This essay examines a longstanding normative assumption in the historiography of slavery in the Atlantic world: that enslaved Africans and their American-born descendants were bought and sold as "commodities," thereby "dehumanizing" them and treating them as things rather than as persons. Such claims have, indeed, helped historians conceptualize how New World slavery contributed to the ongoing development of global finance capitalism-namely, that slaves represented capital as well as labor. But the recurring paradigm of the "dehumanized" or "commodified" slave, I argue, obscures more than it reveals.This article suggests that historians of slavery must reconsider the "commodification" of enslaved humanity. In so doing, it offers three interrelated arguments: first, that scholarship on slavery has not adequately or coherently defined the precise mechanisms by which enslaved people were supposedly "commodified"; second, that the normative position implied by the insistence that persons were treated as things further mystifies or clouds our collective historical vision of enslavement; and third, that we should abandon a strictly Marxian conception of the commodity-and its close relation to notions of "social death"-in favor of Igor Kopytoff's theory of the commodity-as-process. It puts forth in closing a reconstituted conceptualization of the slave relation wherein enslaved people are understood as thoroughly human.Book titles tell the story. The original subtitle for Uncle Tom's Cabin was "The Man Who Was a Thing." In 1910 appeared a book by Mary White Ovington called Half a Man. Over one hundred years after the appearance of the Stowe book, The Man Who Cried I Am, by John A. Williams, was published. Quickskill thought of all of the changes that would happen to make a "Thing" into an "I Am." Tons of paper. An Atlantic of blood. Repressed energy of anger that would form enough sun to light a solar system. A burnt-out black hole. A cosmic slave hole.-Ishmael Reed, Flight to Canada (1976) Between the modern master and the nonmodern slave, one must choose the slave not because one should choose voluntary poverty or admit the superiority
At the outset of Charles Chesnutt's The Marrow of Tradition (1901), Major Carteret's wife has just given birth to the couple's first and only child, a baby boy named Dodie. The next day, Carteret is greeted with congratulations by his employees at the The Morning Chronicle, where he is editor. Among them is Jerry Letlow, the black porter and grandson of Mammy Jane, the Carterets' maid and Dodie's caretaker: "The major shook hands with them all except Jerry, though he acknowledged the porter's congratulations with a kind nod and put a good cigar into his outstretched palm, for which Jerry thanked him without manifesting any consciousness of the omission." Proper decorum disallowing his speech, Jerry communicates only by means of "his outstretched palm," a small but meaningful gesture signifying the vast social expanse between him and Carteret. As circumstance renders Jerry dumb, the narrator intervenes on his behalf: He was quite aware that under ordinary circumstances the major would not have shaken hands with white workingmen, to say nothing of negroes; and he had merely hoped that in the pleasurable distraction of the moment the major might also overlook the distinction of color. Jerry's hope had been shattered, though not rudely; for the major had spoken pleasantly and the cigar was a good one. (487) This awkward encounter between the leading man and the porter-who, "without manifesting any consciousness" in Carteret's presence, must be spoken for by the narrator-is not an insignificant detail. It speaks, rather, to one of the central problems of the novel: the narrative expression of black consciousness. Based loosely on the Wilmington Race Riot of 1898-Chesnutt himself visited the North Carolina town to collect oral histories as material for the novel-The Marrow of Tradition has been understood nearly exclusively as a historical novel. 1 Since Chesnutt's revival from critical obscurity some three decades ago, critics
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