The abolition of chattel slavery and the emergence of man, however laudable, long awaited, and cherished, did not yield such absolute distinctions; instead fleeting, disabled, and short-lived practices stand for freedom and its failure. Everyday practices, rather than traditional political activity like the abolition movement, black conventions, the struggle for suffrage, and electoral activities, are the focus of my examination because I believe that these pedestrian practices illuminate inchoate and utopian expressions of freedom that are not and perhaps cannot be actualized elsewhere. The desires and longings that exceed the frame of civil rights and political emancipation find expression in quotidian acts labeled “fanciful,” “exorbitant,” and “excessive” primarily because they express an understanding or imagination of freedom quite at odds with bourgeois expectations. Paul Gilroy, after Seyla Benhabib, refers to these utopian invocations and the incipient modes of friendship and solidarity they conjure up as “the politics of transfiguration.”21 He notes that, in contrast to the politics of fulfillment, which operate within the framework of bourgeois civil society and occidental rationality, “The politics of transfiguration strives in pursuit of the sublime, struggling to repeat the unrepeatable, to present the unpresentable. Its rather different hermeneutic focus pushes towards the mimetic, dramatic and performative.” From this perspective, stealing away, the breakdown, moving about, pilfering, and other everyday practices that occur below the threshold of formal equality and rights gesture toward an unrealized freedom and emphasize the stranglehold of slavery and the limits of emancipation. In this and in other ways, these practices reveal much about the aspirations of the dominated and the contestations over the meaning of abolition and emancipation.
Gilroy, The Black Atlantic (Cambridge, 1993), 37; and Seyla Benhabib, Critique, Norm, and Utopia (New York, 1986), 13, 41.
Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-making in Nineteenth-century America.
