![]() 1 I also hoped to change the terms in which we understood racial slavery, by attending to its diffuse terror and the divisions it created between life and not life. The category crisis of human flesh and sentient commodity defined the existence of the enslaved and this predicament of value and fungibility would shadow their descendants, the blackened and the dispossessed. ![]() The hold of slavery was what I sought to articulate and convey. Temporal entanglement best articulates the still open question of abolition and the long-awaited but not yet actualized freedom declared over a century and a half ago. ![]() This sentence would be written in the past, present, and future tense. If it were possible, I might have written it as a 345-page-long sentence. In rereading Scenes of Subjection twenty-five years later, I am struck by the breathlessness of the prose, by its ardent desire to say it all, to say everything at once. For me, the relation between slavery and the present was open, unfinished. ![]() Its grasp and claim couldn’t be cordoned off as what happened then. ![]() The life of the captive and the commodity certainly wasn’t my past, but rather the threshold of my entry into the world. I could feel the force and disfigurement of slavery in the present. The conviction that I was living in the world created by slavery propelled the writing of Scenes of Subjection, my first book. ![]()
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