{"id":301,"date":"2006-10-24T23:01:06","date_gmt":"2006-10-24T21:01:06","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/?p=301"},"modified":"2006-10-27T08:52:01","modified_gmt":"2006-10-27T06:52:01","slug":"replacing-the-whip","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/replacing-the-whip\/","title":{"rendered":"replacing the whip"},"content":{"rendered":"

a fragment from this week’s readings for Theories of Slavery that caught my attention, from Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection. Terror, Slavery and Self-making in Nineteenth-Century America.<\/em> how “tethers of burdened individuality” and its accompanying hallmarks of individuated responsibility, morality, will and self-discipline replaced or supplemented the whip in the post-Emancipation era.<\/p>\n

“Given this rendition of slavery, responsibility was deemed the best antidote for the ravages of the past; never mind that it effaced the enormity of the injuries of the past, entailed the erasure of history, and placed the onus of the past onto the shoulders of the individual. The journey from chattel to man entailed a movement from subjection to self-possession, dependency to responsibility, and coercion to contract. Without responsibility, autonomy, will, and self-possession would be meaningless. If the slave was dependent, will-less, and bound by the dictates of the master, the freed individual was liberated from the past and capable of remaking him\/herself through the sheer exercise of will. Responsibility was thus an inestimable component of the bestowal of freedom, and it also produced individual culpability and national innocence, temporal durability and historical amnesia.”<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

a fragment from this week’s readings for Theories of Slavery that caught my attention, from Saidiya Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection. Terror, Slavery and Self-making in Nineteenth-Century America. how “tethers of burdened individuality” and its accompanying hallmarks of individuated responsibility, morality, will and self-discipline replaced or supplemented the whip in the post-Emancipation era. “Given this rendition … Continue reading “replacing the whip”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[31,5,2,30],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=301"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/301\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=301"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=301"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sarah.constantvzw.org\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=301"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}