Scenes of Subjection

Reviews / Votes

One of our most brilliant contemporary thinkers -- Claudia Rankine * New York Times Book Review * A lodestar for a generation of students and, increasingly, for politically engaged people outside the academy -- Alexis Okeowo * the New Yorker * What Hartman has to say about both slavery and its continuing resonances should be heard as widely as possible ... A major scholarly contribution to the project of expanding and refining the nation's political memory. * the Nation * Meticulously researched .... The 25th-anniversary edition of this pathbreaking work of scholarship is a gift to those interested in thinking deeply and expansively about slavery's ever-running machinations. -- Omari Weekes * Vulture * The brilliance of the book - a brilliance that is considerable, formidable and rare - is present in the space Hartman leaves for the ongoing (re)production of [black] performance in all its guises and for a critical awareness of how each of those guises is always already present in and disruptive of the supposed originality of that primal scene [of violence] -- Fred Moten, author of The Consent Not to Be a Single Being Innovative ... [Hartman's] writing is impassioned and even lyrical at times ... This is a powerful and thought-provoking examination of slavery's far-reaching legacy * Publishers Weekly * Sharpens our understanding of whiteness, property, and happiness in startling ways -- David Roediger, author of Wages of Whiteness