In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman famously argues that the event of emancipation was an ambivalent one—less the transition between two absolute and heterogeneous conditions (slavery and liberty) than an inflection point within a continuous trajectory of unfreedom. For Hartman, this ambivalence is expressed in a paradoxical convergence of the formal and the material: even as the former slave was admitted (unevenly) into abstract equality and the project of republican citizenship, such admission was qualified by the proliferation of legal, ideological, and material techniques that reproduced anti-Blackness and generated new structures of racial domination. Crucially, however, these latter were not reducible to a simple resumption of slavery. Where racial slavery functioned principally through the direct expenditure of force in the relation of master and slave, the racialized structures of debt peonage, sharecropping, and convict-lease labor operated through circuits of impersonal domination routed through the abstract individual. It was as legal and moral individuals, that is, that Black freed people were formally subsumed into the economic and political realities of the reunified nation.
As Hartman herself demonstrates, the ascription of individuality to emancipated Black subjects unfolded along moral as well as economic lines. More specifically, the acquisition of the prerogative of citizens and rights bearers was everywhere accompanied by incurrence of moral and political debt, “effectively conscript[ing] the freed as indebted and dutiful worker” in ways that compromised the promise of freedom (Hartman 2022, 213). These debts in turn blurred the distinction between morality and economy. If the freed person was indebted, observes Sean Capener, they were always triply so: politically, in impossible default on the gift of emancipation; financially, in debt peonage or sharecropping; morally, in the perpetual belatedness to the normative standards of white citizenship (Capener 2024). The “afterlife of slavery” is thus not only an economic or political condition—it is a religious one as well.
This paper further interrogates the role of religion in this process, focusing in particular on the role of Christianity in facilitating the formal transformation of Black subjects from the status of “chattel” to “individuality.” In doing so I engage recent scholarship in the study of religion which interrogates the failed promises of emancipation, the role of religion in reconstituting white supremacy, and the broader intersection of religion with race and structures of empire (Blum 2005; Evans 2008; Johnson 2015; Gerbner 2018; Wenger and Johnson 2022; Weisenfeld 2025). Like this body of work, I am concerned in this paper in with the conceptual and formal processes which mediated the contradictory event of emancipation. Yet I also develop this conversation in a different direction, turning my attention away from the vestiges, afterlives, or legacies of slavery to the anticipation of "freedom" within slavery itself. In other words, I contend that viewing emancipation as an alloyed condition plagued by a persistent remnant precludes us from seeing the full scope of conceptual continuity stitching together slavery and its other. Directing my gaze to the immensely contradictory archive of slavery, I argue that the dual structure of emancipation was in fact anticipated and prefigured in slavery itself. I draw from slave law and proslavery Christian literature to contend that the political-theological split between abstract freedom and material subordination was an integral conceptual component of antebellum slavery, that this distinction joined an economic determination of slaves as “chattel” with a theological idiom of Christianization, and that it was this latter idiom, specifically, which facilitated the “metamorphosis of chattel into man and citizen” (Hartman 2022, 5). This argument bears significantly on contemporary discussions of the place of religion within racial capitalism, I conclude, demonstrating the indispensable role of Christianity as a kind of universal conceptual currency mediating discrepant conceptual orders of economics, politics, and religion.
Works Cited
Blum, Edward J. Reforging the White Republic: Race, Religion, and American Nationalism, 1865-1898 (LSU Press, 2005).
Capener, Sean. “On the Fall of the Angels: Economic Theology after the Middle Passage,” Journal of Religion 104. 3(July 2024): 257-281.
Evans, Curtis. The Burden of Black Religion (Oxford UP, 2008)
Gerbner, Katharine. Christian Slavery: Conversion and Race in the Protestant Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2018).
Hartman, Saidyia. Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America, revised edition (Norton, 2022)
Johnson, Sylvester. African American religions, 1500-2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (Oxford UP, 2015).
Weisenfeld, Judith. Black Religion in the Madhouse: Race and Psychiatry in Slavery’s Wake (NYU Press, 2025)
Wenger, Tisa and Sylvester Johnson, eds. Religion and US Empire: Critical New Histories (NYU Press, 2022).
In Scenes of Subjection, Saidiya Hartman famously argues that emancipation, rather than marking an absolute break between slavery and freedom, inaugurates an ambivalent condition defined by the convergence of abstract equality with new forms of racialized exploitation. This paper investigates the role of religion in this process, focusing on how Christian conceptions of personhood facilitated the formal transformation of emancipated Black subjects from chattel into individuals. In doing so, it engages a burgeoning literature which tracks the legacies, vestiges, or afterlives of racial slavery in modern concepts and practices of religion. Reading Hartman alongside Southern slave law and Christian proslavery literature, I argue that the subsumption of Black labor following emancipation operationalized an already existing isomorphism between “chattel” and “labor” established by the translatability of each into a shared Christian theological idiom. The paper concludes by considering the ramifications of this analysis for wider discussions of religion, race, and capitalism.