Capital in the 19th century

I had a hunch that slavery was central to the United States' economic development in the early days of capitalism, and that the U.S. became a powerful economic force in the world because so much was produced--cotton and tobacco--on the back of free labor.

We can't imagine the idea of free labor anymore, neither can we imagine the conception of a fellow human as property owned by another as just another institutionalized way of being.

Edward Baptist's new book, The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, reminds American readers of the unpleasant truth of the history of the rise of American capitalism.

"The idea", writes Baptist, a native of North Carolina, a state whose past is rife with the brutality of the plantation economy, "that the commodification and suffering and forced labor of African Americans is what made the U.S. powerful and rich is not an idea that people are necessarily happy to hear. Yet it is the truth."

Regarding the general perception that African Americans passively accepted their status as slaves and didn't actively resist the condition of enslavement, Baptist says:

Historians have spent a lot of time talking about whether African Americans resisted. Resistance acquires a different look in forced migrations, where survival is a kind of resistance in finding ways to stand in solidarity with each other and to write stories about themselves to say: This is crime.

The shadow and the substance

There is validity in writer Te-Nehisi Coates' observation that the story of the American civil war thus far has largely been a story for white people in which blacks have been passive recipients of the benevolence of their white saviors.

According to Maurice Berger, the tradition of a one-sided story-telling continues in Steven Spielberg's new film Lincoln, which gives a nuanced portrayal of Lincoln but is "almost devoid of images of active black resistance and protest and overall participation in their own cause."

But slaves were crucial agents in their own emancipation, especially through a prolific use of the power of photography, or, as it was known at that time, daguerreography.

Envisioning Emancipation, a book co-authored by Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer, explores how black abolitionists (emancipated slaves who championed freedom for their fellow slaves) like Sojourner Truth and Fredrick Douglass, used the medium of photography to fight the intricate battle of changing minds and hearts in favor of emancipation.

A fascinating trivia about Sojourner Truth: She may have been the first black woman to actively distribute photographs of herself. But her self-publicity wasn't of a blatantly narcissistic kind as her portraits were meant to affirm her status as "a sophisticated and respectable free woman and as a woman in control of her own image."

Truth had a supreme critical perspective on the role of image; while she sold her own photographs to raise money for the cause, she said, "I sell the shadow to support the substance."

(Wow!)

Halloween undone

I just came upon a refreshing refresher on the (historical) origins of the "Zombie."

In an antidote to the spectacularization of the Zombie by Hollywood, Amy Wilentz says that the Zombie was born in the midst of slavery, especially as a response to the excruciating cruelty inflicted by the French in the slave plantations of Haiti.

There is a compelling reason why American parents should prevent their kids from donning "fun" Zombie costumes:

There are many reasons the zombie, sprung from the colonial slave economy, is returning now to haunt us. Of course, the zombie is scary in a primordial way, but in a modern way, too. He’s the living dead, but he’s also the inanimate animated, the robot of industrial dystopias. He’s great for fascism: one recent zombie movie (and there have been many) was called “The Fourth Reich.” The zombie is devoid of consciousness and therefore unable to critique the system that has entrapped him. He’s labor without grievance. He works free and never goes on strike. You don’t have to feed him much. He’s a Foxconn worker in China; a maquiladora seamstress in Guatemala; a citizen of North Korea; he’s the man, surely in the throes of psychosis and under the thrall of extreme poverty, who, years ago, during an interview, told me he believed he had once been a zombie himself.