introduction examines how recognizing slaves' humanity could intensify suffering by justifying punishment and binding slaves more tightly, rather than liberating them. It explores how slavery contradicted by recognizing slaves as both property and persons.

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© All Rights Reserved
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121 views24 pages

Subjection: Scenes

Uploaded by

Marília Lima
This document provides an introduction to the book Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America by Saidiya V. Hartman. The introduction discusses how depictions of violence during slavery often desensitize readers and reinforce black suffering as a spectacle. It focuses on less sensationalized scenes that illuminate the terror of mundane aspects of slavery, like slaves dancing or the legal constitution of slaves' humanity. The introduction examines how recognizing slaves' humanity could intensify suffering by justifying punishment and binding slaves more tightly, rather than liberating them. It explores how slavery contradicted by recognizing slaves as both property and persons.

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RACE AND AMERICAN CUL TURE

Scenes of
Amold Rampersad and Shelley Fisher Fishkin, General Editors

Love and Theft:


Subjection
Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
Eric Lott
TERROR, SLA VER Y, AND SELF-MAKING
The Dialect of Modernism:
Race, Language, and Twentieth-Century Literature
IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AMERICA
Michael North

Bordering on the Body:


The Racial Matrix of Modern Fiction and Culture
Laura Doyle

"Who Set You Flowin'?":


The African American Migration Narrative
Farah Jasmine Griffin

"Doers of the Word": Saidiya V. Hartman


African-American Women Speakers and Writers in the North (1830-1880)
Carla L. Peterson

Race, Rape, and Lynching:


The Red Record of American Literature, 1890-1912
Sandra Gunning

Scenes of Subjection:
Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America
Saidiya V. Hartman

New York Oxford


OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
1997
Introduction

T he "rerrible spectacle " that introduced Frederick Douglass to slavery


was the beating of his Aunt Hester. It is one of the most well-known scenes of torture
in the Iiterature of slavery, perhaps second only to Uncle Torn's murder at the hands
of Simon Legree. By locating this "horrible exhibition" in the first chapter of his
1845 Narrative of lhe Life of Frederick Douglass, Douglass establishes the centrality
of violence to the making of the slave and identifies it as an original generative act
equivalent to the statement "I was bom." I The passage through the blood-stained
gate is an inaugural moment in the formation of the enslaved. In this regard, it is a
primal scene. By this I mean that the terrible spectacle dramatizes the origin of the
subject and demonstrates that to be a slave is to be under the brutal power and
authority of another; this is confirmed by the everu's placement in the opening
chapter on genealogy. 2
I have chosen not to reproduce Douglasss account of the beating of Aunt Hester
in order to call attention to the ease with which such scenes are usually reiterated, the
casualness with which they are circulated , and the consequences of this routine
display of the slave 's ravaged body. Rather than inciting indignation, too often they
immure us to pain by virtue of their familiarity-the oft-repeated or restored charac-
ter of these accounts and our distance from them are signaled by the theatrical
language usually resorted to in describing these instances-and especially because
they reinforce the spectacular character of black suffering. What interests me are the
ways we are called upon to participate in such scenes Are we witnesses who confirm
the truth of what happened in the face of the world-destroying capacities of pain, the
distortions of torture, the sheer unrepresentability of terror, and the repression of the
dominant accounts " Or are we voyeurs fascinated with and repelled by exhibitions
of terror and sufferance? What does the exposure 01' the violated body yield? Proof of
black sentience or the inhumanity of the .. peculiar institution"? Or does the pain of

J
4 SCENES OF SUBJECTION Introduction 5

the other merely provide us with the opportunity for self-reftection? AI issue here is ain't hogs or horses-us is human flesh. "5 The flesh, existence defined at its most
lhe precariousness of empathy and the uncertain line between wítness and speclator. elementaI leveI, alone entitled one to liberty. This basic assertion of colored folks'
Only more obscene than lhe brutality unleashed ai lhe whipping post is lhe demand entitlement to freedom implicitly cal/ed into question lhe rationales that legitimated
that this suffering be materialized and evidenced by lhe display of lhe tortured body lhe exclusion of blacks from lhe purview of universal rights and entitlernents. As
or endless recitations of lhe ghastly and lhe terrible In light of this, how does one Moses and Windham were well aware, the discourse of humanism, ar lhe very least,
give expression 10 these oulrages without exacerbating lhe indifferenee 10 suffering was double-edged sínce the life and liberty they held in esteern were racial entitle-
that is lhe eonsequence of the benumbing speetacle or eontend with lhe nareissistie ments formerly denied them. In short, the seleetive recognition of humanity that
identification that obliterates the other or lhe prurienee that toa often is lhe response undergirded the relations of chattel slavery had not considered them men deserving
to sueh displays? This was the ehallenge faced by Douglass and other foes of of rights or freedom. Thus in taking up lhe language of humanism, they seized upon
slavery, and this is lhe task I take up here. that whieh had been used against and deníed them.
Therefore, rather than try 10 eonvey lhe routinized violenee of slavery and its However, suppose that lhe recognition of humanity held out lhe promise not of
aftermath through invocations of the shocking and the terrible, I have chosen to look líberating lhe flesh or redeeming one 's suffering but rather of intensifying it? Or
elsewhere and consider those scenes in which terror ean hardly be diseemed-slaves what if this acknowledgment was Iittle more than a pretext for punishment, dissimu-
dancing in lhe quarters, the outrageous darky antics of the minstrel stage, the lation of lhe violence of chattel sIavery and lhe sanction given it by the law and the
constitution of humanity in siave law, and the fashioning of lhe self-possessed state, and an instantiation of racial hierarchy? What if lhe presumed endowrnents of
individual. By defamiliarizing the familiar, [ hope to illuminate the lerror of the man=-conscience. sentiment, and reason=-rather than assuring Iiberty or negating
mundane and quotidian rather than exploit the shocking spectacle. What concems s!avery acted 10 yoke slavery and freedom? Or what if lhe heart, lhe soul, and lhe
me here is the diffusion of terror and the violence perpetrated under lhe rubric of rnind were simply the inroads of discipline ralhe r than that which confirmed lhe
pleasure, patemalism, and property. Consequently, the scenes of subjection exam- crime of slavery and proved that blacks were men and brothers, as Charlie Moses
ined here foeus on the enactment of subjugation and the constitution of the subject had hoped.
and include lhe blows delivered to Topsy and Zip Coon on the popular stage, slaves Here I am interested in lhe ways that the recognition ofhumanity and individuality
coereed to dance in the marketplace, the sirnulation of will in siave law, the fashion- acted 10 tether, bind, and oppress. For instance, although the captives bifurcated
ing of identity, and the processes of indivíduation and normalization. existence as both an objeet of property and a person (whether understood as a legal
subject formaJ/y endowed with limited rights and protections, a submissive, culpa-
ble or criminal agent, or one possessing restricted capacities for self-fashioning) has
Human Flesh been recognized as one of the striking contradictions of ehattel slavery, lhe constitu-
tion of this humanity remains to be considered. In other words, the law 's recognition
When Charlie Moses refleeted on his years of slavery, lhe "preacher's of slave humanity has been dismissed as ineffeetual and as a volte-face of an
eloquence" noted by the Works Progress Administration interviewer who reeorded imperíled institution. Or, worse yet, it has been lauded as evidence of the hegemony
his testimony did not blunt his anger. In recounting the harsh treatrnent reeeived by of patemalism and the integral relations between masters and slaves. Similarly,
colored folks, he emphasízed that lhe enslaved were used like anirnals and treated as the faílure of Reconstruetion generally has been thought of as a faílure of ímple-
íf they existed only for the rnasters profits: "The way us niggers was Ireated was mentatíon=tbat is, lhe state.'s índifference loward blacks and unwíllíngness to en-
awful. Marster would beat, knock, kick , kill. He done ever ' thíng he eould 'cept eat sure basíc rights and entitlemenrs sufficed to explaín the racist retrenchment of lhe
us. We was worked to death. We worked Sunday, ali day, ali night. He whipped us postwar period. I approach these issues from a slightly different vantage point and
'til some jus' lay down to die. 11was a poor life. I knows it ain 't right to have hate in thus consider the outrages of slavery not only in terms of the object status of lhe
the heart, but, God almighty!" As if required to explain his animosity toward his enslaved as beasts of burden and chattel but also as they involve notions of slave
former owner who "had the devil in his heart." Moses exclaimed that "God hurnanity. Rather than declare paternalism an ideology, understood in the orthodox
alrnighty never meant for human beíngs 10 be like animais. Us niggers has a sou I an' sense as a false and distorted representation of social relations, I am concemed with
a heart an' a min '. We ain' like a dog or a horse."4 the savage encroachrnents of power that take plaee through notions of reform,
In some respects, Tom Windham 's experíence of enslavernent was the opposite of consent, and protection. As I will argue later, rather than bespeaking lhe mutuality
that deseribed by Charlie Moses; he reported that his owner had Ireated him well. 01' socíal relations or the expressive and affeetive capaeities of the subject, senti-
Nonetheless, like Moses, he 100 explained lhe violation of slavery as being made a rnent, enjoyment, affinity, will, and desire facilitated subjugation, domínation, and
beast of burden. While Moses detailed the outrages of slavery and highlighted the terror precisely by preying upon the flesh, the heart, and the soul. It was often lhe
atrocity of lhe institution by poignantly enumerating the essential features of lhe case that benevolent eorreetives and declaratíons of slave hurnanity intensified lhe
slave 's humanity-a soul, a heart, and a mind-Windham, in conveying the injus- brutal exercise of power upon lhe captive body rather than ameliorating lhe chattel
tice of slavery, put the matter simply: .. I think we should have our liberty cause us condition.
6 SCI'NES 01' SUIlJ"CTI()N lntroduction 7

Likewise , in considering the metamorphosis of chattel into man catalyzed by the of freedom, ali of which justified coercive labor measures and the constriction of
abolition of slavery , I think it is importam to considcr the failure of Reconstruction Iiberties. Apparenl here are the entanglements of slavery and freedom and the dutiful
not simply as a matter of policy or as evidence of a tlagging commitment to black submission characteristic of blaek subjectivity , whether in lhe making and maintain-
rights. which is undeniably the case. but also in terms of the limits of emancipation. ing of ehattel personal or in the fashioning of individuality, eultivation of con-
lhe ambiguous legacy of universalism, the exclusions constitutive of liberalisrn. and
science, and harnessing of free will.
lhe blameworthiness of lhe freed individual. Therefore I examine the role of rights in In light of these coneems, part I examines a variety of seenes ranging from the
Iacilitating relations of domination. the new forrns of bondage enabled by propri- auction block and the minstrel stage 10 the construction of black hurnanity in slave
eturial notions 01' the self, and the pedagogical and legislative efforts aimed at law. In this part, issues of terror and enjoyment frame the exploration of subjection,
transforming the formerly enslaved into rational. acquisitive , and responsible indi- for ealculations of socially tolerable violence and lhe myriad and wanton uses of
viduais. From this vantage point, emancipation appcars less the grand event Df siave property constitutive of enjoyrnent determine lhe person fashioned in the law
liberation than a point of transition between modes 01' servitude and racial subjec- and the blackness conjured up on the popular stage. Part 11 interrogates issues of
tion. As well. it leads us to question whether lhe rights of man and citizen are agency, willfulness, and subjection in the context of freedorn. In particular, it
realizable or whether lhe appellation "hurnan' can be borne equally by ali h examines lhe liberal discourse of possessive individualism, lhe making of the con-
In response to these questions, I contend that the recognition of the humanity of tractual subject, and the wedding of formal equality and black subjugation. The
the slave did not redress the abuses of the institution nor the wanton use of the period covered thus extends frorn the antebellum era to the end of the nineteenth
captive warranted by his or her status as chattel, since in rnost instances the acknowl- century. Despite lhe amazing turnults, transitions, and discontinuities during the
edgment of the slave as subject was a complement to the arrangements of chattel antebellurn period , Reconstruction, and the Gilded Age, I feel this scope is justified
property rather than its rernedy: nor did self-possession liberate the former slave by the tragic continuities in antebellum and postbellum constitutions of blackness.
frorn his or her bonds but rather sought to replace the whip with the compulsory The intransigence of racism and the antipathy and abjection naturalized in Plessy v.
contract and the collar with a guilty conscience. Put differently, largue that the F erguson recast blackness in terms that refigured relations of mastery and servitude.
barbarism 01'slavery did not express itself singularly in the constitution of the slave Thus, an arnazing continuity belied the hypostatized discontinuities and epochal
as object but also in the forrns of subjectivity and circumscribed humanity irnputed 10 shifts installed by categories like slavery and freedom.
lhe enslaved; by the same token, the failures of Reconstruction cannot be recounted The first chapter, "Innocent Arnusements: The Stage of Sufferance;" examines
solely as a series 01' legal reversals or troop withdrawals: they also need to be located the role of enjoyment in the economy of chattel slavery. Specifically it considers
in the very language of persons, rights. and liberties. For these reasons the book enjoyment in regard to the sanctioned uses of slave property and the figurative
examines the forrns of violence and domination enabled by the recognition of hu- capacities of blackness.ln this chapter, I contend that the value of blackness resided
manity, licensed by the invocation of rights. and justitied on lhe grounds of liberty in its rnetaphorical aptitude, whether Iiterally understood as the fungibility of the
and frecdorn.
cornrnodity or understood as the imaginative surface upon which the master and the
In exploring these issues. I do not intend to offer a cornprehensive exarnination nation carne to understand thernselves. As Toni Morrison writes, "The slave popu-
of slavery and Reconstruction or to recover the resistances of the dorninated lation, it could be and was assurned, offered itself up as surrogate selves for medita-
but to critically interrogate terms like "will." "agency." "mdividuality." and tion on problerns of human freedom, its lure and its elusiveness."? lndeed, black-
. 'responsibility." As stated previously, this requires exarnining the constitution 01' ness provided the occasion for self-reflection as well as for an exploration of terror.
the subject by dominant discourses as well as the ways in which the enslaved and the desire, fear, loathing, and longing." In examining the torturous eonstitution of
emancipated grappled with these terms and strived to reelaborate them in fashioning agency and lhe role of feelings in seeuring domination, the chapter looks at popular
thernselves as agents. For these reasons. the sccnes of subjection at issue here theater, the spectacle of the siave rnarket, and the instrumental amusements of the
consider the Manichaean identities constitutive of slave humanity-that is , the sated plantation. At these sites, the reenactment of subjection oceurs by way of coerced
subordinate and/or willful criminal. the calculation of humanity , the fabulation of agency, sirnulated contentrnent, and the obliteration of the olhe r through the slipping
the will. and the relation between injury and personhood. While the calibration of on of blackness or an empathic identification in which one substitutes the self for the
sentience and terms of punishment determined the constricted hurnanity of the other.
enslaved, the abased and encurnbered individuality of the emancipated resulted In these instances, the exercise of power was inseparable from its display because
largely írom the equation of responsibility with blameworthiness. thereby rnaking domination depended upon dernonstrations of the slaveholder 's dominion and the
duty synonyrnous with punishment. The enduring legacy of slavery was readily captive 's abasernent. The owner 's display of rnastery was just as irnportant as the
discemablc in the travestied liberation, castigated agency. and blameworthiness 01' legal title to slave property. In other words, representing power was essential to
the free individual. By the same token, the ubiquitous fun and frolic that supposedly reproducing domination. As James Scott states, a significant aspect of maintaining
demonstrated slave contentment and the Africans suitedness for slavery were rnir- relations of dornination "consists of the symbolization of dornination by demonstra-
rored in the panic about idlencss, intemperate consumption. and fanciful expressions tions and enactrnents of power. "\I These dernonstrations of power consisted of
o SCENES OF SUIlJECTION lntroduction 9

forcing the enslaved to witness the beating, torture, and execution of slaves, chang- ered a story of intimacy and power that dissimulates lhe violence of lhe law and the
ing the names of slave children on a whim to emphasize to slave parents that the violation of the enslaved. ln exploring these issues , the chapter reads Harriet A.
owner, not the parents, detennined the childs fate , and requiring siaves to sing and jacobss Incidents in lhe Life of a Slave Girl, Written by Herself, as an effort to
dance for the owners entertainment and feign their contentment. Such perfonnances defoml the masterful rhetoric of seduction by positioning the "slave girl" as a
confinned the slaveholder 's dominion and made the captive body the vehicle of the willful agent detennined to obtain freedom rather than her owners affection and
master 's power and truth. employing cunning and duplicity in the narrative. In this regard, the reversibility of
The innocent amusements and spectacles of mastery orchestrated by members of seduction both legitimares violence and enables an enactment of rebellion and a
the slaveholding class to establish their dominion and regulate lhe little leisure usurpation of power in Jacobss narrative.
allowed the enslaved were significant components of slave perfonnance. Conse- Iacobxs narrative is also instructive regarding the issue of freedom. The critique
quently. it is difficult, if not impossible. 10 establish an absolute and definitive of freedom exemplified by the loophole of retreat-a space of freedom that is ai the
division between "going before lhe master " and other amusements. Moreover. this same lime a space of captivity-and the difficulties experienced in trying to assume
accounts for the ambivalent pleasures afforded by such recreations. The vexed the role of free and self-possessed individual prefigure the critique of ernancipation
character of good times and the reelaboration of orchestrated amusements for other advanced by fonner slaves in the postbellum context. II The entanglements of slav-
ends are the focus of the second chapter .. 'Redressing the Pained Body: Toward a ery and freedom underlincd by Jacobss continued servitude and vastly improved yet
Theory of Practice." In "going before the rnaster ," the enslaved were required to far from ideal condition are the central issues examined in the second half 01' the
sing or dance for the slave owners pleasure as well as to demonstrate their submis- book. Part 11focuses on the extended servitude 01'the ernancipated. the fashioning of
sion, obsequiousness, and obedience. What was demanded by the master was simu- the obligated and blameworthy individual. and the injurious constitution of black-
lated by the enslaved: yet the capitulation of the dominated to these demands must be ness. In this section I consider the changes wrought by emancipation and the shifting
considered as pragmatism rather than resignation since one either complied with the registers of racial subjection. Chapter 4, "The Burdened Individuality of Freedom;'
rules governing socially sanctioned behavior or risked punishment. In addition. serves as an introduction to part 11. Primarily ít focuses on the legacy of slavery in
these perfonnances constituted acts of defiance conducted under the cover of non- the postbellum context and the instability and ambivalence 01'rights discourse. The
sense, indirection, and seeming acquiescence. By virtue of such tactics, these per- fifth chapter. "Fashioning Obligation: Indebted Servitude and lhe Fetters 01' Slav-
fonnances were sometimes turned against their instrumental airns: at the same time, ery.' extends this discussion by examining the contractual subject represented in
the reliance on masquerade , subterfuge. and indirection also obscured the small acts pedagogical manuais for lhe freed. Basically. it contends that will and responsibility
of resistance conducted by the enslaved. After ali. how does one determine the replaced the whip with the tethers of guilty conscience. 01' particular interest are
difference bctwecn "puuin' on ole massa" -the simulation of cumpliance for cuv- liberal notions of responsibility modeled on contractual obligation. calculated reei-
ert aims-and the grins and gesticulatiuns of Sambo indicating the repressive con- procity, and, most important, indebtedness since debt played a central role in the
struction of contented subjection? AI the levei of appearance. these contending creation of the servile , blameworthy. and guilty individual and in the reproduction
perfonnances uften differed little. At lhe levei of effect, however , they diverged and transformation of involuntary servitude .
radically. One perfonnance aimed to reproduce and secure the rclations of domina- Chapter 6. "lnstinct and lnjury: Bodily Integrity. Natural Affinities, and the
tion and the other to manipulate appearances in order to challenge lhe se relations and Constitution 01' Equaiity .' examines issues of rights , equality, and exclusion. Based
create a space for action not generally available. However, since acts of resistance upon the argument advanced in lhe preceding chapters regarding the entanglements
exist within the context of relations of domination and are not external to them, they 01' slavery and freedom. I maintain that the vision 01' equality forged in the law
acquire their character from these relations, and vice versa. At a dance. holiday fete , naturalized racial subordination while atternpting to prevent discrimination based on
or com shucking, the line between dominant and insurgent orchestrations of black- race or fonner condition of servitude. What concems me here are the corporeal
ness could be effaced or fortified in the course of an evcning , either because thc politics spanning the divide between slavery and freedom-the bodily degradation
enslaved utilized instrumental amusements for contrary purposes or because surveil- uf the African espoused in the majority opinion of Dred SCO(( v. Sanford by Judge
lance necessitated cautious fonns of interaction and modes of expression. Roger Taney (which Taney insisted excluded blacks from the "person" of the
The simulation of agency and the enactment of willful subrnission in the domain Constitution imagined by the founding fathers and was sufficient reason for their
of law are examined in the third chapter, "Seduction and the Ruses of Power ." It continued exclusion) and the feared loss of white bodily integrity that upheld the
contends that the rhetoric of seduction-the power ascribed to the dependent and the scparate-but-equal doctrine in Ptessy I'. Ferguson. largue that Plessy exemplifies
subordinate-deployed in the law licensed extreme acts of violation in the name of the corporeal anxieties of the liberal order and illuminates the double bind of equality
feelings, intirnacy, and reciprocity rather than recognizing the influence of the weak. and exclusion that distinguishes modern state racism from its antcbellurn prede-
Issues of sexual violation and dornination are the particular focus of the chapter, and cessor rather than simply providing an instance of the dismantling of lhe civil rights
in this regard, seduction is considered "a meduation on freedom and slavery " and agenda legislatively enacted in the years 1865-1875. Thus this reading does not
willfulness and subjugation in the arena of sexuality .IU In effect, seduction is consid- consider Plessy v. Ferguson an aberration of liberal ideais but rather a striking
[O SCENES OF SUBJECTION lntroduction [)

example of the eommonplaee-the wedding of equality and exc1usion in the liberal . the authority of these doeuments even as I try to use them for contrary pur-
IOg
state. Of signal importanee in Plessy are the strategies of disavowal that remove the
ses."
state from lhe domains that it in effeet constitutes, lhe primaey granted to affeet in PO The effort to "brush history against the grain' requires excavations at the margins
detennining the seope and enjoyment of rights and the duties of the state, and the f monumental history in order that the ruins of the dismembered past be retrieved,
reinseription of degradation in the elaboration of the separate-but-equal doetrine. ~urning to forms of knowledge and p~aetice not generally conside~ed legitim.ate
In short largue that despite the shift from the legal-status aseriptions eharacteristic objeets of historical inq.uiry or .appropnate o~ adequat~ sources. for history ma~Ing
of the antebelIum period, the emphasis on the blood, sexuality, and commingling in and attending to the cultivated silence, exclusions, relations of violence and dom ma-
postemancipation racial diseourse ultimately refigured the status-race of chattel slav- tion that engender the official accounts. Therefore the documents, fragments, and
ery. Here again, sentiment sanctions blaek subordination because affinity and desire acCounts considered here, although claimed for purposes contrary to those for which
ultimately eclipse equality. While the inferiority of blacks was no longer the legal rhey were gathered, nonetheless remain entangled with the politics of dornination. In
standard, the various strategies of state racism produced a subjugated and subordi- this regard, the effort to reconstruct the history ofthe dominated is not discontinuous
nated class within the body politic, albeit in a neutral or egalitarian guise. Notwith- with dominant accounts or official history but, rather, is a struggle within and against
standing the negatory power of the Thirteenth Amendment, racial slavery was the constraints and silences imposed by the nature of the archive-the system that
transformed rather than annulIed. As suggested earlier, this transformation was governs the appearance of statements and generates social meaning.!"
manifested in debt-peonage and other forms of involuntary servitude that con- My interest in reading this material is twofold: in interpreting these materiaIs, I
scripted the newly emancipated and putative free laborer, an abiding legacy of black hope to illuminate the practice of everyday Iife-specifically, tactics of resistance,
inferiority and subjugation, and the regulatory power of a racist state obsessed with modes of self-fashioning, and figurations of freedom-and to investigate the con-
blood, sex , and procreation. The eneumbrances of emancipation and the fettered struction of the subject and social relations contained within these documents. Con-
condition of the freed individual, at the very least, lead us to reeonsider the meaning sequently, this effort is enmeshed with the relations of power and dominance that it
of freedorn, if they do not cast doubt on the narrative of progresso strives to write against; in this regard, it both resists and complies with the official
narratives of slavery and freedom. My reliance on the interviews conducted by the
Works Progress Administration raises a host of problems regarding the construction
A Note on Method of voice, the terms in which agency is identified, the dominance of the pastoral in
representing slavery, the political imperatives that informed the construction of
How does one telI the story of an elusive emancipation and a travestied national memory, the ability of those interviewed to recall what had happened sixty
freedom? Certainly, reconsidering the meaning of freedom entails looking eritieally years earlier, the use of white interviewers who were sometimes the sons and
at the production of historical narratives since the very effort to represent the situa- daughters of former owners in gathering the testimony, and so on. The construction
tion of the subaltem reveals the provisionality of the archive as well as the interests of black voice by mostly white interviewers through the grotesque representation of
that shape it and thereby determine the emplotment of history. For exarnple, the what they imagined as black speech, the questions that shaped these interviews, and
imperative to construct a usable and palatable national past certainly detennined the the artifice of direet reported speech when, in fact, these interviews were transcribed
pieture of slavery drawn in the testimonies gathered by the Works Progress Adrninis- non verbatim accounts make quite tentative ali claims about representing the inten-
tration, not to mention the hierarchical relations between mostly white interviewers tionality or consciousness of those interviewed, despite appearances that would
and black interviewees. Bearing this in rnind, one recognizes that writing the history encourage us to believe that we have gained access to the voice of the subaltem and
of the dominated requires not only the interrogation of dominant narratives and the located the true history after all.'>
exposure of their contingent and partisan character but also the reclamation of With al\ this said, how does one use these sources? At best with the awareness that
archival material for contrary purposes. As Gayatri Spivak rernarks, "The 'sub- a totalizing history cannot be reconstructed from these interested, selective , and
altern ' cannot appear without the thought of the 'elite.' "12 In other words, there is fragmentary accounts and with an acknowledgment of the interventionist role of the
no access to the subaltem conseiousness outside dominant representations or elite interpreter, the equally interested labor of historical revision, and the impossibility
documents. Accordingly, this examination of the cultural praetices of the dominated of reconstituting the past free from the disfigurements of present concems.t> With alI
is possible only because of the accounts provided by literate black autobiographers, these provisos issued, these narratives nonetheless remain an important source for
white arnanuenses, plantation joumals and documents, newspaper accounts, mis- understanding the everyday experience of slavery and its aftermath. Bearing the
sionary tracts, traveI writing, amateur ethnographies, govemment reports, et cetera. aforementioned qualifications in mind, I read these documents with the hope of
Because these documents are "not free from barbarism," I have tried to read them gaining a glimpse of black life during slavery and the postbellum period while
against the grain in order to write a different account of the past, while realizing the remaining aware of the impossibility of fulIy reconstituting the experience of the
lirnits imposed by employing these sources, the impossibility of fully recovering enslaved. I don 't try to Iiberate these documents from the context in which they were
the experience of the enslaved and lhe ernancipated, and the risk of reinforc- colIected but do try to exploit the surface of these accounts for contrary purposes and
12
SCENES 01' SUBJECTION
Introduction 13
to consider the form resistance assumes given this context. My attempt to read a transient and fleeting expression of possibility that cannot ensconce itself as a
against the grain is perhaps best understood as a combination of foraging and durable temporal marker. If periodization is a barrier imposed from above that
disfiguration-raiding for fragments upon which other narratives can be spun and
obscures lhe involuntary servitude and legal subjection that followed in the wake of
misshaping and deforming the testimony through selective quotation and the
slavery, then attempts to assert absolutist distinctions between slavery and freedom
amplification of issues germane to this study.
are untenable. Fundamentally, such assertions involve distinctions between the tran-
Of course the WPA testimony is intcrested. provisional, and characterized by sient and the epochal, underestimate the contradictory inheritance of emancipation
lapses of forgetting, silences. and exclusions. but what sources are immune to such and the forms of involuntary servitude that foIlowed in the wake of slavery, and
charges? John Blassingame has detailed the difticulties inherent in using the WPA diminish the reign of terror that accompanied the advent of freedom. Put differently,
sources because of the powcr differential between white interviewers and black does the momentousness of emancipation as an event uItimately efface the continu-

I interviewees. the editing and rewriting of these accounts , and the time lapse between
lhe interview and the experience of slavery; nonetheless he concedes that they are an
important source of information about slavery. 17 1 agree with Blassingame 's assess-
ment and would also add that there is no historical document that is not interested,
ities between slavery and freedom and the dispossession inseparable from becoming
a "propertied person"? If one dares to "abandon the absurd catalogue of official
history." as Edouard Glissant encourages, then lhe violence and domination per-
petuated in the name of slavery's reversal come to the fore.!? From this vantage
exclusive , or a vehicle of power and dorninauon, and it is precisely the latter that 1 point, emancipation seems a double-edged and perhaps obfuscating labe!. It dis-
am trying to bring to the fore in assessing everyday practices, the restricted confines closes as weIl as obscures since involuntary servitude and emancipation were syn-
in which they exist, and the terms in which they are represented. Besides, contem- onymous for a good many of lhe formerly enslaved. This is evidenced in "comrnon-
poraneous narratives and interviews are no less selective in their representations of sense" observations that black lives were more valuable under slavery than under
slavery. Thc WPA testimony is an overdeterrnined representation of slavery, as are freedom, that blacks were worse off under freedom than during slavery, and that the
ali of lhe accounts. Therefore. the work of reconstruction and fabulation that 1 have gift of freedom was a "hard de al. •. I use the term "comrnon sense " purposely to
undertaken highlights the relation between power and voice and the constraints and underline what Antonio Gramsci described as lhe' 'chaotic aggregate of disparate
closures that determine not only what can be spoken bUI also (the identity of) who conceptions" that conform with "the social and cultural position of those masses
speaks. In so many words, 1 approach issues of subjectivity and agency by examin- whose philosophy it is." It is a conception of world and life "implicit to a large
ing the possibilities and constraints of various practices from performance to the extent in determinate strata of society" and "in opposition to 'official' conceptions
rhetorical strategies of law. Again, my reading of slave testimony is not an attempt of the world. "20 In this case, common sense challenges the official accounts of
to recover the voice of the enslaved bUI an attempl 10 consider specific practices in a freedom and stresses the similarities and correspondencies of slavery and freedom.
public performance of slavery that cncompasses thc slave on the auction block and At a minimum, thesé observations disclose the disavowed transactions between
those sharing their recollections decades later. I~ In this regard, the gap betwcen the slavery and freedom as modes of production and subjection.
event and its recollection is bridged not only by the prompting of interviewers but The abolition of chattel slavery and the emergence of man, however laudable,
also by the censored context of self-expression and the uncanny resernblance be- long awaited, and cherished, fail to yield such absolute distinctions; instead fleeting.
tween "puuin on ole massa" and lhe tactics of withholding airned at not offending disabled, and short-lived practices stand for freedom and its failure. Everyday prac-
white interviewers and/or evading self-disclosure.
tices. rather than traditional political activity like the abolition rnovement, black
The effort to examine the event of emancipation is no less riddled by inescapable conventions, the struggle for suffrage, electoral activities, et cetera. are the focus of
ironies, the forernost of these being the discontinuity between substantial freedom my examination because I believe that these pedestrian practices iJluminate inchoate
and legal emancipation. Inevitably one is forced 10 confront the discrepant legacy of and utopian expressions of freedom that are not and perhaps cannot be actual-
ernancipauon and the decidedly circumscribcd possibilitics available 10 the freed. In ized elsewhere. The desires and longings that exceed the frame of civil rights and
short, how does une adequately render the double bind of emancipalion-that is, political emancipation find expression in quotidian acts labeled "fanciful." "exor-
acknowledge lhe illusory freedom and travestied Iiberation that succeeded chattel bitant." and "excessive" primarily because they express an understanding or
slavery without gainsaying the small Iriumphs of Jubilee? Certainly one rnust con- imagination of freedom quite at odds with bourgeois expectations. Paul Gilroy, after
tend with the enormity of emancipation as both a breach with slavery and a point of Seyla Benhabib. refers to these utopian invocations and the incipient modes of
transition to what looks more Iike lhe reorganizauon of the plantation system than friendship and solidarity they conjure up as "the politics of transfiguration. "21 He
self-possession. citizenship. or liberty for the "freed." In the place of the grand notes that in contrast to the politics of fulfillment that operate within the framework
narrative of freedom, with its decisive cvents and incontrovertible advances, loffer of bourgeois civil society and occidental rationality, . 'the politics of transfiguration
an account that focuses on the ambivalent legacy of emancipation and the undeni- strives in pursuit ofthe sublime. struggling to repeat the unrepeatable, to present the
ably truncated opportunities available to the freed. Lacking the certitude of a defini- unpresentable. Its rather different hcrmeneutic focus pushes towards the mimetic,
tive partition betwecn slavery and freedom. and in the absence of a consumrnate dramatic and performative." From this perspective, stealing away, the breakdown,
breach through which frcedom might unambivalently announce itself. thcre is at best moving about, pilfering , and other everyday practices that occur below the threshold
''t SCENES OF SUBJECTION

of formal equality and rights gesture toward an unrealized freedom and emphasize
the stranglehold of slavery and the limits of emancipation. ln this and in other ways,
these practices reveal much about the infrapolitics of the dominated and the contesta-
tions over the meaning of abolition and emancipation. PART ONE
The intervention made here is an atternpt to recast the past. guided by the conun-
drums and compulsions of our contemporary crisis: the hope for social transforma.
tion in the face of seemingly insunnountable obstacles, the quixotic search for a F ormations of Terror
subject capable of world-historical action, and the despair induced by the lack of
one. ln this regard, it is hoped that the instances of insurgency and contestation
narrated herein and the relentless proliferation of small acts of resistance perhaps
and Enjoyment
offer some small measure of encouragement and serve to remind us that the failures
of Reconstruction still haunt us, which in part explains why the grand narratives
continue to hold sway over our imagination. Therefore, while I acknowledge his-
tory's "fiction of factual representation," to use Hayden Whites terrn, I also recog-
nize the political utility and ethical necessity of historical fiction. As Walter Ben-
jamin rernarked, "Only that historian will have the gift of fanning the spark of hope
in the past who is finnly convinced that even lhe dead will not be safe if the enemy
wins. "22
48 FORMATIONS OF TERROR AND ENJOYMENT

the critique and its broad strokes are intent upon destroying the discourse on indo,
Icnce, servility. and contentment that licensed the institution. However, even in the
context of this ruthless encounter with the pleasures afforded within the confines of
slavery, he manages to catch hold of glimmerings of opposition-in this case' 'the 2
sharp hits against slaveholders " in "jubilee patting."
This search for an oppositional culture , or a symbolic analogue of Douglass's
physical confrontation with Covey, the overseer and "nigger breaker ," alights on
Redressing the Pained Body
slave song:
TOWARD A THEORY OF PRACTICE
They would sing ., words which to many would sccm unmcaning jargon, but which
nevertheless. were full of meaning to themselves. I have sometimes thought that the
mere hearing of these songs would do more to impress some minds with the horrible History is what hurts, it is what refuses desire and sets inexorable lirnits to indi-
character of slavery, than the reading of whole volumes of philosophy on the subject vidual as well as collective praxis, which its "ruses" tum into grisly and ironic
could do. I did not when a slave, understand the deep meaning 01' those rude and reversals of their overt intention.
apparently incoherent songs. I was myself within the circle: so that I neither saw nor -Fredric Jameson, The Po/itical Unconscious (1982)
heard as those without might see and hear. They told a tale of woe which was then
altogether beyond my feeble cornprehension: they were tones loud. long and deep; they
breathed the prayer and complaint of souls boiling over with the bitterest anguish. Every
tone was a testimony against slavery, and a prayer to God for deliverance from chains.
The hearing of those wild notes always depressed my spirit , and filled me with ineffable Lu Lee's owner encouraged the enslaved to have Saturday night dances
sadness. I have frequently found myself in tears while hearing them .... To those even though he was a religious man and thought it wrong to dance. Lee remembered
songs I trace my first glimmering conception of the dehumanizing character of slav- him saying, "Seek your enjoyment, niggers gol to pleasure lhemselves someway."
eryln As argued earlier, the promotion of innocent amusements and harmless pleasures
Yet these songs insufficiently meet the requirernents of an oppositional culture, one was a central strategy in the slave owner's effort to cultivate contented subjection.
capable of combating ostensibly beneficial diversions and poised to destroy these However, lhe complicity of pleasure with the instrumental ends of slaveholder
designs for rnastery. While every tone testifies against slavery, sorrow rather than domination led those like Mary Glover to declare emphatica\1y, "I don' t want [that]
resistance characterizes such songs; furthermore , they are cmblems of the "soul- kind of pleasure. " Generally, the response of lhe enslaved to the management and
killing effects of slavery ." The mere hearing of these songs impresses one with the orchestration of "Negro enjoyment" was more complex than a simple rejection of
horrible character of slavery. Above ali. these songs are valued as dirges expressive "innocent amusements." Rather, the sense of operating within and against these
of the social death of slavery and inchoate expressions of a latent political conscious- closures made the experience of pleasure decidedly ambivalent. If "good times"
ness. In this regard, they belie popular portraits of happiness and contentrnent. The were an index of the owner's profit and dominion, what possibilities could pleasure
opacity of these sorrowful and half-articulate songs perplexes and bafftes those yield? For those like John McAdams, pleasure was less a general form of dominance
within and without the circle of slavery. When a slave. Douglass was unable to see than a way of naming, by contradistinction, the consumption and possession of the
and hear as those without might have , yet those without 100 often rnisinterpreted body and black needs and possibilities. It was more than a tendency for understate-
these songs as evidence of satisfaction. Anticipating Du Bois's assessment of the ment that led McAdams to characterize his experience and that of other slaves as
"no pleasure, as we had to workjust as soon as [we] got large enough to work."1
sorrow songs as "lhe music of an unhappy people. of the children of disappoint-
Not only was pleasure posed in contrast to labor, but the negation or ambivalence
rnent; they tell of death and suffering and unvoiced longing toward a truer world, of
mist wanderings and hidden way.' Douglass emphasized lhe singularity of sorrow, of pleasure was to be explained by the yoking of the captive body to the will, whims,
and exploits of the owner and by lhe constancy of the slave's unmet yearnings,
thus hoping to establish an absolute line of division between diversion and lhe
whether for food or for freedorn. Yet McAdams's remarks also suggest that "Iack "
glimmerings of protest.P> Yet this distinction could not be sustained. for the pro-
insufficient1y describes the vexed state of pleasure, since slaves also lived for Satur-
miscuous exchanges of culture and lhe fraught terms of agency muddled lhe lines of
day night dances. The value attached to having a good time was its facilitation
opposition, and as Douglass himself recognized. on rare occasions lhe pleasures
available within lhe confines of slavery indeed possessed glimmerings of insurgency of collective identification: "We made good use of these nights as that was ali the
and transformation, time lhe slaves had rogether 10 dance, talk, and have a good time among their
own color."2 And yet pleasure was ensnared in a web of domination, accumula-
tion, abjection, resignation, and possibility. It was nothing if not cunning, mercu-
rial, treacherous, and indifferently complicit with quite divergent desires and aspira-

49
50 FORMATlONS OF TERROR ANO ENJOYMENT Redressing lhe Pained Body 51

tions, ranging from the instrumental aims of slave-owner designs for mastery to the ravished body, severed affiliations and natal alienation, and the assertion of denied
promise and possibility of releasing or redressing the pained constraints of the needs. Practice is not simply a way of naming these efforts but rather a way of
captive body. It is the ambivalence of pleasure and its complicity with dominative thinking about the character of resistance, the precariousness of lhe assaults waged
strategies of subjection that is the theme of this chapter. against dornination, the fragmentary character of these efforts and the transient
The struggles waged against domination and enslavement in everyday life took a batdes won, and the characteristics of a politics without a proper locus.
variety of fonns, including opportunities seized in the domain of pennissible anel The everyday practices of lhe enslaved encompassed an array of tactics such as
regulated amusements. If these occasions were designed, as Frederick Douglass work slowdowns, feigned illness, unlicensed travei, lhe destruction of property,
argued, to ••better secure the ends of injustice and oppression, " they also provideda- /' rheft, self-mutilation, dissimulation, physical confrontation with owners and over-
context in which power was challenged and c1aims made in the name of pleasure~ seers that document the resistance to slavery. 7 These small-scale and everyday fonns
need, and desire.> Pleasure was fraught with these contending investments in the of resistance interrupted, reelaborated, and defied the constraints of everyday life
body. As Toby Jones noted, the Saturday night dances pennitted by the master were under slavery and exploited openings in the system for the use of the enslaved. What
refashioned and used for their own ends by the enslaved: "The fun was on Saturday unites these varied tactics is the effort to redress the condition of the enslaved,
night when massa 'Iowed us to dance. There was a lot of banjo pickin' and tin pan restore the disrupted affiliations of the socially dead, challenge the authority and
beatin' and danein' and everybody talk bout when they lived in Africa and done what dominion of the slaveholder, and alleviate the pained state of the captive body.
they wanted. "4 Within the confines of surveillance and nonautonomy, the resistance However, these acts of redress are undertaken with the acknowledgment that condi-
to subjugation proceeded by steaIth: one acted furtively, secretly, and imperceptibly, tions will most Iikely remain the same. This acknowledgment implies neither resig-
and the enslaved seized any and every opportunity to slip off the yoke. nation nor fatalism but a recognition of the enonnity of the breach instituted by
In these pages, I outline the c1andestine fonns of resistance, popular illegalities, slavery and the magnitude of domination.
and "war of position" conducted under the cover of fun and frolic. Here I do not Redressing the pained body encompasses operating in and against the demands of
mean to suggest that everyday practices were strategies of passive revolution but the system. negotiating the disciplinary harnessing of the body, and counterinvesting
merely to emphasize that peregrinations, surreptitious appropriation, and moving .in the body as a site of possibility. In this instance, pain must be recognized in its
about were central features of resistance or what could be described as the subterra- ~ístoricity and as the. articulat.ion of a social c.o~dition of brutal cons~r.aint. extreme
nean "politics" of the enslaved. With this in mind, I endeavor in this chapter to need, and constant violence; m other words, rt IS the perpetual condition of ravish-
illuminate the social struggle waged in "the Negro's enjoyment" and the challenges -~çnt. Pain is a norrnative condition that encompasses the legal subjectivity of
todomination launched under the rubric ofpleasure. Yet, in orderto do this, we rnust, the enslaved that is constructed along the Iines of injury and punishment, the viola-
first, situate perfonnance within the context of everyday practices and consider the tion and suffering inextrícably enmeshed with the pleasures of rninstrelsy and melo-
possibilities of practice in regard to speeific fonns of domination; second, defamiliar- drama, the operation of power on black bodies, and the life of property in which
ize fun and frolic or the perfonnance of blackness in order to make visible the the full enjoyment of the slave as thing supersedes the admittedly tentative recog-
challenges that emerge in this arena; and, third, liberate the perfonnative from the nition of slave humanity and permits lhe intemperate uses of chattel. This pain
closures of sentiment and contented subjection in order to engage the critical laborof" might best be described as the history that hurts-the still-unfolding narrative of
redress.> captivity, dispossession, and dornination that engenders the black subject in the
Americas.
If this pain has been largely unspoken and unrecognized, it is due to lhe sheer
The Centrality of Practice denial of black sentience rather than the inexpressibility of pain. The purported
jmmuníty of blacks to pain is absolutely essential to the spectacle of contented
Exploiting the limits of the pennissible, creating transient zones of free- ~.ubjection or, at the very least, to discrediting the c1aims of pain. 8 The black is both
dom, and reelaborating innocent amusements were central features of everyday ins~nsate and content, indifferent to pain and induced to work by threats of corporal
practice. Practice is, to use Michel de Certeau's phrase, "a way of operating" _~unishment. These contradictions are partly explained by the ambiguous and pre-
defined by "the non-autonomy of its field of action," internal manipulations of the carious status of the black in the "great chain of being"-in short, by lhe pa-
established order, and ephemeral victories. The tactics that comprise the everyday ~hologizing of the black body=-this abhorrence then serves to justify acts of violence
practices of the dominated have neither the means to secure a territory outside the !hat exceed normative standards of the humanely tolerabIe, though within the limits
space of domination nor the power to keep or maintain what it is won in f1eeting, ofthe socially tolerable as concerned the black slave. In this regard, pain is essential
surreptitious, and necessarily incomplete victories.« The refashioning of pennitted to the making of productive slave laborers. The sheer enormity of this pain over-
pleasures in the effort to undennine, transfonn, and redress the condition of enslave- whelms or exceeds lhe limited forms of redress available to the enslaved. Thus the
ment was consonant with other fonns of everyday practice. These efforts generally ~.ignificance of the performative lies not in the ability to overcome this condition or
focused on the object status and castigated personhood of the slave, the pained and provide rernedy but in creating a context for the collective enunciation of this pain,
~ 52 FORMATIONS OF TERROR AND ENJOYMENT Redressing lhe Pained Body 53

transfonning need into politics and cultivating pleasure as a limited response to need lhe brute force of the racial-economic order. Thus, the brutality and antagonisms of
and a desperately insufficient form of redress. slavery are obscured in favor of an enchanting reciprocity. The pastoral renders the
state of domination as an ideal of care, duty, familial obligation, gratitude, and
humanity. The ruthless use of labor power and the extraction of profit are imagined
The Closures of Sentiment as the consensual and rational exchange between owner and slave. This is accom-
plished by representing direct ando primary forms of domin~tion .as coer~ive and
It is impossible to imagine the enslaved outside a chain of associations in consensual-in short, by representmg slavery as a hegernonic social relation.
which the captive dancing in literal or figurative chains, on the deck of a ship, in the This repressive problematic of consent frames everyday practices in terms of
marketplace, or before the master does not figure prominently. This indelible image mutual obligation and reciprocity between owners and the enslaved. Thus it stages

I of a prostrate yet perky Sambo conjures up an idealized and fetishized state of


servitude, in which the imputed consciousness of the enslaved ensures submission
and docility more effectively than either the whip or the chain. In other words, the
figure reconciles infantilized willfulness with the abject status of the will-less object.
the agency of the enslaved as a form of willed self-irnmolation in that what is
"consented" to is a state of subjugation of the most extreme order. Consequently,
the representations of slave agency have intensified the effects of subjugation and
dispossession in the guise of will and denied the abject and ambivalent personhood
Not only is this image paradigmatic; it is also so pervasive and repressive that it of the captive in the facile and spurious attempt to incorporate the slave into the
makes cIaims about the perfonnative as a practice of resistance and redress quite ethereal realms of the normative subject through demonstrations of his consent and/
tentative. For the "Pompey " of the missionary report somnambulantly reciting the or autonomy. Certainly the notion of the autonomous self endowed with free will is
catechism, the Jim Crow of the minstrel stage, and the contented slave singing for inadequate and, more important, inappropriate to thinking through the issue of slave
the master or dancing on the auction block conspire to eradicate the social experience agency. The self-possessed subject with his inalienable attributes is quite unthink-
of enslavement-its terror, suffering, captivity, exchange, objectification, and able or unimaginable in this case. Nevertheless, by emphasizing complementarity,
domination, to name just a few of the significant features in a possibly endless Iitany reciprocity, and shared values, this hegemonic or consensual model of slave rela-
of violence-precisely as they appear to give "voice " to the slave. In the case of tions neutralizes the dilemma of the object status and pained subject constitution of
these anointed agents of the enslaved, the simulation of will effectively annuls any the enslaved and obscures the violence of slavery. 9 What do reciprocity, mutu-
possibility of redress or resistance. ality, and the recognition of the captive's humanity mean in the context of slavery?
Is it possible to consider, let alone imagine, the agency of the perfonnative when In other words, who is protected by such notions-the master or the slave?
the black perfonnative is inextricably linked with the specter of contented subjec- This vision of mutuality and organic order finds expression in the pastoral. 10 As a
tion, the torturous display of the captive body, and the ravishing of the body that is mode of historical representation, the pastoral seizes upon the strains of song and
the condition ofthe other's pleasure? As well, how does one explicate the conditions story, invariably a part of slave life, as precious components in the depiction of the
of slave agency when the very expression seems Iittle more than an oxymoron that morallandscape of slavery in order to give voice to the values of the social order in
restates the paradox of the object status and pained subject constitution of the the appropriately simple tones of the enslaved. Song. dance, and story become the
enslaved? How is it possible to think "agency" when the slave's very condition of emblems of an integral moral economy. Thus the grotesque speaking of "de bes'
being or social existence is defined as a state of detenninate negation? In other story" is the sentimental disguise of domination. The reverential status of the slave's
words, what are the constituents of agency when one's social condition is defined by voice, and more generally his or her agency, effectively links the exercise of will and
negation and personhood refigured in the fetishized and fungible tenns of object of contented subjection. The nonsense orthography provides the illusion of direct testi-
property?
mony, immediacy, and authenticity, which only serves to (re)produce the master's
Generally, the representation of the perfonnative has been inscribed in a repres- text, even if donning the rags of the slave.!' (Certainly this mode is dominant
sive problematic of consensual and voluntarist agency that reinforces and romanti- in much of the historiography of slavery and in the slave testimony collected by
cizes social hierarchy. The pastoral has been the dominant mode of this problematic the Works Progress Administration and underlines the difficu1ty of representing the
of repression. In the social landscape of the pastoral, slavery is depicted as an experience of the enslaved, even when one has access to "firsthand" accounts. The
"organic relationship" so totalizing that neither master nor slave could express "the politics, interests, and relations of power that condition such representations must be
simplest human feelings without reference to the other." Thus the mas ter and the taken into account, even as one tries to use this testimony for contrary purposes, for
slave are seen as, if not peacefully coexisting, at the very least enjoying a relation- the pastoral as mode of inquiry represses the relations of domination that make this
ship of patemalistic dependency and reciprocity. In this instance, patemalism mini- knowledge of the past possible.) 12
mizes the extremity of domination with assertions about the mutually recognized Within the encIosures of the avowedly total and reciprocal relations of master and
humanity of mas ter and slave. Even the regime of production becomes naturalized as slave in which the simplest expression of human feelings is impossible without
"the rhythms of work, " as if slave labor were merely another extension of blacks' reference to the other, the fetish or artifice of the slave ' s consent and agency effec-
capacity for song and dance. The lure ofthe pastoral is in reconciling sentiment with tively links the exercise of will and contented subjection.t ' Not surprisingly, song
54 FORMATIONS OF TERROR AND ENJOYMENT Redressing lhe Pained Body 55

and dance and a range of everyday acts, seemingly self-directed but actually induced gemony, el cetera. 16 Slavery is characterized by direct and simple fonns of domina-
by the owner, are the privileged expressions of this consenting agency. The paternal non. the brutal asymmetry of power, the regular exerci se of violence, and the denial
endowments of will, voice, and humanity deny the pained and punitive constitution of liberty that make it difficult, if not impossible, to direct one's own conduct, let
of the slave as person and the necessary violence of racial slavery. Thus the perfor- alone the conduct of others. As Foucault rernarks, "There cannot be relations of
~ative is rendered as little more than scenes of revelry and good times that Iighten power (as o~posed to domination] unless.sub~ects are fr~e. If one ~ere completel~ at
the burden of slavery and bonded labor represented as an extension of leisure; tbe dispositlon of the other and became his thing, an object on which he can exercise
thereby emphasizíng the festive and celebratory character of servítude.!+ Most often an infinite and unlimited violence, there would not be relations of power. In order to
these practices, when not envisioned as concessions of slaveholders designed to exercise a relation of power, there must be on both sides at least a certain fonn of
"win over' or to debase the enslaved, have been rendered through the idyllic lens of liberty. "17 Certainly this seriously challenges facile assertions of slave agency and
the pastoral, in which the "off times," not bondage and coerced labor, define slave casts doubt on lhe capaciousness of transgression. In a state of domination, lhe
life.t> Certainly Douglass was aware of this double bind; it was responsible for the operations of power appear more repressive than productive, and the attendant fonns
anxiety that accompanied his discussion of slave recreations. He negotiated it by of subjection seem intent upon preventing the captive from gaining any measure of
identifying recreation with abasement and stressing the importance of interpretation agency that is not met with punishmenl, thereby confinning the slave's existence as
and contextual analysis in uncovering the critical e1ements or "implicit social con- the object of violence.
sciousness" of slave culture. Thus the question remains as to what exercise of the will, fonns of action, or
enactment of possibility is available to animate chattel or the socially dead or to the
excluded ones that provides the very ground of rnan's liberty.l" The double bind,
The Character of Practice simply stated, is: How does one account for the state of domination and the possi-
bilities seized in practice? How does one represent the various modes of practice
In Iight of this, how might we reconsider the perfonnative in order to without reducing them to conditions of domination or romanticizing them as pure
illuminate the social relations of slavery and the daily 'practices of resistance that forces of resistance? To complicate the picture still further, how does one make any
traverse these relations or represent the critical labor of these practices without .claims about the politics of perfonnance without risking the absurd when discussing
reproducing the contented subject of the pastoral or the heroic actor of the romance the resistances staged by an unauthorized dance in the face of the everyday workings
of resistance? To render everyday practices with any complexity requires a disfigure- of fear, subjugation, and violence? How does one calculate or measure such acts in
I ment and denaturalization of this history of the subject as romance, even if a the scope of slavery and its reasoned and routinized terror, its calibrations of subjec-
romance of resistance. This requires that we forgo simply ce1ebrating slave agency tivity and pain, and the sheer incommensurability of the force that it deploys in
and instead endeavor to scrutinize and investigare lhe fonns, dispositions, and response to the small challenges waged against it? UItimately, the conditions of
. constraints of action and the disfigured and liminal status of the agents of such acts. domination and subjugation determine what kinds of action are possible or effective,
I In contrast to approaches that foreclose perfonnance in the troubled frame of au- though these acts can be said to exceed the conditions of domination and are not
tonomy, arrogating to the enslaved the iIIusory privileges of the bourgeois subject or reducible to them.
I self-possessed individual, or perfonnance as evidence of the harmonious order of If the fonns of power determine what kinds of practice are possible within a given
'slaveholder hegemony and the slave's consent to that order, or perfonnance as a' field, what are the prospects for calculated action given that the very meaning of
reprieve from the horrors of the system, what is considered here are precisely the siave property is "being subject to the master's will in ali things" and that issues of
ways in which perfonnance and other modes of practice are detennined by, exploit, consent, will, intentionality, and action are utterly meaningless, except in the in-
and exceed the constraints of domination. . stance of "criminal" acts. Bearing this in mind, what possibilities for agency exist
How do the fonns, relations, and institutions of power condition the exercise of that don 't put the enslaved at risk of a greater order of pain and punishment since the
agency? The particular status of the slave as object and as subject requires a careful slave is a legal person only insofar as he is criminal and a violated body in need of
consideration of lhe notion of agency if one wants 10 do more than "endow" lhe limited fonns of protection? In this case, the assignation of subject status and the
enslaved with agency as some sort of gift dispensed by historians and critics 10 the recognition of humanity expose the enslaved to further violence in the case of
dispossessed. Certainly the constraints of agency are great in this situation, and it is criminal agency or require the event of excessive violence, cruelty beyond the limits
difficult 10 imagine a way in which lhe interpellation of lhe slave as subject enables of the socially tolerable, in order to acknowledge and protect the slave's person. Is it
fonns of agency that do not reinscribe the terms of subjugation. Although it has possible that such recognition effectively forecloses agency and that as subject the
become commonplace in Foucauldian approaches 10 power relations 10 conceptual- enslaved is still rendered without will or reinscribed as the object of punishment? Or
ize agency as an enabling constraint or an enabling violation, the problem with is this limited conferral of humanity merely a reinscription of subjugation and pained
this approach is that it assumes that ali fonns of power are nonnatively equiva- existence? Does the designation of "criminal" or "damaged property" intensify or
lent, without distinguishing between violence, domination, force, legitimation, he- alleviate the onus of anguished and liable person?
Redressing the Pained Body 57
50 FORMATlONS OF TERROR AND ENJOYMENT

In short, what I am trying to hint at here is the relation of agent and act-in blacks, whites, and others, and the practices that produce racial difference. Bla9.ness
particular, the anomalous status of the slave as subject and the circumscribed action mark a social relationship of dominance and abje~and potentially one of redre~
s
characteristic of this condition. The cleavage or sundering of the slave as object of ~tion; it is a contested figure at the very center of soc~l~ruggle.22
property, pained flesh, and unlawful agent situates the enslaved in an indefinite and --rherefore, "performing blackness" conveys both the cross-purposes and the
paradoxical relation to the normative category "person." One must attend to this circulation of various modes of performance and performativity that concem the
paradox in order to discem and evaluate the agency of the enslaved because the production of racial meaning and subjectivity, the nexus of race, subjection, and
forms of action taken do not transcend this condition but rather are an index of the spectacle, the forms of racial and race(d) pleasure, enactments of white dominance
particular figurations of power and modes of subjection. and power, and the reiteration and/or rearticulation of the conditions of enslavement.
Yet it is also important to remember that strategies of domination don't exhaust all It is hoped that "performing blackness" is not toa unwieldy and, at the same time,
possibilities of intervention, resistance, or transformation. Therefore, it is necessary that this unruliness captures the scope and magnitude of the performative as a
to investigate what possibilities exist given these determinants, the myriad and strategy of power and tactic of resistance. ~nterchangeable use of p~ol}11ª-!!9!
infinitesimal ways in which agency is exercised, the disposition or probability of and ~rformativity is intended to be inclusive of displays of power, the punitive a!}d
certain acts, and the mechanisms through which these "ways of operating" chal- Theátrlcal embodiment of racial norms, the discursive reelaboratiQn of blac1._ness,
lenge and undermine the conditions of enslavement. Is the agency of the enslaved to -and the affirrnative deployment and negation of blackness in the focus on redress. I -'É
be located in reiterative acts that undermine and discursively reelaborate the condi- nave õpted to use the term "performing blackness" as a way of illuminating jhe
tions of subjection and repressionjt? Is it founded upon the desire to negate con- -entanglements of dominant and subordinate enunciations of blackness and the diffi-
straint, to restage and remember the rupture that produced this state of social death, culty of distinguishing between contending enactments of blackness based on form,
to exceed this determinate negation through acts of recoJlection, or to attend to the ãuthenticity, or even intention. -
needs and desires of the pained body? '. These performances 0f'õlack~
'---- are
__ in no way the . ;-'possessio~"
,r of the enslaved;
~

they are enactments of social struggle and contending articulations of racial mean-
fog. The unremitting and interminable process of revision, reelaboration, mimicry,
Performing Blackness ~d repetition prevents efforts to locate an originary or definitive point on the chain
of associations that would fix the identity of a particular act or enable us to sift
The difficulties posed in rethinking the relation of performance and agency through authentic and derívative performances, as if the meaning of these acts could
are related primarily to the pervasiveness of the spectacle of black contentment and b~~~rated from the effects they yield, the cOOtexts in which they occur, or the
abjection, the repressive problematic of will and voluntarism, the pained, punitive, desires that they catalyze, or as if instrumental amusements could be severed from
and burdened constitution of the slave as subject, and the extreme and violent tlie prospects of pleasure or the performative from scenes of torture. Moreover,
enactments of power.>' The dominative performance of blackness thwarts efforts to these performances implicit1y raise questions about the status of wh~t is being
reassess agency because it has so masterfuJly simulated black "will' only in order to performed-the power of whiteness or the black's good time, a nonsensical sIave
reanchor subordination. How does one discem "enabling conditions" when the very song, or recollections of dislocation.
constitution of the subject renders him sociaJly dead or subversively redeploy an The emphasis on the joining of race, subjection, and spectacle is intended to
identity determined by violent domination, dishonor, and natal alienation? In this ~enaturaliz§and underline its givellne~~hat is, the strategies through which it
case, does redemption rather than repetition beco me the privileged figure of the IS made to appear as if it has always existed, thereby denying the coerced and

performative? How might it be possible to dislodge performance and performativity "C'üiiivated production of race. (This was particularly the case in the antebellum
from these closures and reevaluate performance in terms of the claims made against period, in which race was made an absolute marker of status or condition and being
power, the interruption and undermining of the regulatory norms of racial slavery, as black carne t~ be. identified with, if not ide~tical to, the condition .of enslavement.) . ~
a way of operating under duress and constraint and as an articulation of utopian and The "naturahzatlon" of blackness as a particular enactment of pained cont~nt~l t;.<,p-

transformative impulses? jequires an extremity of force and violence to maintain this seeming "givenness-,"
The import of the performative, as indicated by those like Toby Jones or John The "giYeon.e.s.s" of blackness ~ults from th~rutal corpore-ªlization of the bod,.
McAdams, is in the articulation of needs and desires that radicaJly call into question and the fixation of its constituent parts as indexes of truth and racial meaning. The
the order of power and its production of "cultural inteJligibility" or "Iegible Construction of black bodies as phobogenic objects-? estranged in a corporeal male-
bodies. "21 Thus issues of redemption and redress are central to these practices, diction and the apparent biological certainty of this malediction attest to the power of
and the intended or anticipated effect of the performative is not only the reelabora- the performative to produce the very subject which it appears to express.P What I
tion of blackness but also its affirmative negation. It is important to remember that am trying to argue here is not that the black body exists prior to the discourses and
.blackness is defined here in terms of social relationality r~ther.Jhan identity; thus practices that produce it as such but that what is particular to the discursive constitu-
,!:>lacknessincorporates subjects normatively defined as black, the relations amon tion of blackness is the inescapable prison house of the flesh or the indelible drop of
5 FORMATlONS OF TERROR AND ENJOYMENT
Redressing the Pained Body 59
blood-that is, the purportedly intractable and obdurate materiality of physiological
difference. investment in the body and the identification of a particular locus of pleasure, as in
dances like the snake hips, the buzzard lope, and the funky butt. This counterinvest-
Thus despite the effort to contextualize and engage blackness as a production and
ment in alI likelihood entails li protest or rejection of the anatomo-politics that
performance, the sheer force of the utterance "black" seems to assert a primacy,
produces the black body as aberrant. More important, it is a way of redressing the
quiddity, or materiality that exceeds the frame of this approach. The mention of this
pained constitution and corporeal malediction that is blackness.
"force" is not an initial step in the construction of a metaphysics of blackness or an
effort to locate an "essence" within these performances but merely an acknowledg_
ment of the sheer weight of a history of terror that is palpable in the very utterance
Defamiliarizing the "Negro's Enjoyment"
"black" and inseparable from the tortured body of the enslaved. It acts as a re-
minder of the material effects of power on bodies and as an injunction to remember The sense 9..f black c~mmun1tyJexpressed by "having a good time among
that the performance of blackness is inseparable from the brute force that brands,
our own color" depends upon acts of identification, restitution, and remembrance.
rapes, and tears open the flesh in the racial inscription of the body. In other words,
Yet the networks of affiliation enacted in performance, sometimes referred to as the
the seeming obstinacy or the "givenness" of "blackness" registers the "fixing" of
"community among ourselves," are defined not by the centrality of racial identity or
the body by terror and dominance and the way in which that fixing has been con-
stitutive. the selfsameness or transparency of blackness nor merely by the condition of en-
slavement but by the connections forged in the context of dil!rupted affiliations,
If, as I have argued, the dominant performances of blackness are about the sociality amid the constant threat of separation, and shifting s~ts of identification_
spectacle of mastery and the enactment of a willed subjection, then can the instances
particular to site, location, and ~!éi~In other words0h~ "c~mmunity" or the
in which the dominant is used, manipulated, and challenged be read as disruptive or ·networks of affiliation constructed in practice.~e not ~ducible to race-as if race ~ ~
refigured articulations of blackness? Outside the productions of race enacted in the pn"Un-gave meaning to community or as if communitLwas the expression of ra~e-
performative, which have thus far been elaborated primarily in terms of the staging 'flUt are to be understood in terms of the possibilities of resistance conditioned by
of power and subjection, in what other modes are racial meanings produced? Are relations of power and the very purposeful ~nd self-consdõus effort to build commu::.
there stylistic markers that distinguish the differential articulations of "blackness"? iii-w.-
Are the performances considered here at ali concemed with creating the sense of a -Despite the "warrnly persuasive" and utopian quality that the word "comrnu-
coherent black identity? Or are the articulations of blackness primarily concemed nity" possesses, with its suggestion of a locality defined by common concem,
with and inseparable from the desire for freedom, redress, and restored affiliations? reciprocity, unity, shared beliefs and values, and so on, it cannot be assumed that the
In other words, how are Saturday night dances articulations or reelaborations of conditions of domination alone were sufficient to create a sense of common values,
racial meaning? Or do such performances only inadvertently give meaning or form trust, or collective identification.P The commonality constituted in practice depends
to blackness? If blackness is reelaborated, then how, in what terms, and by what
less on presence or sameness than upon desired change-the abolition of bondage.
means? If the condition of bondage is by definition a racial and c1ass ascription, then
Thus, contrary to identity providing the ground of community, identity is figured as
is any effort to address, critique, or undermine racial dominance and enslavement
the desired negation of the very set of constraints that create commonality-that is,
necessarily a performance of blackness? How is race transformed and refigured in
practice? the yeaming to be liberated from the condition of enslavement facilitates the net-
works of affiliation and identification. -- - .
If blackness is produced through specific means of making use of the body, it is -Yet it is important to recognize that the relations among sIaves were characterized
important to consider this "acting on the body" not only in terms of the ways in as much by antagonisms, distrust, contending interests, values, and beliefs as by
which power makes use of the body but also in terms of pleasure. Pleasure is central mutual cooperation and solidarity. As one ex-slave put it, "They taught us to be
to the mechanisms of identification and recognition that discredit the c1aims of pain against one another and no matter where you would go you would always find one
but also to those that produce a sense of possibility-redress, emancipation, trans- that would be tattling and would have the white folks pecking on you. They would
formation, and networks of affiliation under the pressures of domination and the [be] trying to make it soft for themselves. "26 For example, the dangers posed by
utter lack of autonomy. Much attention has been given to the dominative mode of surreptitious gatherings included not only discovery by the owner or the patrollers
white enjoyment, but what about forms of pleasure that stand as figures of transfor- but also the possibility that a fellow slave would betray the meeting. Certainly this is
mation or, at the very least, refigure blackness in terms other than abjection? Certain documented by the number of planned sIave revolts and rebellions that were de-
ways of making use of the body are diacritically marked in practice as "black' or as feated by informers.ê? Acts ofbetrayal, complicity, and collusion reveal the Iimits of
self-conscious forms of racial pleasure: "having a good time among our own community, in that they iIIuminate the antagonisms and contending interests of the
color," to quote McAdams. These acts become productions of race focused on enslaved and the exclusions inevitably a part of the making of community. As an
particular pattems of movements, zones of erotic investment, forms of expression, episode recounted by a former sIave iIIustrates, complicity and collusion were pun-
and notions of pleasure. Race is produced as an "imaginary effect" by a counter- ished by exclusion from the boundaries of community:
60 FORMATIONS 01' TERROR AND ENJOYMENT Redressing lhe Pained Body 61

I 'member once he built a house for young mas ter and he said he was gonna let the significance of conjuring as an articulatíon of envy and contestation within the slave
darkies have a dance there , and they thought he was sure 'nough; but he didn't so they community and not simply as an African "survival. "30
decided to have a dance anyhow. It was a moonlight night, and they had this big dance in "Community among ourselves' is an articulation of an ideal and a way of naming
the field, and the padderollers come and caught one man and threw him right on me, and the networks of affiliation that exist in the context of difference, disruption, and
he come and got me and said "God damn you.' and kept his hand right in my collar and death.31 The significanceof becoming or belonging together in terms other than
held me and took me home to master. He told master that he had told me that if I would those defined by one's status as property, will-less object, and the not-quite-human
tell who ali was there he wouldrr't whip me, but if I didu't he would whip me ali day
should not be underestimated. This belonging together endeavors to redress and
light, and you ought to heard me telling! It was around the time when the niggers was
nurture the broken body; it is a becoming together dedicated to establishing other
rising , and they asked me did I hear them shooting? "Did you see any guns?" And I
terms of sociality, however transient, that offer a small measure of relief from the
said, "No, I didn't see no guns, but I heard them shooting." I hadn't heard a thing , but I
knowed what they wanted to hear. so I said that I did. I couldn 't go to none of the debasements constitutive of one's condition.V Here it is useful to think about the
parties after that. The niggers would kick me OU! if they saw me; they wouldn't have me production of these shared identifications and interests as being constantly refigured
there. and negotiated and as fractured by differences and antagonisms rather than defined
by stasis and continuity. Rather than invoking community as an ideal of homoge-
Therefore, an assessmcnt of community must take into account the differences neity or selfsameness or as arena of idealized values in opposition to the conflicts and
constitutive of the enslaved, the significance of "community among ourselves' as a violence of the social order, we must grapple with the differences that constitute
utopian figure of transformation, and the fact that most acts of everyday resistance community and the particular terms of community's enactment in their specificity in
usually were solitary or involved only one other person.ê" The collective enactment order to fully understand the value of "having a good time among their own color."
of the assault on the law and the authority of the slave owner distinguished these In other words, the networks of affiliation or "politics of identification" enacted in
gatherings from other forms of everyday resistance that usually were solitary. Both practice traverse a range of differences and create fleeting and transient lines of
the enslaved and slave owners recognized the possibility and the danger enabled by connection across those differences.
these collective gatherings. The common set of identifications experienced in "having a good time among
The pleasure associated with surreptitious gatherings was due, in part, to the sense their own color" or "talking about when we were free in Africa" is not fixed but a
of empowerment derived from collective action and the precariousness and fragility fleeting, intermittent, and dispersed network of relations. These relations can neither
of "community." What was valued about these gatherings was "company with be reduced to domination nor explained outside it. They exceed the parameters of
others." As John McAdarns recalled: "Of course us negroes just lived for them resistance in creating altemative visions and experiences of subjectivity, though they.
negro dances we had every Saturday night there on the farm-no one to bother or do indeed challenge the dominant construction of blackness. This shared set of
interfere with us and believe me son, we made good use of these nights as that was identifications and affiliations is enacted in instances of struggle, shared pleasures,
ali the time the slaves had together to dance, talk and have a good time among their
own color. The white people they never bothered us on these times at ali unless we
-
transient forms of solidarity, and nomadic, oftentimes illegal, forms of association.
- - .
raised toa much hell, then they would come and make us behave ourselves " (em-
phasis minej.ê? Yet the intersubjective and collective identification facilitated in Politics without a Proper Locus
these contexts should not be overestimated. These practices were important because
they were vehicles for creating and experiencing supportive, enjoyable, and nurtur- In considering the determinations and limits of practice it becomes evident
ing connections. They were enactments of community, not expressions of an a priori that resistances are engendered in everyday forms of practice and that these resis-
unity. The language of community has been shaped by an organic vision of social tances are excluded from the locus of the "political proper. "33 Both aspects of this
relations, as contrasted with the instrumentalist, utilitarian, violent, and distanced assessment are significant because toa often the interventions and challenges of the
relations of society or social order. Thus, as it is traditionally invoked, community dominated have been obscured when measured against traditional notions of the
offers us a romance in place of complex and contentious social relations. However, political and its central features: the unencumbered self, the citizen, the self-
to reify the social relations of enslavement via the romance of community is to fail to possessed individual, and the volitional and autonomous subject. The importance of
recognize both the difficuity and the accomplishment of collectivity in the context of the concept of practice is that it enables us to recognize the agency of the dominated
domination and terror. This is not to minimize or neglect the networks of support and and the limited and transient nature of that agency. The key features of practice
care that existed among the enslaved but to keep in mind the limits and fractures of central to this examination of the agency of the enslaved are the nonautonomy of the
community attributable to the extrernity of domination, surveillance, terror, self- field of action; provisional ways of operating within the dominant space; local,
interest, distrust, conflict, lack of autonomy, tenuous and transient connections, and multiple, and dispersed sites of resistance that have not been strategically codified or
fear. Moreover, it is crucial to engage the issue of community through the disruptive integrated; and the nonautonomy and pained constitution of the siave as person, The
antagonisms that are also its constituents. In this regard, we might think about the barring of these practices [rom the political, as traditionally conceived, has a range
2 FORMATIONS OF TERROR ANO ENJOYMENT Redressing lhe Pained Body 63

of consequences and effects that concern the constitution of the subject, the fea- and the state and, at the same time, they are provisional and short-Iived and exploit
sibility and appropriateness of certain forms of action, the incommensurability of the c1eavages of the social order. However, the focus on the contingent and transient
liberal notions of will and autonomy as standards for evaluating subaltern behavior, character of these practices is not an attempt to underestimate the magnitude of these
the inscription of agency as criminal or, at the very least, as deserving of punish- acts, for they are fraught with utopian and transformative impulses that are unrealiz-
ment, and the inadequacy and incompleteness of redress. able within the terms of the current order precisely because of the scope of these
Thus when thinking about these practices as the "infrapolitics of the dominated," implicit, understated, and allegorical e1aims for emancipation, redress, and restitu-
to use James Scott's term, or as a "politics of a lower frequency," to use Paul tion.
Gilroy's term, it is important to note both the effects yielded by the popular iIIe- The plurality of resistances enacted in everyday life is produced by and details the
galities or popular intransigence of the enslaved and their remove from the proper relations and mechanisms of power. The dangers posed by these practices and the
locus of the politica!. 34This is especialIy important in the case of the enslaved if we threats issued to the dominant order provide a map of the specific mechanisms of
are to engage the particularities of the subject constitution and object status of the repression and power in antebellum social relations. For example, both the very
enslaved. The bourgeois individual, the unencumbered self, and the featureless incongruence or incommensurability of purported dangers posed by slave gatherings
person that give meaning to the term "political" in its conventional usage, with alI and the great force used to meet and crush them document the crisis of slavery and
the attendant assumptions about the relation of the subject and the state, cannot the attempt to manage this crisis by a combined strategy of paternalism and brutal
incorporate the enslaved, for how does one express an individual wilI when one is repression. In the context of crisis, infinitesimal assaults to the slave order acquire
without individual rights? After alI, the rights of the self-possessed individual and even greater significance. The import of these practices is evidenced not only in the
the set of property relations that define liberty depend upon, if not require, the black testimony of the enslaved or the formerly enslaved and the terms in which they
as will-Iess actant and sublime object. If white independence, freedom, and equality represent their experience but in the power exercised both to encourage and manage
were purchased with slave labor, then what possibilities or opportunities exist for the slave amusements and to constrain, prohibit, and police such activities. The disrup-
black captive vessel of white ideality?35 tions caused by a smalI act like sneaking off to a dance or attending a praise meeting
The siave is the object or the ground that makes possible the existence of the catalyzed a chain of events that was disruptive, short-lived, and, to some degree,
#- bourgeois subject and, by negation or contradistinction, defines liberty, citizenship,
and the enelosures of the social body. As Edmund Morgan has argued, the meaning
expected. The enslaved defied and redefined their condition of absolute subjection in
acts of minor transgression: movement without a pass to visit a loved one, stealing,
and the guarantee of (white) equality depended upon the presence of slaves. White unpermitted gatherings, et cetera.
men were "equal in not being slaves. "36 The slave is indisputably outside the Certainly it would be difficult to describe such acts as revolt or as a threat to bring
normative terms of individuality to such a degree that the very exercise of agency is the state to its knees, yet the very excess of force that met such acts certainly serves
seen as a contravention of another's unlimited rights to the object. (Even labor is not to illustrate the terror that is part and parcel of the everyday landscape of slavery and,
considered agency because it is the property of another, extracted by coercive more important, the difficulty of action in such circumstances. How is resistance
means, and part of the bestial capacities of the black;lLs.iQ(PIY personifies the power registered in a context in which being found with a pen or pencil is almost as bad as
and dominion of the owner.) Not surprisingly, thé'"age~~ of the enslaved is onl having murdered your master, according to Elijah Green? Or in which being caught
intelIigible or recognizable as crime and the desigrratioü of perso~hood b~d at a dance without a pass might result in being stripped and given twenty-five lashes
~ith incredible duties and responsibilities that serve to enhance the repre~ if you 're lucky or a severe and Iife-threatening beating if you aren 't? How does one
mechanisms of power, denote the Iimits of socialIy tolerable forms of violence, and enact resistance within the space of the permissible or exploit the "concessions" of
intensify and legitimate violence in the guise of protection, justice, and the recõgiiT- slave owners without merely reproducing the mechanisms of dominance? What
tion of slave humanity. This oftlcialacknowledgment of agency and humanitY, shape does resistance or rebelIion acquire when the force of repression is virtually
•rather than chalIenging or contradicting the object status and absolute subjugation of without limit, when terror resides within the limits of socialIy tolerable, when the
the enslaved as chattel, reinscribes it in the terms of personhood. innocuous and the insurgent meet an equal force of punishment, or when the e1an-
Though this examination of slave agency primarily concerns issues of resistance, destine and the surreptitious mark an infinite array of dangers? In this context, might
restitution, and redress, it is equally attentive to the constraints of domination and not a rendezvous at an unauthorized dance, attending a secret meeting, or sneaking
the brutal exercise of power that give form to resistance. Mindful of the aforemen- off to visit your companion suddenly come to appear as insurgent, or, at the very
tioned concerns regarding the subject, this exploration of agency and resistance is least, as quite dangerous, even when the "threats" posed are not articulated in the
less concerned with issues of heroic action and oppositional consciousness than with form of direct confrontation but expressed in quite different terms?
the inadvertent, contingent, and submerged forms of contestation.ê? This approach As Toby Jones recalIed, such gatherings engendered a liberatory and utopian
emphasizes both the preponderance of resistance and the absence of a proper locus structure of feelings. Raymond Williams defines a structure of feelings as "a kind of
that would grant autonomy to these practices. These practices are significant in that feeling and thinking which is indeed social and material, but each in an embryonic
they are local assaults and pedestrian chalIenges to slavery, the slave owner, the law, phase before it can become fully articulate and defined exchange. "38 This inchoate
Redressing lhe Pained Body 65
64 FORMATIONS OF TERROR ANO ENJOYMENT

and practical consciousness is expressed by Jones as the recollective anticipation of an tentative use of the political and inforrns this effort to wrench the political from
d
freedom and by others as an impulse or "instinct that we was going to be free. "39 its proper referent. Given the exclusion of the slave from the sphere of the political,
Obviously, this structure of feeling existed in a troubled relation to slavery, for if a what forms do the assertion of needs and desire acquire? What assumptions of the
slave entertaining thoughts of freedom was discovered, he would be lucky to escape poJitical are at alI relevant or adequate to their social location? Slaves are not
with a beating. Other slaves were usually forced to witness this beating and threat- consensual and willful actors, the state is not a vehicle for advancing their claims,
ened with the same treatment if they were caught. 40 As one ex-slave commented, mey are not citizens, and their status as persons ís contested. Assimilating these
"Whipping darkies was the joy of the white man back in those days. "41 practices into the ~on:nati~e frame of t~e polítical is less impo~~nt than ~xamining
John McAdams recounted that even small challenges to slavery could have disas- the relation of subJectlficatlOn and practice and the form the political acquires for the
trous effects: "The only way the slaves could go from one plantation to another was enslaved. In what ways are the (im)possibilities of practice related to, if not deter-
they had to have a pass from their Mas[t]er or Mistress; if they went without a pass, mined by, the closures of politics? How are the claims of the dominated articulated
woe be unto that negro, for the mas[t]er of the place would ask us for our pass, and if or advanced or their needs addressed or accommodated?
we could not show one, it was just toa bad. He would give us one of the worst The historical and social limits of the political must be recognized in order to
whippings we ever got. Of course I use to slip off and go to see my girl on another evaluate the articulation ofõeeds and the forwarding of claims in domains relegated
farm, but I was very careful that I did not let anyone catch US."42 Even a child's to the privatized or nonP2litical. If the publíc sphere is reserved for the white
display of rebelliousness could be met with the threat of death. As a child, Susan bõüijeois subject and the public/private divide replicates that between the political
Snow would "fight and scratch" with other children, black and white. In order to and the nonpolitical, then the agency of the enslaved, whose relation to the state is
break her of this habit, her mas ter forced her to look at the bodies of slaves who had mediated by way of another's rights, is invariably relegated to the nonpolitical side'
been hanged for harming a white man.43 õf this divid~. This gives us some sense of the fu11 weight and meaning of the
How does one survive the common atrocities of slavery yet possess a sensibility, a ~,s dominion. In effect, those subjects removed from the public sphere are
feeling, an impulse, and an inexplicable, yet irrepressible, confidence in the possi- formally outside the space of politics.
bilities of freedom? It is hard to imagine possibility, let alone freedom, within the The everyday practices of the enslaved genera11y fall outside direct forms of
context of such fatal incommensurabilities: cruel whippings and courting, death and confrontation; they are not systemic in their ideology, analysis, or intent, and, most
dance. Extreme acts of violence are depicted matter-of-fact1y because of their regu- important, the slave is neither civic man nor free worker but excluded from the
larity. The recollections of Susan Snow and Mingo White catalog the coexistence of narrative of "we the people" that effects the linkage of the modem individual and
the mundane and the unimaginable, the constancy of the unbearable, and the diffu- the state. The enslaved were neither envisioned nor afforded the privilege of envi-
sion and rationality of terror. The grotesque incongruence of act and punishment and sioning themselves as part of the "imaginary sovereignty of the state" or as "in-
the violence that awaited even the smallest transgression document the provisional, fused with unreal universality. "46 Even the Gramscian model, with its reforrnula-
tentative, and restricted character of these practices or any claims that might be made tion of the relation of state and civil society in the concept of the historical bloc and
on their behalf. As well, these instances demonstrate that even in contexts of direct its expanded definition of the political, maintains a notion of the political inseparable
and primary forms of domination there are innumerable sites of confrontation and from the effort and the ability of a class to effect hegemony. 47 By questioning the use
struggle, and perhaps even more important, they indicate the great cost of such acts. of the term "political," I hope to illuminate the possibilities of practice and the
In order to illuminate the significance of performance and the articulation of social stakes of these dispersed resistances. All of this is not a preamble to an argument
struggle in seemingly innocuous events, everyday forms of practice must be contex- about the "prepolitical" consciousness of the enslaved but an attempt to point to the
tualized within the virtually unbounded powers of the slave-owning class, and limits of the political and the difficulty of translating or interpreting the practices of
whites in general, to use all means necessary to ensure submission. Thus it is no the enslaved within that framework. The everyday practices of the enslaved occur in
surprise that these everyday forms of practice are usually subterranean. Iam reluc- the default of the political, in the absence of the rights of man or the assurances of the
tant to simply describe these practices as a "kind of politics," not because I question self-possessed individual, and perhaps even without a "person," in the usual mean-
whether the practices considered here are smalJ-scale forms of struggle or dismiss ing of the termo
them as cathartic and contained.e+ Rather, it is the concem about the possibilities of
practice as they are related to the particular object constitution and subject formation
of the enslaved outside the "political proper" that leads me both to question the Stealing Away, the Space of Struggle, and
appropriateness of the political to this realm of practice and to reimagine the political the Nonautonomy of Practice
in this context. (As well, I take seriously Jean Comaroff's observations that "the real
politik of oppression dictates that resistance be expressed in domains seemingly When the enslaved slipped away to have secret meetings, they would call it
apolitical. ' ')45 "stealing the meeting," as if to highlight the appropriation of space and the expro-
The contradictory status of the enslaved, their ambiguous relation to the state, and priation of the object of property necessary to make these meetings possible.ff Just
the nonautonomy of both their social status and their practice determine this limited as runaway siaves were described as "stealing themselves," so, too, even short-
• ~""".r>..I .VJ"'~ ut- TJ:::RROR ANO ENJOYMENT
Redressing lhe Pained Body 67
lived "flights" from capnviry were referred to as "stealing away." "Stealing
away" designated a wide range of activities, from praise meetings, quilting parties, our chillen live to see it, to please let our chillen live to see a better day and be free,
and dances to illicit visits with lovers and family on neighboring plantations. h so dat they can give honest and fair service to the Lord and ali mankind everywhere.
encompassed an assortment of popular ilIegalities focused on contesting the author_ And we'd sing 'our little meetin's about to break, chillen, and we must parto We got
ity of the slave-owning class and contravening the status of the enslaved as posses, to part in body, but hope not in mind. Our little meetin's bound to break.' Den we
sion. The very phrase "stealing away" played upon the paradox of property's used to sing 'We walk about and shake hands, fare you well my sister's, Iam going
agency and the idea of property as theft, thus alIuding to the captive's condition as a home.' "54 These meetings held in "hush arbors" or covertly in the quarters illumi-
legal form of unlawful or amoral seizure, what Hortense SpilIers describes as "the nate the significant difference between the terms of faith and the import of Chris-
violent seizing ofthe captive body from its motive will, its active desire. "49 Echoing tianity for the master and the enslaved. For example, the ring shout, a form of
Proudhon's "property is theft," Henry Bibb put the matter simply: "Property can'j devotional dance, defied Christian proscriptions against dancing; the shout made the
steal property." It is the play upon this originary act of theft that yields the possí, body a vehicle of divine communication with God in contrast to the Christian vision
bilities of transport, as one was literalIy and figuratively carried away by one's of the body as the defiled container of the sou I or as mere commodity. And the
desire.w The appropriation of dominant space in itinerant acts of defiance contests attention to the soul contested the object status of the enslaved, for the exchange of
the spatial confinement and surveilIance of slave life and, ironicalIy, reconsiders the blacks as commodities and their violent domination were often described in terms of
meaning of property, theft, and agency. Despite the range of activities encompassed being treated as if one did not have a souJ.55
under this rubric, what these events shared was the centrality of contestation. Steal- Freedom was the central most important issue of these meetings. According to
ing away was the vehicle for the redemptive figuration of dispossessed indi- William Adams, at these meetings they would pray to be free and sing and dance.>"
vidual and community, reconstituting kin relations, contravening the object status of The avid belief in an imminent freedom radicalIy chalIenged and nulIified the gospel
chattel, transforming pleasure, and investing in the body as a site of sensual activity, of slavery, which made subordination a virtue and promised rewards in the "kitchen
sociality, and possibility, and, last, redressing the pained body. of heaven." Elizabeth Washington stated that ministers would "preach the colored
The activities encompassed in the scope of stealing away played upon the tension people if they would be good niggers and not steal their master' s eggs and chickens
between the owner's possession and the slaves dispossession and sought to redress and things that they might go to the kitchen of heaven when they died. " It was not
the condition of enslavement by whatever limited means available. The most direct uncommon for slave owners to impart a vision of Christianity in which the enslaved
expression of the desire for redress was the praise meeting. The appeals made to a would also attend to them in the afterlife. As one mistress stated, "I would give
"God that saves in history" were overwhelmingly focused on freedom.51 For this anything if 1 could have Maria in heaven with me to do little things for me. "57
reason, WilIiam Lee said that slaves "couldri't serve God unless we stole to de cabin For the enslaved the belief in a divine authority minimized and contained the do-
or de woods. "52 West Tumer confirmed this and stated that when patrolIers discov- minion of the master. As welI, these meetings facilitated a sense of colIective
ered such meetings they would beat the slaves mercilessly in order to keep them identification through the invocation of a common condition as an oppressed people
from serving God. Tumer recounted the words of one patrolIer to this effect: "If I and a shared destiny. Serving God ultimately was to be actualized in the abolition of
ketch you here servin' God, I' II beat you. You ain ' t got no time to serve God. We slavery.
bought you to serve us. "53 Serving God was a crucial site of struggle, as it con- Stealing away involved unlicensed movement, colIective assembly, and an abro-
cemed issues about styles of worship, the intent of worship, and, most important, gation of the terms of subjection in acts as simple as sneaking off to laugh and talk
the very meaning of service, since the expression of faith was invariably a critique of with friends or making noctumal visits to loved ones.58 Sallie Johnson said that men
the social conditions of subordination, servitude, and mastery. As Tumer's account would often sneak away to visit their wives.>? These nighttime visits to lovers and
documents, the threat embodied in serving God was that the recognition of divine family were a way of redressing the natal alienation or enforced "kinlessness" of the
authority superseded, if not negated, the mastery of the slave owner. Although by enslaved, as welI as practices of naming, running away, and refusing to marry a
the 1850S Christianity was widespread among the enslaved and most owners no mate not of one's choosing or to remarry after a husband or wife was sold away; alI
longer opposed the conversion or religious instruction of slaves, there was nonethe- of these were efforts to maintain, if not reconstitute, these ties.6O Dora Frank's uncle
less an ethical and political struggle waged in religious practice that concemed would sneak off at night to see his woman. On one occasion, he failed to retum by
contending interpretations of the word and styles of religious worship. Even those daylight, and "nigger hounds" were sent after him. He was given 100 lashes and
slaves whose owners encouraged religion or sent them to white churches found it sent to work with the blood stilI running down his back.s! Dempsey Jordan recog-
important to attend secret rneetings. They complained that at white churches they nized that the risks involved in such joumeys were great but slipped off at night to
were not alIowed 10 speak or express their faith in their own terms. "We used to slip see his girl in spite of them: "I was taking a great chance. 1would go and see my girl
off in de woods in de old slave days on Sunday evening way down in de swamps to lots of nights and one time 1crawled 100 yards to her room and got in the bed with
sing and pray to our own liking. We prayed for dis day of freedom. We come from her and lay there until nearly daylight talking to her. One time 1 was there with her
four and five miles 10 pray together to God dat if we don't live to see it, to please let and them patter rolIers come that night and walked alI around in that room and this
here negro was in her bed down under that moss and they never found me. 1sure was
68 FORMATIONS OF TERROR ANO ENJOYMENT
Redressing lhe Pained Body 69
scared. "62 The fact that the force of violence and the threat of sale did not prevenr cetera, were nothing less than a fundamental challenge to and breach of the c1aims of
such actions illustrates the ways in which the requirements of property relations were slave property-the black captive as object and the ground of the master's inalien-
defied in the course of everyday practices.
able rights, being, and liberty. .
The consequences of these small-scale challenges were sometimes Iife threaten- The agency of theft or the simple exercise of any c1aims to the self, however
ing, if not fatal. Fannie Moore remembered the violence that followed the discovery restricted, challenged the figuration of the black captive as devoid of will. 70 Stealing
of a secret dance. They were dancing and singing when the patrollers invaded the away ironically encapsulated the impossibility of self-possession as it exposed the
dance and started beating people. When UncIe Joe's son decided it was "time to Iink between Iiberty and slave property by playing with and against the tenns
die" because he couldn't sustain another beating and fought back, the patrollers beat of dispossession. The use of the tenn "play" is not intended to make light of
him to death and whipped half a dozen others before sending them home.63 Accord- the profound dislocations and divisions experienced by the enslaved or to imply

I ing to Jane Pyatt, if slaves had a party or a prayer meeting and they made too much
noise, patrollers would beat them and some times would sell them. The patrollers
took two of her brothers, and she never saw them again.s- Generally, the punish-
ment for unlicensed assembly or traveI was twenty-five to fifty lashes.
that these tentative negotiations of one's status or condition were not pained or
wrenching but to highlight the perfonnative dimension of these assaults as staged,
repeated, and rehearsed-what Richard Schechner tenns "twice-behaved behav-
ior. "71 Through stealing away, countercIaims about justice and freedom were ad-
Stealing away was synonymous with defiance because it necessarily involved vanced that denied the sanctity or legitimacy of rights of property in a double gesture
seizing the master's property and asserting the self in transgression of the law. The that played on the meaning of theft. Implicit within the appropriation of the object of
trespasses that were invariably a part of stealing away were a source of danger, property was an insistence that flew in the face of the law: liberty defined by
pride, and a great deal of boasting. Garland Monroe noted that the secret meetings he inalienable rights of property was theft. Stealing away exploited the bifurcated
participated in were held in the open, not in huts or arbors. They were confident that condition of the black captive as subject and object by the flagrant assertion of
they could outwit and defy patrollers. If the patrollers carne, the slaves took advan- unlicensed and felonious behavior and by pleading innocence, precisely because as
tage of a superior knowledge of the territory to escape capture or detection.és an object the slave was the very negation of an intending consciousness or will. The
Physical confrontations with patrollers were a regular feature of these accounts, and disruptive assertions, necessarily a part of stealing away, ultimately transgressed the
a vine stretched across the road to trip the patrollers' horses was the most comrnon law of property.
method of foiling one's pursuers.e« As James Davis bragged, "I've seen the Ku Similarly, stealing away defied and subversively appropriated slave owners' de-
Klux in slavery times and I've cut a many grapevine. We'd be in the place dancin' signs for mastery and control-primarily the captive body as the extension of the
and playin' the banjo and the grapevine strung across the road and the Ku Klux come master's power and the spatial organization of domination. Stealing away involved
ridin' along and run right into it and throw the horses down. "67 The enslaved were not only an appropriation of the self but also a disruption of the spatial organization
empowered by the collective challenge posed to power and the mutual reinforcement of dominance that confined slaves to the policed location of the quarters unless
against fear of discovery or punishment. From this perspective, pastoral and folksy provided with written pennission of the slaveholder to go elsewhere. 72 As well, the
slave gatherings appear Iike small-scale battles with the owners, local whites,and organization of dominant space involved the separation of public and private realms;
the law.
this separation reproduced and extended the subordination and repression of the
These day-to-day and routine fonns of contestation operated within the confines enslaved. If the public realm is reserved for the bourgeois citizen subject and the
of relations of power and simultaneously challenged those very relations as .these private realm is inscribed by freedom of property ownership and contractual transac-
covert and chameleonic practices both complied with and disrupted the demands of tions based upon free will, then in what space .is the articulation of the needs and
the system through the expression of a counterdiscourse of freedom. In the course of desires of the enslaved at ali possible?"! How does one contest the ideological
such gatherings, even the span of the Potomac could be made a bridge of cornmunity codification and containment of the bounds of the political? Ultimately, the struggle
and solidarity. As James Deane remembered, they would blow conch shells at night waged in everyday practices, from the appropriation of space in local and pedestrian
to signal a gathering. "We would ali meet on the bank of the Potomac River and sing acts, holding a praise meeting in the woods, meeting a lover in the canebrake, or
across the river to the slaves in Virginia, and they would sing back to uso"68 Such throwing a surreptitious dance in the quarters to the contestation of one's status as
small-scale infringements of the law also produced cIeavages in the spatial organiza- transactable object or the vehicIe of another's rights, was about the creation of a
tion of domination. The play on "stealing,' "taking or appropriating without right social space in which the assertion of needs, desires, and countercIaims could be
or leave and with the intent to keep or make use of wrongfully" or "to appropriate collectively aired, thereby granting property a social Iife and an arena or shared
entirely to oneself or beyond one's proper share," articulates the dilemma of the identification with other slaves. Like de Certeau's walker who challenges the disci-
subject without rights and the degree to which any exercise of agency or appropria- plinary apparatus of the urban system with his idle footsteps, these practices also
tion of the self is only intelligible as crime or already encoded as crime.é? As well, it create possibilities within the space of domination, transgress the policed space of
highlights the transgression of such furtive and cIandestine peregrinations since the subordination through unlicensed traveI and collective assembly across the pri-
very assertions and activity required to assemble at praise meetings,dances, et vatized Iines of plantation households, and disrupt boundaries between the public
1
Redressing the Pained Body 7
70 FORMATIONS OF TERROR AND ENJOYMENT

cruelties of slavery, the exploitation of slave labor, and the appropriation of the
and private in the articulation of insurgent claims that make need the medium of
slave's product by slave owners. Amid the seeming nonsense of the juba song was a
politícs.r+
bid for freedom:
We raise de wheat,
Embodied Needs and the Politics of Hunger DeYgib us de com;
We bake de bread,
The collective assertion of need politicizes the longings of the enslaved and Dey gib us de crust;
challenges the privatization of subordination within respective plantation house- We sif de rneal,
holds.t> As Patricia Williams remarks, however, the assertion of black need has not Dey gib us de huss;
been heard as political but only "against the background of their erstwhile musi- We peel de meat,
cality. "76 Yet it is the insistent and unceasing expression of black need that largely Dey gib us de skin;
defines the criticallabor of the performative and a subordinate politics characterized And dat's de way
by the impossibility of decisive autonomy, membership in the nation-state, or the Dey take us in;
We skim de pot,
entitlements of the subject in its normative terms-man and citizen. An example as
Dey gib us de liquor,
commonplace as juba illuminates this politics of need. In the case of juba, a popular And say dat's good enough for nigger.
vernacular dance that is simply one example of any number of performances that Walk over! Walk over!
could be considered in this regard, there is both the counterinvestment in the body as
a site of pleasure and the articulation of needs and desire. Your butter and de fat;
Poor nigger. you can't get over dat!
Juba was a coded text of protest. It utilized rhythm and nonsense words as cover
for social critique. The content of juba songs examined the relations of captivity, Walk overl'"
appropriation, and domination that defined slavery and addressed the needs of the Douglass's version ofthe juba song was similar to a version sung by Bessie Jones,
enslaved. The critique of slavery centered on the use of the slave for the master's a folk performer from the Georgia Sea Islands. Jones stated that the juba song she
wealth and amusement and on the unmet longings of the ravished and ravenous learned from her grandfather was a eryptie message about the abhorrent eonditions
black body.?? Both the consumption of that body's possibility and the constancy of of slave life, in particular the slop they were forced to eat.
hunger are at the center of juba' s often witty critique of slavery. 78 The most impor-
tant eharacteristie of juba, besides "patting" or the rhythmic use of the body, was Juba this and Juba that
the songs. Juba, even when the exact nature of its steps, whether jig, reei, or shuffle, Juba killed a yella cat
was uncertain, could be identified by the repertoire of juba songs that accompanied Get over double trouble, Juba.
it. 79 Generally, the songs enacted resistance and aired dissent in the guise of play You sift the meal,
Vou give me the husk.
and sheer nonsense.ê? Solomon Northrup mistakenly characterized them as "un-
Vou cook the bread,
meaning songs, eomposed rather for [their] adaption to a certain tune or measure,
Vou give me the crust
than for the purpose of expressing any distinct idea. "81 And the guise of Vou fry your meat,
sheer play and nonsense led those like William Smith, after stumbling upon Vou give me the skin.
a performance of juba, to eoncIude that "slaves were the happiest of the human And that's where mama's trouble begin.8S
race.' '82
The body of the song is almost identical to that reeounted by Douglass. Jones
Douglass designated patting juba as "jubilee beating " to emphasize the revolu-
interpreted this section of the song as follows: "The mother would always be talking
tionary scope of redress and the possibilities of emancipation, sated needs, and
to them about she wished she could give them some of that good hot cornbread, hot
nonpunitive embodiment. Although it was performed on the minstrel stage, he
pies or hot what not. But she couldn't. She had to wait and give that old stuff that
eharacterized juba as an exclusively Southern performance and cIaimed that every
was left over. And then they began to sing it and play it. "86 ln both Douglass's
farm had its juba beater because it "supplied the plaee of violin or other musical
and Jones's version, it is clear that juba enacted resistance and foregrounded
instrument." However, juba also aceompanied instrumental music.ê- Douglass's
slave exploitation in the tacitly political content of eoded lyrics and covert acts of
diseussion of juba emphasized the insurgent aspeets of performance, the condemna-
tion of slavery, and the slave' s yearnings for freedom: "The performer improvised protesto
The form of redressive action at work in juba involves using the body for pleasure
as he beat the instrument, marking the words as he sang so as to have them fali pat
and protesting the conditions of enslavement. The repertoire of songs address the
with the movement of his hands. Once in a while among a mass of nonsense and wild
body's need-in particular, the condition of hunger-and the unjust distribution of
frolie, a sharp hit was given to the meanness of slaveholders." The song details the
(;)
72 FORMATIONS OF TERROR AND ENJOYMENT Redressing lhe Pained Body

resources between the producers and the owners. As suggested earlier, in this case, tion or the reliability or fallibility of memory. Of concem here are the ways memory
the art of need entails the utilization of the body as a literal vessel of communication, acts in the service of redress rather than an inventory of memory. 89
attending to unmet longing and expressing dissent. Beating the body Iike a drum and For example, the inverted pot used to evade detection during secret meetings and
for one' s own ends delivers a certain measure of pleasure, comforts the pained body, dances exemplifies the ways in which practices are sedimented with traces of a past,
and offers a fleeting glimpse of dominion. In this sense, juba can perhaps be seen as which perhaps are neither remernbered nor forgotten but exist as a "memory of
"a claim of one's body against power. "87 Furthermore, these forms of everyday difference."9O In the accounts of stealing to meetings, there is usualIy an emphasis
practice redefine the political in the appropriation of space, the assertion of needs, on the methods used to prevent being detected by owners or patrolIers. The inverted
the critique of subordination, and the use of pleasure as a vehicle of dissent and washtub or pot is the most frequently mentioned means of avoiding detection. Millie
transformation. In this case, the art of need is nothing less than a politics of hunger. Simpkins stated that at quilting parties, while the older people worked on quilts and
the young ones danced and had a good time, they would place a pot at the door to
keep white people from hearing them. Mary Gladdy remembered their gathering as
Memory and History often as two or three times a week to hold prayer and experience meetings. They
placed a large iron pot against the door to keep their voices from escaping. After
The appropriation of space consequent to everyday practice not only en- singing, praying, and sharing experiences alI night long, they would leave believing
abled needs and desires to be aired but implicitly addressed the relation of the history that freedom was in the offing.?'
of violence and dislocation that produced the captive and the possibilities of redress. The use of an overtumed cooking or wash pot to evade detection is mentioned
This appropriated space of social collectivity, in accordance with Henri Lefebvre' s throughout the narratives. According to Anderson and Minerva Edwards, "When
definition of representational space, is "redolent with imaginary and symbolic ele- we prayed by ourselves we daren't let the white folks know it and we tumed a wash
ments" that have their source in the violent history of the people. 8~The violence and pot down to the ground to catch the voice. We prayed a lot to be free and the Lord
dishonor and disaffiliation constitutive of enslavement and the radical breach intro- done heered uso We didn't have no songbooks and the Lord done give us our songs
duced by the Middle Passage are articulated within these everyday practices and and when we sing at night it jus' whispering to nobody. Nobody hear US."92 "They
determine the possibilities ar the impossibility of redress. Therefore, not only is the would tum the kettle down outside the door, raised so that the sound can get under
dominant space pilfered and manipulated in giving voice to need and in making there and you wouldn't hear them. If they heard the women pray, the next moming
counterclaims about freedom, humanity, and the self (a reconstructed self that they would hit them fifty lashes for praying.' '93 Patsy Hyde said that the pot not only
negates the dominant terms of identity and existence), but also this space becomes kept white folks from hearing what they said but also showed that God was with the
ineffably produced as a sacralized and ancestral landscape. These sacralized and slaves.?"
ancestral elements are created, imagined, and remembered in the use of prayer trees This practice has been related to the use of sacred water pots and drums in
and inverted pots, performed in the shout, and called up in sacred gatherings. Africa.?> Sidney Mintz has suggested that it may be an inversion that compensates
Oevotional dances to ancestral spirits, remembering things they have not witnessed for the prohibition of drumming, in that the overtumed tub consumes or absorbs
or experienced like "when they lived in Africa and done what they wanted," and an sound rather than producing it. 96 Albert Raboteau speculates that it may be a frag-
insurgent nostalgia that expressed a longing for a home that most could only vaguely mentary emblem of Eshu Elegba because in orisha tradition "it is obligatory to begin
recall ar that lived only in imagination transformed the space of captivity into one worship with an offering to Eshu Elegba in order to insure that the order and
inhabited by the revenants of a dismembered past. decorum of the service is not disturbed. "97 The use of the inverted pot is analogous
In this context, the lived relations of domination and subordination did not simply to the placing of inverted flowerpots on African-American gravesites to signify
coexist with the evocation of the ancestors and the recollective anticipation or departed spirits. Robert Farris Thompson argues that in these gestures to the dead are
expectation of freedom; within these practices, the dislocation and displacement of traces of Kongo culture: "Inversion signifies perdurance, as a visual pun on the
enslavement were marked in varied and multifarious ways. The goal here is not to superior strength of the ancestors, for the root of bikinda, 'to be upside down, to be
create an index of African survivals or retrievals of Kongo, Fon, Ibo, or Yoruba in the realm of the ancestors, to die' is kinda, 'to be strong,' because those who are
traces but to consider the everyday historicity of these practices-that is, the way in upside down, who die, are strongest. "98
which the quotidian articulates the wounds of history and the enormity of the breach Yet rather than attempting to locate the origins of these practices or to classify
instituted by the transatlantic crossing of black captives and the consequent pro- Africanisms, I want to explore the way in which these practices witness and record
cesses of enslavement: violent domination, dishonor, natal alienation, and chattel the violent discontinuities of history introduced by the Middle Passage, the contra-
status. Everyday practices are texts of dislocation and transculturation that register in diction of captivity and enslavement, and the experience of loss and affiliation. In
their "perverse lines of origin" the violence of historical process and, in so doing, this case, these traces of memory function in a manner akin to a phantom limb, in
offer witness. This witnessing has little or nothing to do with the veracity of recollec- that what is felt is no longer there. It is a sentient recolIection of connectedness
75
Redressing the Pained Body
1"4 FORMATIONS OF TERROR AND ENJOYMENT

Contrary to the metaphysics of Africanity and the "submission to consanguinity,"


experienced at the site of rupture, where the very consciousness of disconnectedness
what is at stake here is precisely the body of memory-that is, the dominated social
acts as mode of testimony and memory. The recognition of loss is a crucial elernenr
collectivity of enslaved Africans and the brutal operation of power on these captive
in redressing the breach introduced by slavery. This recognition entails a re-
büdies.103 Thus history is illuminated not only by the recitation of the litany of
membering of the pained body, not by way of a simulated wholeness but precisely
horr that characterized the "commercial deportation of Africans," but also by
through the recognition of the amputated body in its amputatedness, in the insistent ors
performance practices that serve as a means of redressing the pained body and
fecognition of the violated body as human flesh, in the cognition of its needs, and in
restaging the event of rupture or breach that engendered "the other side." The
the anticipation of its liberty. In other words, it is the ravished body that holds out the
(counter)investment in the body as a site of need, desire, and pleasure and the
possibility of restitution, not the invocation of an illusory wholeness or the desired
constancy of unmet needs, repressed desires, and the shortcomings of pleasure are
return to an originary plentitude.
articulated in the very endeavor to heal the flesh and redress the pained body.
The status of the past, whether figured as "life in Africa when we were free" or
The limits of an ethnological and continuist account of memory have been bela-
embodied by an African parent or grandparent or an unviolated natality (against the
bored in order to clear a space for considerations of memory that focus on rupture,
natal alienation of enslavement) or as an understanding of the self in relation to the
breach, discontinuity, and crisis. In this regard, let us again consider the example of
millions gone and/or those on the other side of the Atlantic, is experienced most
juba from the vantage point of subterranean and repressed histories rather than as a
significant1y in the terms of loss and discontinuity. 99 This past cannot be recovered,
recollection of distant but retrievable origins or as the eternal recurrence of essential-
yet the history of the captive emerges precisely at this site of loss and rupture. In the
ist particularisms within a folksy and pastoral milieux de memoire. This approach to
workings of memory, there is an endless reiteration and enactment of this condition
memory confronts head-on the issues of dislocation, rupture, shock, and forgetting
of loss and displacement. The past is untranslatable in the current frame of meaning
and the texture of its fragmented existence. The concern is not to recover the past but
because of the radical disassociations of historical process and the discontinuity
to underscore the loss inscribed in the social body and embedded in forms of
introduced into the being of the captive as he is castigated into the abstract category
practice. Therefore my aim is not to retrieve the prehistory of the captive but to
of property. The Middle Passage, the great event of breach, engenders this discon-
examine what Edouard Glissant describes as our nonhistory: "the experience of
tinuity. Thus the reiterative invocation of the past articulated in practice returns to
shock, contradiction, painful negation, and explosive forces which make a totali-
this point of rupture. In this instance, memory is not in the service of continuity but
tarian philosophy of history an impossibility." 104 To describe it as a subterranean
incessantly reiterates and enacts the contradictions and antagonisms of enslavement,
history is to underscore the millions of "unceremoniously buried" that mark the
the ruptures of history, and the disassociated and dispersed networks of affiliation. It
transatlantic crossing.IOS In this Iight, it is possible to describe juba as a practice of
is by way of this reiteration or differential invocation of the past and by way of this
countermemory distinguished by rupture and dispersion. (Counter)memory disrupts
memory of difference that everyday practices are redolent with the history of cap-
the narrative of progress from ethnohistory or prehistory to history, or from milieux
tivity and enslavement. This working through of the past is a significant aspect of
to lieu. 106 It is allied to redress in that it attends to the breach instituted by the Middle
redress.
The discussion of memory in black cultural practice has been interpreted most Passage and to the violated, dismembered, captive body.
often through continuist narratives of tradition grounded in the foundational status of
Africa. However, it is absolutely necessary to demystify, displace, and weaken the
concept of Africa in order to address the discontinuities of history and the com- The Body of Memory
plexity of culture practice. As Paulin Hountondji argues, one must enfeeble the
The subterranean history of death and discontinuity inforrns everyday prac-
concept of Africanity "by dissipating the mystical halo of values arbitrarily grafted
tice in myriad ways.t"? Perhaps the most significant ways are the memory of differ-
on this phenomenon by the ideologues of identity. " In order to engage the complex-
ence and the role of repetition in perforroance. Repetition or iterability is what enables
ity of history and tradition(s), "it [isl necessary to weaken resolutely the concept of
us "to regenerate ourselves through the continuing process of redefinition.' '108 Yet
Africa, to rid it of all its ethical, religious, philosophical, political connotations,
the failure of full recovery or recompense, the inability to fully occupy an imagined
etc., with which a long anthropological tradition overloaded it and the most visible
prior condition or to bridge the divide of the split subject, is what drives redress and
effect was to close the horizon, to prematurely close history." 100 Moreover, the very
deems it inadequate. It is also this failure that necessitates repetition. If repetition
identification and cataloging of Africanisms is usually mired in a primitive and
"continually 'cuts' back to the start" or is homage to an "original generative instance
reductive metaphysics of Africanity that produces Africa as the temporal other of the
or act," as Snead argues, then what is returned to is the inevitable loss or breach that
West and the values of Africanity as little more than a shorthand for sensuousness,
stands at the origin and engenders the black "New World" subject and "neo-
instinct, rhythm, superstition, improvisation, naturalness, and physical prowess.!"'
African" forros like juba. As well, the "cut" retums to denied and unrnet needs.I"?
I have endeavored to attenuate the mystical and homogenizing Africanity of the
The event of rupture is articulated in a variety of ways. The discontinuity in juba' s
discourse of "survivals" and instead to emphasize the historicity of these practices
descent makes irnpossible the recuperation of origins: was it an African circle dance,
by alternately describing the operation of memory and interrogating Africanity. 102
r~"JVlA I IU-N-S-O-F TERROR ANO ENJOYMENT
Redressing the Pained Body 77
ajig, or a square dance? Isolated gestures insinuate the divergent Iines of descem bur
refuse definitive c1assification. Mnemic traces of past practices cannot be followed captivity, and enslavement. The re-membering of the violated body must be consid-
to one site of origino The impossibility of origins might also be conceptualized in ered in relation to the dis-rnernbered body ofthe slave-that is, the segmentation and
relation to the sexual economy of slavery: the uncertainty of descent, the negation of organization of the cap~ive body for purposes of wo~k, reproduction, and p~nish-
patemity, the interdiction regarding the master-father's name, and the ambiguous ment. This re-rnembering takes the form of attending to the body as a site of
legacy of inheritance and dispossession.llo This approach to descent "fragments pleasure, eros, and sociality and articulating its violated condition. Second, redress
what was thought unified; it shows the heterogeneity of what was imagined consis- is a limited form of action aimed at relieving the pained body through altemative
tent with itself." 111 configurations of the self and the redemption of the body as human flesh, not beast of
The very designation "juba" refers to a range of practices: the percussive Use of burden. Third, redress concems the articulation of needs and desires and the en-
the body, slapping out rhythms on chest, thighs, and knees while tapping or dancing deavor to meet them. It is an exercise of agency directed toward the release of the
a short step, shuffle, or jig; a circIe dance of competition where the dancer pats or pained body, the reconstitution of violated natality, and the remembrance of breach.
those in the circIe keep time or create complex rhythrns for the central dance r or It is intended to minimize the violence of historical dislocation and dissolution-the
couple; and a solo performance comprising mainly patting chest, knees, and history that hurts. Redressive action encompasses not only a heightened attention to
thighs.uz It was commonly described as "a kind of reeI with a calling leader" and the events that have culminated in the crisis but also the transfiguration of the broken
as a jig, a designation that applied to the "Irish jig" and to an "impolite bac. and ravenous body into a site of pleasure, a vessel of communication, and a bridge
chanalian dance of grotesque manner" identified as "African." 113 The very term between the living and the dead. The event of captivity and enslavement engenders
"juba" invokes this uncertainty and the submarine roots of the black Atlantic. The the necessity of redress, the inevitability of its failure, and the constancy of repeti-
etymology of this revision or misrecognition has been traced to Bantu words Iike tion yielded by this failure.
juba, diuba, or guiba.us Yet in the space ofthis revision and repetition emerges the In this regard, the body is both the "eroding witness" to this history ofterror and
subterranean history of rupture. Repetition is an outcome, a consequence, or an the object of redress. Obviously, the body broken by the regime of work, the
regularity of punishment, the persistence of torture, and the violence of rape and
accumulation of practice, and it also structures practice.tre Repetition enables the
sexual exploitation is in dire need of restitution. Yet the very conditions that have
recognition of the self and points to that which can never be fulIy recolIected and to
the impossibility of restoring that which has been breached. The constancy of produced the broken and disciplined body and the body as object, instrument, and
repetition is catalyzed by the inadequacy of redress and the regularity of domination commodity ensure that the work of restoration or recompense is inevitably incom-
and terror. These factors induce "rememory"; in other words, the compulsion or plete. The limited means of redress available to the enslaved cannot compensate for
propensity for repetition is induced by the ungovemable processes of the social. 116 the enormity of this loss; instead, redress is itself an articulation of loss and a longing
Breach triggers memory, and the enormity of the breach perhaps suggests that it can for remedy and reparation. 11 is impossible to fulIy redress this pained condition
be neither reconciled nor repaired. without the occurrence of an event of epic and revolutionary proportions-the aboli-
The forms of redress enacted in performance are a necessarily incomplete working tion of slavery, the destruction of a racist social order, and the actualization of
through of the event of breach because of the constancy of assault and the inability to equality. The incompleteness of redress is therefore reIated to the magnitude of the
transform social relations through such practices or generate an event that would breach-the millions lost in the Middle Passage and the 15 million and more cap-
result in the reversal of forces. In other words, while the breach could never be fully tured and enslaved in the Americas-and to the inadequacy of remedy. 117
compensated for, at the very least, the efforts to ser things right would entail a I have adopted the term "redress" from Victor Tumer's quadripartite schema of
revolution of the social order-the abolition of slavery, racism, domination, and social drama, though my model of the social differs significantly from his with its
exploitation, the realization of justice and equality, and the fulfilIment of needs. social totality of schism and integration. In Tumer's model, redressive action is
Thus the inadequacy of the redressive action undertaken in everyday practices does about limiting or containing a breach. Nonetheless, the need to contain or reconcile
not signal the failure of these practices but highlights the way in which pleasure or the breach is no less desperate because of its impossibility and inevitable failure,
especialIy when the crisis is unceasing and acts of breach are endlessly perpetu-
the counterinvestment in the body at stake here serves as a Iimited figure of social
transformation. ated.IIS In the redressive phase of what Tumer calIs "disharmonic processes"-in
my terms, the contradictions and antagonisms of the social-' 'pragrnatic techniques
and symbolic action reach their fulIest expression." 119 Redress has liminal charac-
Redress teristics, the quality of being "betwixt and between"; it is poised between breach
and mounting crisis and, as such, fumishes "a distanced replication and critique of
the events leading up to and composing the crisis. "120 These techniques concem
If redress does not or cannot restore or remedy loss, redeem the un-
ceremoniously buried, or bridge the transatlantic divide, then what possibilities for. remedying disrupted affiliations, caring for the violated and broken body, and recon-
relief, restitution, or recovery does it provide? First, redress is a re-membering of the stituting the terms of subjectivity for the socialIy dead. The symbolic actions range
social body that occurs precisely in the recognition and articulation of devastation, from the redemptive "rnarch to heaven," another way of describing the shout, to
rnundane activities like exchanging stories, staying up alI night talking with your
• .....,0., •..•" • n:rN~S"-O-F''''Tt R ROR A N D EN J O Y M E NT

lover, or singing across the Potomac to siaves on the other side. The incompleteness
of redress and the constancy of breach and crisis are primary determinants of the
force of repetition in black performance and the ambivalent formation of pleasure.
Therefore, rather than think of these practices as providing a reprieve from domi. 3
nation, we must think about pleasure not only in the context of domination but also
as an articulation of these tensions, Iimits, fissures, wounds, and ravages. The Seduction and the Ruses of Power
ambivalence of the pleasures afforded in the context of slavery was documented in
numerous accounts of "fun and frolic." When Anna Lee described Saturday night
dances, she emphasized the fact that these dances provided the only occasion for ln the very nature of things, he [the siave] is subject to despotismo Law as to him is
collective gatherings and having fun: "We had to have some way to see the other sex only a compact between his rulers, and the questions which concem him are matters
and be together, and that was the only time that our master allowed us to be together agitated between them.
just among ourselves, and we sure made the best of it cause we generally danced, -Justice D. L. Wardlaw, Ex parte Boylston (1845)
hollered and had our fun ali night long." 121 Rather than the dance providing an
You never knew what it is to be a slave; to be entirely unprotected by law or custom;
occasion for forgetting or escaping the "reality " of slavery, the pleasure such
to have the laws reduce you to the condition of chattel, entirely subject to the will of
opportunities afforded were bittersweet, fteeting, and tempered by the perpetuity of
bondage. Moreover, the pleasure to be had was infected with despair, fear, dissat- another.
-Harriet A. Jacobs , Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,
isfaction, and a desire for freedom, and surreptitious gatherings were haunted by the Written byHerself(1861)
fear of discovery and reprisal.
If through performance the enslaved "asserted their hurnanity." it is no less true The relation between legal interpretation and the infliction of pain remains operative
that performance articulated their troubled relation to the category "human," if only even in the most routine of legal acts.
because no absolute line could be drawn between the pleasant path of slave rnanage- -Robert Cover, "Violence and the Word" (1986)
ment and the collective articulation of needs, solidarity, and possibility. While lhe
pleasures afforded within the confines of slavery were vulnerable to Douglass's 1 went to converse with Celia (defendant) at the request of several citizens. The
critique of debased amusement and reactionary diversions, they also provided the object of my conversation was to ascertain whether she had any accomplices in the
crime. This was eight or ten days after she had been put into the jail. I asked whether
occasion for srnall-scale assaults against slavery and opportunities for collective
she thought she would be hung for what she had done. She said she thought she
reftection on ones condition. Thus, in this regard, it is impossible to separate the use
would be hung. 1 then had her to tell the whole matter. Sne said the old man
of pleasure as a technique of discipline from pleasure as a figuration of social
(Newsome, the deceased) had been having sexual intercourse with her. That he had
transformation.t-? The confusion of lhe slaves good lime and stealing away in these told her he was coming down to her cabin that night. She told him not to come and if
short-lived transports therefore mitigates against absolute assertions about pleasure. he carne she would hurt him. She then got a stick and put it in the comer. He carne
The claims made on behalf of pleasure are tenuous, provisional , and double-edged. down that night. There was very little fire in the cabin that night. When she heard
In short, pleasure was inseparable from the expenditure and ravishment of lhe him coming she fixed the fire to make a Iittle light. She said his face was towards her
body. As Celeste Avery recalled, ai weekly frolics and dances folks would get and he was standing talking to her when she struck him. He did not raise his hand
"broke down from so much dancing." 123 Parties were calIed drag downs, hoe when she went to strike the first blow but sunk down on a stool towards the floor.
downs, or dig downs, according to Charles Anderson, because folks would "dig Threw his hands up as he sunk down The stick with which she struck was
right into it, and give it alI they gol. "124 Thus it appears that pleasure was inescap- about as large as the upper part of a chair, but not so longo ... She said
after she had killed him, the body laid a long time. she thought an hour. She did not
ably ensnared with expenditure and dissolution-bodies exhausted and restored, lost
know what to do with it. She said she would try to bum it.
and regained, anguished and redressed. This state of expenditure, according to
-State of Missouri V. Celia, a Slave (1855)
Victor Turner, is an integral part of performance process, for in the "breakdown,"
the individual is "reduced or ground down in order to be fashioned anew.' '125
However, the breakdown also illuminates the dilemma of pleasure and possession
since the body broken by dance insinuates its other, its double, the body broken by
the regimen of labor and (dis)possessed by the chattel principie. 126 This doubling of
In nineteenth-century common law, rape was defined as the forcible carnal
knowledge of a female against her will and without her consent. 1 Yet the actual or
the body bespeaks the ambivalence of pleasure and illuminates the brutal and myriad attempted rape of an enslaved woman was an offense neither recognized nor pun-
uses of slave property and the infinitesimal and innumerable assaults posed in the ished by law. Not only was rape simply unimaginable because of purported black
expression of desire. lasciviousness, but also its repression was essential to the displacement of white

79

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