![]() ![]() The Marxist narrative of modes of production or the Foucauldian account of modes of power seemed inadequate when accounting for slavery. The other major concern was theorizing violence: not just spectacular instances of violence, but the ordinary or quotidian violence that structures everyday life. ![]() I had read Marx and Patterson, so I understood the limits of political emancipation as well as the distinction between manumission and emancipation and the disestablishment or abolition of slavery. I was also troubled by the prevailing liberal framework that marked formal emancipation as the end of slavery and as an incredible rupture. But I felt that the key terms of life in the modern age were set in stone in that formative moment it provided the structure for our language of freedom and rights, man and citizen. I didn’t imagine that I would become a scholar of slavery. The available critical language seemed inadequate for describing the necessary violence and the extreme domination characteristic of slavery. To my eyes, it was impossible to make sense of the structural logic and foundational character of racism without reckoning with slavery. To understand that substrate of Black life, I began to research slavery. ![]() I started out writing a dissertation on the blues. Saidiya Hartman: I arrived at slavery unexpectedly. Elias Rodriques: What led you to writing Scenes of Subjection? ![]()
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