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Introduction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2019

Franco Barchiesi  and
Shona N. Jackson
Franco Barchiesi
Affiliation:
Ohio State University
Shona N. Jackson
Affiliation:
Texas A&M University
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Extract

Labor historiography in the contexts of modern racial slavery and emancipation has long placed changes in the status of work at the core of the very meaning of captivity and freedom, their epochal watersheds, and institutionalized or unintended overlaps. Reviewing, in this journal's pages, recent scholarship on the relations between slavery and capitalism, James Oakes summarized that the “crucial differences between the political economy of slave and free labor … ultimately led to a catastrophic Civil War and one of the most violent emancipations in the hemisphere.” The literature Oakes critically discussed exemplifies the growing academic interest in the multifarious functionality of coerced production for the development of global capitalism. The resulting picture reaches much further than mere questions of economic causality, or whether chattel slavery did kick-start the profitability of capitalism, rather than the other way around. At stake are explanations of how racial captivity—which liberal economic, political, and moral discourse deems an anachronism—shapes the very productive, financial, social, institutional, and philosophical foundations of the global present. Historic and contemporary activist resistance to recurring and ubiquitous waves of antiblack violence, as well as the increasingly self-confident affirmation of white supremacy across Western states and civil societies has rendered such dilemmas in starker terms, asking whether persistent echoes of racial slavery are symptoms that the system is “built this way” rather than being just “broken.”

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Introduction
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International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 96: Blackness and Labor in the Afterlives of Racial Slavery , Fall 2019 , pp. 1 - 16
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Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2019

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References

NOTES

1. See, for example: Foner, Eric, Reconstruction: America's Unfinished Revolution, 1863–1877 (New York, 1988)Google Scholar; Scott, Rebecca J., Slave Emancipation in Cuba: The Transition to Free Labor, 1860–1900 (Pittsburgh, PA, 2000)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Hahn, Steven, A Nation Under Our Feet: Black Political Struggles in the Rural South from Slavery to the Great Migration (Cambridge, MA, 2005)Google Scholar; Jung, Moon-Ho, Coolies and Cane: Race, Labor and Sugar in the Age of Emancipation (Baltimore, MD, 2009)Google Scholar; Roediger, David, Seizing Freedom: Slave Emancipation and Liberty for All (London, 2014)Google Scholar.

2. Oakes, James, “Capitalism and Slavery and the Civil War,” International Labor and Working-Class History 89 (2016): 195–220CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The books reviewed by Oakes are: Beckert, Sven, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York, 2014)Google Scholar; Johnson, Walter, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Cambridge, MA, 2014)Google Scholar; Baptist, Edward E., The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York, 2014)Google Scholar; Schermerhorn, Calvin, The Business of Slavery and the Rise of American Capitalism, 1815–1860 (New Haven, CT, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3. In addition to the references in note 2, see Beckert, Sven and Rockman, Seth, eds., Slavery's Capitalism: A New History of American Economic Development (Philadelphia, PA, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Peter J. Hudson, “The Racist Dawn of Capitalism: Unearthing the Economy of Bondage,” Boston Review, March 14, 2016 (http://bostonreview.net/books-ideas/peter-james-hudson-slavery-capitalism, accessed August 1, 2018).

4. On the liberal mainstream, see Drescher, Seymour, Abolition: A History of Slavery and Antislavery (Cambridge, 2009)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Bender, Thomas (ed.), The Antislavery Debate: Capitalism and Abolitionism as a Problem in Historical Interpretation (Berkeley, CA, 1992)Google Scholar. On the “Williams thesis” and its recent revival, see Williams, Eric E., Capitalism and Slavery (London, 1944)Google Scholar and Tomich, Dale, “Capitalism and Slavery Revisited: Remaking the Slave Commodity,” in The Legacy of Eric Williams: Into the Postcolonial Moment, ed. Shields, Tanya L. (Jackson, MS, 2015), 172–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

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6. This is the case, for example, of Inikori, Joseph E., Africans and the Industrial Revolution in England: A Study in International Trade and Economic Development (Cambridge, 2002)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; see Hall, Catherine, Draper, Nicholas, and McClelland, Keith, “Introduction,” in Legacies of British Slave-Ownership: Colonial Slavery and the Formation of Victorian Britain, ed. Hall, Catherine et al. (Cambridge, 2014), 1–32CrossRefGoogle Scholar. See also Baucom, Ian, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Sublette, Ned and Sublette, Constance, The American Slave Coast: A History of the Slave-Breeding Industry (Chicago, 2015)Google Scholar. The notion of “thingification” is, of course, from Aimé Césaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York, [1950] 2000).

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10. Harold Cruse reproached, along these lines, white Marxist historian Herbert Aptheker's critique of Booker T. Washington's moderation. For Cruse, Aptheker's position illustrated the cul-de-sac facing left analyses regarding as bourgeois “sellouts” blacks who failed to be either part or allies of the revolutionary proletariat. In this way, Cruse continued, anticapitalist critique is incapable of accounting for black practices (to refer to an expression that informs the work of Saidiya Hartman discussed in this introduction) specifically responding—without necessarily becoming accommodationist—to structural oppression that is not reducible to economic exploitation. See Harold W. Cruse, “Revolutionary Nationalism and the Afro-American,” Studies on the Left 2/3, 12–25.

11. Leong, Diana, “The Salt Bones: ‘Zong!’ and an Ecology of Thirst,” ISLE: Interdisciplinary Studies in Literature and Environment 23 (2017): 798–820Google Scholar. See also Baucom, Specters.

12. Alves, Jaime A., The Anti-Black City: Police Terror and Black Urban Life in Brazil (Minneapolis, MN, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Woods, Tryon P., Blackhood against the Police Power: Punishment and Disavowal in the “Post-Racial” Era (East Lansing, MI, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

13. See Morgan, Jennifer, Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia, PA, 2004)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Jones, Cecily, Engendering Whiteness: White Women and Colonialism in Barbados and North Carolina, 1627–1865 (Manchester, United Kingdom, 2007)Google Scholar. Morgan and Jones (as well as Hartman's Scenes) emphasize the role of the Americas’ slave law in defining the subordinate “protected” status of white women within a patriarchal ordering of gender. Sexual violence was defined as a crime only when suffered by free human subjects, not legally enslaved and racially defined objects of property. White women survivors faced, if anything, a higher credibility bar, if they had a reputation of associating with black people. For a critical discussion of white feminism as historically and philosophically developing through a discourse of gender premised on the rejection of blackness, consciously or unconsciously identified with slaveness, see Broeck, Sabine, Gender and the Abjection of Blackness (Albany, NY, 2018)Google Scholar.

14. James, C.L.R., The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution (New York, 1989 [1938]), 88Google Scholar.

15. Oakes, James, Freedom National: The Destruction of Slavery in the United States, 1861–1865 (New York, 2013)Google Scholar and Drescher, Abolition.

16. Fanon, Frantz, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Philcox, Richard (New York, [1961] 2004), 15Google Scholar.

17. Glissant, Edouard, Caribbean Discourse: Selected Essays, trans. Dash, J. Michael (Charlottesville, VA 1989 [1981]), 64, 75–76Google Scholar.

18. For a brilliant critique of how natural-law analyses of slavery and freedom in the footsteps of Jean-Jacques Rousseau end up reinforcing the “natural slavery” notion, see Douglass, Patrice D., “The Claim of Right to Property: Social Violence and Political Right,” Zeitschrift für Anglistik und Amerikanistik 65 (2017): 145–60CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

19. Coates, Ta-Nehisi, We Were Eight Years in Power: An American Tragedy (New York, 2018)Google Scholar.

20. We have addressed this question from different angles in our earlier works, see Jackson, Shona N., Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean (Minneapolis, 2012)CrossRefGoogle Scholar and Barchiesi, Franco, Precarious Liberation: Workers, the State, and Contested Social Citizenship in Postapartheid South Africa (Albany, NY, 2011)Google Scholar.

21. Wilderson, Frank B. III, “The Position of the Unthought: An Interview with Saidiya V. Hartman”, Qui Parle 13 (2003): 183–201Google Scholar.

22. Da Silva, Denise Ferreira, Toward a Global Idea of Race (Minneapolis, MN, 2007)Google Scholar, xxiv. Da Silva's criticism specifically targets Etienne Balibar, Stuart Hall, and the “racial formation” approach proposed by sociologists Michael Omi and Howard Winant as key positions reducing racialized power to a matter of discourse, imagination, hegemony and exclusion rather than domination and violence, which are deeply and structurally woven in the connection between Western modes of humanist knowledge, philosophical meditations on what constitutes human subjectivity, and the paradigm of European expansion, colonization, and enslavement.

23. “Black metacritique” means here the black critique of critical theory, especially to the extent critical theory centers questions of political economy, ideology, hegemony, or alienation, which elude the structural significance of blackness and antiblack violence.

24. For example, a recent conference at Columbia University, “Free to Be Anywhere In the Universe: An International Conference on New Directions in the Study of the African Diaspora” (April 25–27, 2019), had a section on “The Theoretical Turn” in Black Studies, the introduction to which mentions that “in recent years Black Studies has been enlivened by engagements with a variety of theoretical resources that have yielded multiple trajectories (i.e., Afro-Futurism, Afro-Pessimism, Black Performance, Black Queer studies, to name just a few).” See http://iraas.columbia.edu/Event/free-be-anywhere-universe-international-conference-new-directions-study-african-diaspora.

25. In this regard, Jared Sexton defines blackness qua political ontology as “not a metaphysical notion, because it is the explicit outcome of a politics and thereby available to historic challenge through collective struggle. But it is not simply a description of a political status either, even an oppressed or subjugated political status, because it functions as if it were a metaphysical property across the longue durée of the pre-modern, modern and now postmodern eras.” See Sexton, Jared “‘The Curtain of the Sky’: An Introduction,” Critical Sociology 36 (2010): 18CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26. Paul Gilroy has emphasized the centrality, in transatlantic black cultural practices and discourse, of a persistent “political and philosophical critique of work and productivism.” See Gilroy, Paul, “There Ain't No Black in the Union Jack”: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation (Chicago, [1987] 1991), 233Google Scholar. See also the discussion of the “infrapolitics of the black working class” as diverging from not only capitalist discipline, but also labor organizing in Kelley, Robin D.G., “Introduction: Writing Black Working-Class History from Way, Way Below,” in Race Rebels: Culture, Politics, and the Black Working Class (New York, 1994), 1–16Google Scholar.

27. Davis, Angela, “Reflections on the Black Woman's Role in the Community of Slaves,” The Massachusetts Review 13 (1972): 81–100Google Scholar.

28. Rizvana Bradley, “‘Living in the Absence of a Body’: The (Sus)Stain of Black Female (W)holeness,” Rhizomes: Cultural Studies in Emerging Knowledge 29 (2016), https://doi.org/10.20415/rhiz/029.e13.

29. Hortense J. Spillers, “Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17 (1987): 64–81; on the revolutionary implications of “ungendering” in Spillers, see Terrefe, Selamawit D., “Speaking the Hieroglyph,” Theory and Event 21 (2018): 124–47Google Scholar.

30. Hartman, Saidiya, Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Social Upheaval (New York: Norton, 2019)Google Scholar.

31. On the connection between antiblack violence, sexualized terror, labor, and domesticity see also Sharpe, Christina, Monstrous Intimacies: Making Post-Slavery Subjects (Durham, NC, 2009)Google Scholar.

32. Hartman, Saidiya, “The Belly of the World: A Note on Black Women's Labors,” Souls: A Critical Journal of Black Politics, Culture, and Society 18 (2016): 166–73CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33. Hartman, Scenes, 116.

34. Hartman has addressed the multifaceted antiblackness in abolitionist narratives of “victory”—centered as they are on the idealization of a Western “freedom principle” that dismisses both black practices of subversion and the persistence of black captivity—in her review of Seymour Drescher's Abolition, American Historical Review, 115 (2010): 1103–06.

35. This is the definition of antiblackness provided in Jared Sexton, Amalgamation Schemes: Antiblackness and the Critique of Multiracialism (Minneapolis, 2008), 149.

36. Wilderson, Red, White & Black. This point is central to the perspective, discussed below, Wilderson terms “afro-pessimism.”

37. Hartman, Saidiya, Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York, 2008), 6Google Scholar.

38. Robinson, Cedric J., Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill, NC, [1983] 2000), 2Google Scholar.

39. Robinson, Black Marxism, xxx. Robinson refers to the “inadequacies of Marxism”; see also Fanon, The Wretched, 40.

40. Hart, William David, “Constellations: Capitalism, Antiblackness, Afro-pessimism, and Black Optimism,” American Journal of Theology & Philosophy 39 (2018): 5–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar, 15.

41. Fanon, Frantz, Black Skin, White Masks, transl. Markmann, Charles Lam (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 110Google Scholar. In The Black Jacobins, C.L.R. James, like other historians of the period, does mention that blacks died in large numbers during slavery, particularly in Haiti, the focus of his work. However, he, like others in the radical tradition, is not interested in theorizing death but is instead concerned with what black enslaved and post-slavery workers accomplished. This is the distinction that we foreground here.

42. See McKittrick, Katherine (ed.), Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis (Durham, NC, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

43. Moten, Fred, “Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh),” South Atlantic Quarterly 112 (2013): 737–80CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

44. Death is capitalized here to distinguish it as a structure of all black life after slavery, as opposed to death as an occurrence within all life or a reality of differently situated political subjects.

45. Saidiya Hartman, Lose, 111.

46. This material on black indigeneity and the addition of value to black bodies is developed in Shona Jackson's manuscript in progress, Marxism, Method, and Indigenous Sovereignty.

47. See Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Heller-Roazen, Daniel (Stanford, CA, 1998)Google Scholar.

48. See Hartman, Lose, 6.

49. For more on the ways in which Moten theorizes black paraontology, see his trilogy for Duke University Press, collectively titled “Consent Not to Be a Single Being”: Moten, Fred, Black and Blur (Durham, NC, 2017)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moten, Fred, Stolen Life (Durham, NC, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Moten, Fred, The Universal Machine (Durham, NC, 2018)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

50. Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” 739.

51. Hartman (Lose, 17) writes: “… I searched for the traces of the destroyed. In every line item, I saw a grave. Commodities, cargo, and things don't lend themselves to representation, or at least not easily. The archive dictates what can be said about the past and the kinds of stories that can be told about the persons cataloged, embalmed, and sealed away in box files and folios. To read the archive is to enter a mortuary; it permits one final viewing and allows for a last glimpse of persons about to disappear into the slave hold.”

52. For a discussion of defamiliarization as a methodological strategy, see Hartman, Scenes, 3–5.