Saidiya Hartman

Blog posts

• The active role of the law in producing racist conceptions of Black women's promiscuity

• How different forms of law (slave law vs. common law) interact with one another and contradict one another, producing one rule for white women and another for Black women

• Relation to today --> how do the law work today in ways that are in continuity with the treatment of Black women under slavery in terms of consent and culpability

Saidiya Hartman, "Seduction and the Ruses of Power"

Like Crenshaw, Hartman shows that the law produces racialized gendered violence

Because the law defined enslaved Black people as both "person" and "property," it had to find ways to manage these contradictory definitions

These are definitions that go to the very heart of what it means to be understood as human, as a person, and as a woman

(538).

Three central arguments:

1). Under slave law, the meaning of rape is thrown into crisis. Rape's definition as a form of sexual violence done against one's will and without consent becomes unintelligible in the context of enslaved women because they are understood as property (without agency, will, etc.)

How, then, can rape within the context of slavery be made legible?

2). At the same time, however, the slave system constructed enslaved Black people as persons so that enslaved people could be made culpable for a crime. i.e. the law only recognized Black personhood and agency when Black people caused a white person harm.

Within this context, the meaning of agency = the ability to be punished or criminalized

3). Within the context of rape law and normative constructions of gender and sexuality, this contradictory idea of Black people as both "property" and "person" had to be managed. Black women thus had to be constructed as always willing, as seductive, lascivious, and as already consenting -- as culpable for their own violation.

Enslaved women's gender had to be differentially constructed in order to mark a distinction between Black women and white women

How could Black women be treated with such brutality and still be recognized as women or as persons culpable of a crime? How could the system of slavery sustain such contradictions?

Hartman, Scenes of Subjection (1997)

Broader project: To illuminate how the slave system depended not only on extreme forms of violence but also on ideas of affection, sentiment, pleasure, enjoyment, and empathy

Or, more exactly, the extreme and terrible violence inflicted upon enslaved people was sustained and made possible by sentiment, affection, etc.

This is part of the discourse of seduction she explores

Just as, following Tuck, Arvin, and Morrill, we should understand settler colonialism as a structure not an event, for Hartman slavery is also an enduring structure rather than a historical event that is now over

No Selves to Defend

"Black women have always been vulnerable to violence in this country and have long been judged as having “no selves to defend” – a term I devised and named an anthology on the subject after. When Ida B Wells began her anti-lynching and anti-rape campaigns a few decades after Celia was hanged, in the late 19th century, she was determined to expose the myths that black men were rapists and that black women could not be raped. Wells insisted that black women were entitled to state protection – and the recourse of self-defense – as a right of citizenship. In 2018, this right still proves elusive." -- Mariame Kaba

Criminalizing Survival

Case of Marissa Alexander

Marissa Alexander was arrested and charged with aggravated assault in August of 2010 for firing a single warning shot after being attacked by her then estranged husband. In August of 2012, Marissa was sentenced to twenty years in prison under Florida’s harsh minimum mandatory sentencing policies.

Case of Trayvon Martin

Hartman's essay is structured in four parts:

1). Explains the case of Celia to show how enslaved Black women are produced as culpable for their own violation. They are understood as not able to be raped under the law and yet they can be criminalized for self-defense.

2). Explains what Hartman means by the discourse of "seduction"

3). Places this discourse of seduction within the broader context of the law and the construction of the master/slave relation as reciprocal

4). Explores the differential meanings of humanity and gender difference under slavery

I. Two cases

State of Missouri

v. Celia

Alfred

v. State

II. The discourse of seduction

"Rape disappeared through the intervention of seduction -- the assertion of the slave woman's complicity and willful submission. Seduction was central to the very constitution and imagination of the antebellum South, for it provided a way of masking the antagonistic fissures of the social by pathologizing the black body and licensing barbarous forms of white enjoyment" (545).

"In a more expansive or generic sense, seduction denotes a theory of power that demands the absolute and 'perfect' submission of the enslaved as the guiding principle of slave relations, and yet seeks to mitigate the avowedly necessary brutality of slave relations through the shared affections of owner and captive" (545).

III. Seduction and the Law

"The tautology reiterated: the dominated exert influence over the dominant by virtue of their weakness, and therefore more formal protections against despotism or guarantors of equality are unnecessary" (548).

"The higher court ruling held that the master had absolute power to render the submission of the slave perfect; yet it also argued that the harshness of such a principle would be regulated, not by existing legislation, but by feelings" (549).

"...this conceptualization of power relations depended upon feelings, not law, to guarantee basic protections to the enslaved" (549).

IV. Gender, Labor, and the Human

"The calculation of slave existence [humanity] was determined by base conditions necessary for functioning as an effective laborer" (553).

"The ravished body, unlike a broken arm or other site of injury, did not bestow any increment of subjectivity because it did not decrease productivity or diminish value" (553).