3 - Ephemeral Africa
Essentialized Odors and the Slave Ship
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 April 2020
Summary
The opening epigraph of James Scott’s Domination and the Arts of Resistance (1990) introduces an Ethiopian proverb to exemplify the concepts of “hidden transcripts” and “weapons of the weak,” two notions now essential to understanding subaltern resistance. In this adage, a nobleman walks in front of an Ethiopian serf: “When the great lord passes the wise peasant bows deeply and silently farts.”1 African slaves in the Atlantic littoral applied similarly rebellious ideas about odor as both “hidden transcripts” and “weapons of the weak” to respond to the conditions of different slave systems.
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- The Smell of SlaveryOlfactory Racism and the Atlantic World, pp. 123 - 154Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2020