Audacious....Original and provocative....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
A tour de force.
American Literature
American historians, especially historians of the South, will learn much from Secenes of Subjection
The Journal of American History
...a profoundly important subject...the author explores anew the calculated use of both blatantly overt and seemingly subtler forms of control over black bodies and black psyches.
Mississippi Quarterly
Well worth close attention, however, since Hartman relies o n extensive and intensive scholarly research to challenge the apparently major distinctions between slavery and emancipation and to encourage our recognition that there have been no dramatic historical turning points for black Americans." Journal of Southern History