Captivating and nuanced read of Smallwood, Stephanie. Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2007 as well as Saidiya Hartman’s Lose your Mother (2006) in the context of Orlando Patterson’s concept of social death. Argues that scholars should revisit their interpretations of Patterson’s argument; that he was advocating for social death as an ideology held by enslavers, not as a reality of enslaved people. He finds value in “concentrating the efforts of the enslaved more than the condition of slavery,” we might have a more enriching view of their lives and of their politics (something he believes Smallwood accomplishes). (1249). He also makes a compelling argument that rather than adopting a dominant definition of culture, we should see how enslaved people used certain forms of culture in order to to make sense of enslaved life to meet their needs. (1245)

Rough notes:

Ship - Hudibras
- Funeral rights on the ship are key
- Historiography - Patterson argues for annihilation (1982) (1233)
- However, this interp. of his argument doesn’t do much for us.
- Developed within a sociological framework (not designed to describe change over time) / also falls into timeline of the assault on the Black family trope (1234)
- Two opposed views of slavery - overpowering vs. Black heroes (implication is that this is too reductive) (1235)
- Zong tragedy has a new context - people has property - see Baucom’s Specters of the Atlantic
- Critique: “Social Death” stands in for the experience of slavery (1236)
- Continuity of the power of the enslaver only works when you leave enslaved people out of the story
- Cites Carretta as taking on concept of social death in demonstrating how Equiano rewrote his story (1236)
- If social death, then how did people organize? (1236)
- See quote on transience (1238)
- Hartman - Alienation forms part of what it means to be African American
- Dispassionate bookkeeping as a form of violence (1238)
- Recognizing enslaved people’s consciousness as an act of mourning (from Hartman) (1239)
- Violence & death creating politics (1239)
- Smallwood/Hartman - social death as product of commodification, though Smallwood’s interventions are deeper, argues Brown (1240)
- Smallwood - strongly explores the tension of the intent to turn people into things - essentially, the harder master’s tried, the more they found resistance everywhere (this almost seems like the reverse of Genovese?) (pull quote - 1241)
- Smallwood points out how important it was for Africans to define the slave ship in some form that would help them conceptualize the experience.
- Traditional sides: Patterson, Frazier (damage only) - scholars of slave resistance not a fan of this interp. | Woodson, Du Bois, Herskovitz (studies “Africanisms”) (this is the Frazier Herskovitz debate)
- Rucker - examines continuity vs. rupture (1243) Does not see violence as a part of self-making as Hartman & Smallwood do; instead, sees continuity of resistance as important
- Argument - see bottom of 1244
- Think about politics instead of simple “resistance” (1246)
- Concept: threat of social death (1248 - see where this is repeated more than once)