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Abstract
Working from the injunction of C. L. R. James about the requirement to understand the “new forms created in the context of slavery,” this essay argues that there is a political requirement for the study of the intellectual history and political thought of the African enslaved. The essay also notes that the Black enslaved body represented a distinct form of labor in which it produced commodities while itself being a “property in person.” Such a historical process produced “thingfication,” and unique forms of domination and alternative frameworks of freedom.
Notes
About the Author
Anthony Bogues is a scholar, writer, and curator. He is the Asa Messer Professor of Humanities and Critical Theory at Brown University, where he is Professor of Africana Studies and inaugural director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. He is also a visiting professor at the University of Johannesburg and the author/editor of seven books in the fields of political thought, intellectual history, and Haitian art. He has curated exhibitions in the United States, South Africa, and the Caribbean. He is currently working on a manuscript titled Black Critique: Race, Capitalism, Slavery and Freedom and A Reader on Haitian Art and Culture. He is a member of the scientific committee of the Center D’Art, Port Au Prince, Haiti.
Notes
1 C. L. R. James, “The Atlantic Slave Trade & Slavery: Some Interpretations of Their Significance in the Development of the United States and the Western World,” in Amistad, edited by John Williams and Charles Harris (New York: Vintage Books, 1970), 119–64.
2 Ibid.
3 C. L. R. James, Black Jacobins (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), 47.
4 There has been over the past few years a plethora of books published on this matter, they include: Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2017); Edward Baptist, The Half Has Never Been Told (New York: Basic Books , 2016); Steven Beckert , Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Vintage, 2015 ). For a recent discussion of the William theses itself see Pepijn Brandon, “From William’s Theses to Williams Theses: An Anti-Colonial Trajectory,” International Review of Social History 62 (2017): 305–27. However it is important to note that years before the Williams theses Du Bois published, Black Reconstruction in 1935 making a more fundamental argument about the relationship between capitalism and slavery specifically when he opens the text with the chapter, “The Black Worker.”
5 In the case of the British Caribbean colonies the empirical evidence for wealth generation can be seen in the project, Legacies of British Slave-Ownership, based at the University of London. www.ucl.ac.uk.ibs.
6 For a discussion of this see George Lamming’s unpublished speech, “To be a Slave “unpublished speech in author’s possession.
7 W.E.B. Du Bois, Black Reconstruction in America, 1860–1880 (New York: Atheneum, 1969 [Reprint edition]).
8 Of course we have the WPA narratives as well as many slave narratives; however, what I am pointing to is a mapping of a political/social/intellectual history of thought in which we theorize on the ideas of the enslaved.
9 At the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice, Brown University, among the cluster of projects which the center has undertaken is an international one titled “Towards a Global history of Slave Knowledges: A Global Curatorial Project.” In this collaborative undertaking with many museums, including the National Museum of African American History and Culture, Iziko Slave Lodge in South Africa, The International Museum of Slavery in Liverpool and the Research Center for Material Culture in the Netherlands, among others, we hope to rewrite the histories of slavery and colonialism from the perspective of the enslaved and the colonized.
10 C. Robinson, Black Marxism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000 ), 67.
11 Ibid., p. 170.
12 For a discussion of this see, Boston Review Forum 1, “Race. Capitalism and Justice,” 2017.
13 See Stuart Hall and Alan O'Shea, “Common Sense Neo-liberalism,” Soundings no. 55 (2013): 8–24.
14 Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection (Oxford: Oxford Univerity Press, 1997), 3.
15 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin White Masks, translated by Charles Lam Markmann (London: Pluto Press, 1986), 2.
16 Amie Cesaire, Discourse on Colonialism (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2000), 42.
17 Karl Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 (New York: International Publishers, 1967 ), 108.
18 For a fuller discussion of this concept see, forthcoming, A. Bogues, Black Critique : Race, Capitalism and Freedom (2020).
19 Angela Davis, “Unfinished Lecture on Liberation-11,“ in The Angela Davis Reader, ed. Joy James (Oxford: Blackwell; 1998), 55.
20 Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth (New York: Grove Press, 1961).
21 Ibid.
22 For a discussion of this, see Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, The Way of the World: On Neoliberal Society (London: Verso, 2013), as well as Anthony Bogues, Empire of Liberty: Power Desire and Freedom (Hanover, NH: Dartmouth College Press, 2010). This brief commentary was written before the emergence and consolidation of different forms of authoritarian populism. As a political ideology racism is central to practices of authoritarian populism. One core of this ideology is a political practice in which a global financial elite seek to destroy any remaining elements of state regulations in the capitalist order. This new conjuncture does not change the racial practices in which black bodies are disposable; it only makes it more acute, hence the rise of the extreme right wing and their practices of white supremacy.
23 For a discussion of this see Bogues, Empire of Liberty, Chap. 1.
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Anthony Bogues
Anthony Bogues is a scholar, writer, and curator. He is the Asa Messer Professor of Humanities and Critical Theory at Brown University, where he is Professor of Africana Studies and inaugural director of the Center for the Study of Slavery and Justice. He is also a visiting professor at the University of Johannesburg and the author/editor of seven books in the fields of political thought, intellectual history, and Haitian art. He has curated exhibitions in the United States, South Africa, and the Caribbean. He is currently working on a manuscript titled Black Critique: Race, Capitalism, Slavery and Freedom and A Reader on Haitian Art and Culture. He is a member of the scientific committee of the Center D’Art, Port Au Prince, Haiti.