![]() This thinking is Hartman’s domain.Ī critique of the subject animates Hartman’s book. She allows us to ask: What do objectification and humanization-both of which can be conceived in relation to certain notions of subjection-have to do with the essential historicity, the quintessential modernity, of black performance? This is a double ambivalence that requires, above all, some thinking about the opposition of spectacle and routine, violence and pleasure. She shows how narrative always echoes and redoubles this dramatic interenactment of “contentment and abjection,” and she explores the massive discourse of the cut, of rememberment and redress, that we always hear in narratives where blackness marks simultaneously the performance of the object and the performance of humanity. Hartman opens us to the problematics of everyday ritual, the stagedness of the violently (and sometimes amelioratively) quotidian-the essential drama of black life, as Zora Neale Hurston might say. Her extraordinary new book, Scenes of Subjection, allows us to think about this hypervisibility in relation to musical obscurity and to questions of tone and rhythm. ![]() ![]() Between looking and being looked at, spectacle and spectatorship, enjoyment and being enjoyed, moves the economy of what Saidiya V. ![]()
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