Hegel’s Burden: The Discursive Spectrum of Slave Rebellion by Adeleke Adeeko

THE BROTHERWISE DISPATCH, VOL.3, ISSUE#10, JUNE-AUGUST/2020

At the beginning of his very lucid and tightly argued On the Postcolony, Achille Mbembe recommends that critics should cease formulating theoretical statements about the possibility of Africa’s autonomy and come to terms with the reality that African societies permanently lost their “‘distinctive historicity’” when they ceded control to Europe. Since then, nothing important has happened in Africa that is “not embedded in times and rhythms heavily conditioned by European domination” [1]. The “particular and sometimes local” concerns of African societies can no longer be honestly perceived outside the worldly orbit into which their dealings with Europe have consigned them. Of course, Mbembe is being a little disingenuous because his book, which he says is intended to lay out “the criteria that African [social and political] agents accept as valid” [2], is about nothing other than “particular and local concerns” of African politics.

A little less than a decade earlier, Paul Gilroy’s now deservedly influential The Black Atlantic eloquently challenged the self-authorization “resistance” paradigms that have dominated the writing of the intellectual history of black peoples in the New World. Gilroy argued that the manifest antagonism of black thought, at least as it is reflected in literature and popular music, is thoroughly misread if it is classified as an opposition to New World modernity. Idioms of self-constitution such as “nationality, ethnicity authenticity, and cultural integrity” [3] articulated by black thinkers to fight slavery, the deadly path most New World blacks took to modernity, do not contradict modernity’s intellectual assumptions. In essence, Gilroy seems to be saying, the basic principles of what we now call modern black thought gestated as questions generated by the contradictions slavery constituted for modernity.

I started by quoting Gilroy and Mbembe, who do not appear to have read each other’s work, because their accounts of modern black being (perhaps nonbeing in Mbembe) resurrect the ghost of Hegel’s allegory of Lordship and Bondage. For either author, slavery and colonialism constitute the historical “normativity” within which modern black communities in Africa and the New World have evolved in the last four centuries or so, and it is only from inside that “normativity” that black acts of self-constitution can be honestly studied. [4] Gilroy, writing about British and Anglophone American cultural politics, condemns the language of occultic “‘cultural insiderism’” that black nationalisms, including both the latent one in black poststructuralist literary criticism and the manifest one in Afrocentricity, use to justify their general assertions and to conceal the fact that the exclusive ethnic space is never the primary category of identification for black thinkers. [5] Writing about Africa in the same valence, Mbembe excoriates theories of a separate African being, historicist or mythical, that fail to reckon with colonization.

The slew of research projects implemented around the “Black Atlantic” theme proposed by Gilroy indicates that the basic terms of writing modern black history may be undergoing some fundamental revisions, and that a distinct body of knowledge is being amassed around the defining impact of the flow of ideas enabled by colonization and modern transatlantic slave trade on the cultures of the African Old World and the American New World. Black Atlanticism represents cultural traffic in black societies in the United States and the Caribbean from the eighteenth century onward as the strategic deployment of ideas that leading writers and thinkers adapt from European philosophers of modernity. Olaudah Equiano, Ignatius Sancho, W.E.B. DuBois, Edward Blyden, and even the fiercely nationalist Marcus Garvey comment on their societies and generate programs of black advancement by refining the fundamental principles of the Enlightenment to account for black existence. Whatever may be “black” in these formulations cannot, therefore, be uncoupled from the gains of Enlightenment. To complete the argument, it is suggested that a fairly honest account of modernity has to include black peoples’ “selective use of the ideologies of the Western Age of Revolution” [6] to make their case against slavery both in theory the slave’s rebellion and in practical politics. [7] In this conception of New World blackness, practices carried over from Africa are to be seen as a spectral presence meaningful only to the needlessly fastidious seeker of ancestral beginnings: “Though African linguistic tropes and political and philosophical themes are still visible for those who wish to see them, they have often been transformed and adapted by their New World locations to a new point where the dangerous issues of purified essences and simple origins lose all meaning” [8].

Some Africanist readers of Gilroy have found his reduction of Africa’s link to America into “tropes” and “themes” objectionable. [9] But all we need to do to appreciate the impact of Gilroy’s line of inquiry is to turn to Cameroon’s Achille Mbembe, who uses phrases that echo Gilroy’s, although he does not explicitly align his project with the Atlantic rubric. According to Mbembe, the slave trade “was the event through which Africa was born to modernity” and the story of existence in Africa since the fifteenth century has been dominated by Europe. A true understanding of African historicity should therefore “presuppose a critical delving into Western history and the theories that claim to interpret it”. [10] Mbembe diagnoses the maldevelopment of African politics to be a consequence of the normative contradictions of its modern experience:

It was through the slave trade and colonialism that Africa came face to face with the opaque and murky domain of power, a domain inhabited by obscure drives and that everywhere and always makes animality and bestiality its essential components, plunging human beings into a never-ending process of brutalization. . . . Underlying the problems of arbitrariness and tyranny . . . lies the problem of freedom from servitude and possibility of an autonomous African subject. [11]

The main task of philosophy and policy making in Africa should, given these circumstances, be about calibrating the extent of the regime of brutality immanent to Africa’s modern history as a postcolony or, to say the same thing, as an ex-slave farm. Without analyzing the etiology of the “obscure drives,” scholars of the African postcolony will be mistaking symptoms for the disease and literality for the sense. The scourge of “tyranny” and “arbitrariness” will not relent unless the fundamental character of servitude which modern history and politics have apportioned to Africa is first analyzed. All existential notions that are derivable from African premodern self-certainties have been suspended by slavery and colonial conquests. Colonialism and slavery, in Mbembe’s apt phrasing, tend to “freeze the law of the entity invaded” [12].

The operative syllogism in Mbembe and Gilroy’s intellectual transnationalism is that the Atlantic facilitated both the slave trade and the creation of a single historical, philosophical, and, perhaps, cultural unit that supersedes natal notions like ethnicity. (Also implied is the idea that black people did not become Africans until after their conquest.) In order for them to survive in their new environment, New World blacks are compelled by normative forces of modernity to dissolve what may be called their “origins” in favor of a new identity. All the “essential factors” of black being, Gilroy and Mbembe seem to imply, “come into their right in the course of their development” within slavery and colonialism. [13]

The line of argument followed in this book’s reading of histories and novels of slave rebellions in the United States, the Caribbean, and Africa departs from the kind of discursive transnationalism being practiced by Gilroy and Mbembe. I am not prepared, yet, to abandon the influence of nationalist and ethnocentric will on black intellectual reactions to slavery and colonialism. Nat Turner, who is not known to have read either Kant or Hegel, was inspired by a millenarian interpretation of the biblical apocalypse; however, the beginning point of his attempt to bring about his new world and new heaven is Southampton County, Virginia. It is from there, he thought, that the liberation of the whole world should begin. Toussaint L’Ouverture knew of the French Revolution, and, unlike Nat Turner, he had read secular texts about worldly freedom like the ones written by Abbéy Reynal. If C.L.R. James is to be believed, and I think he should, Toussaint lost control of the Haitian Revolution because he abandoned Haiti’s specific nationalist needs too quickly and tried too hard to make Haiti into a tropical France.

This book’s study of the rewriting of the history of black slave rebels in American, Caribbean, and African literary cultures is intended, at the level of abstraction, to interrogate the meaning of what Gilroy has very usefully called the slave’s “counter-violence.” In practice, the project interprets the uses to which writers, working under diverse “national” literary, historical, political, and intellectual traditions, put the efforts of black slaves who dared to “kill” their masters and break the norms of subjection. This study proceeds on the premise that the central contention in the making of modern black intellectual history concerns how to gauge the meaning of the attempts which black folks have made to cut the normative strings that bound their fate to the will of those who claim to be their masters. I should not be misunderstood as saying that black history and culture are not modern entities; it is an established point, I believe, that black political and cultural thought constituted crucial parts of modernity. Oral poetry, written literature, and history indicate that rebellion and other nonconformities are inherent features of modern slave (and colonial) societies. Nonetheless, it is my contention that while slavery and colonization may have brought black peoples into modernity, black people, as the stories of messianic slave rebels in literature and history show, first have to attack the grounds of their existence in modernity as subordinate beings bound to live only as slaves do under masters.

G.W.F. Hegel: Lordship and Bondage

Although this book is mainly about the meaning of slave rebellions in black writing, it is important that we should cast a quick glance at Hegel’s allegory of Lordship and Bondage for two reasons: (1) recent thinking about slavery and black culture takes its fundamental assumptions about cultural and intellectual relations from this text; (2) a different way of making abstractions about the relationship of black cultures to slavery can also be derived from Hegel’s story. Implied in varying degrees of explicitness in the positions staked out by Mbembe and Gilroy is the concern that theoreticians of modern black histories have not dealt adequately with the ramifications of Hegel’s abstractions on the range of actions, physical or spiritual, available to the slave. It is possible to argue, for example, that the starting point of Gilroy’s “primal history of modernity . . . reconstructed from the slaves’ point of view” [14] is Hegel’s allegory of Lordship and Bondage. [15] In the same vein, Mbembe, who says that “the ‘slave’ is the forename we must give to a man or woman whose body can be degraded, whose life can be mutilated, and whose work and resources can be squandered—with impunity” [16], clearly thinks of the fate of the colonized in terms analogous to Hegel’s views on the condition of the bondsman.

As Hegel recounts it, the awareness a consciousness has of itself exists in the mind of the self-conscious as something that emerges and is known as such in relation to another self-present and self-aware consciousness. On its own, a self-consciousness discovers that there is at least one other self-consciousness that operates like it and desires everything it wants: “each sees the other do the same as itself; each itself does what it demands on the part of the other, and for that reason does what it does, only so far as the other does the same” [17]. In this interaction of self-consciousnesses, “each is the mediating term to the other, through which each mediates and unites itself with itself” [18].

So long as this order of mutual recognition and definition prevails, no knowledge of independent self-consciousness as self-consciousness can be gathered from the interactions. That is, each party involved in mutual self-recognition “has not set aside the opposition it involves and left it there, but has made its account with it and become reconciled to it” [19] and cannot yet claim something Hegel calls “self-conscious freedom.” In order for the self-conscious entities that mutually recognize each other to attain that state, each party will try to annihilate all competing others. Hegel captures the essence of this contest for independent “self-conscious freedom” in the proverbial summary that says, “It is solely by risking life that freedom is obtained” [20]. This notion resembles, I cannot but note, the idea stated axiomatically in Yorùbá as “ogun layé ” (existence is war).

The parties in the combat for self-conscious freedom duel so viciously that only one will “live”; the others will “die.” The consciousness that “lives” retains life or “independence without absolute negativity,” and the one that “dies” succumbs to “‘negation’ of consciousness, negation without independence” and is thus left without the significance of actual recognition [21]. Having survived the battle for freedom, the victorious consciousness actuates its new status—a form of pure self-consciousness—by reducing its defeated (and “dead”) adversary into an entity defined by material immediacy and the non-essential validation it is made to render. According to Hegel, “The one is independent, and its essential nature is to be for itself; the other is dependent, and its essence is life or existence for another. The former is the Master, or Lord, the latter the Bondsman” [22].

We must note that the free Lord or Master that now “exists for itself” is not identical to the cognate entity that entered the battle of existence earlier. While the new form (the Master) still “mediated with itself through another consciousness” [23], the after-battle mediator is a degraded and diminished entity not close in any way to the opponent that entered the battle earlier. This “dead” mediator—the slave and, according to Mbembe, the colonized—is content in “thinghood.” After conquest (or surrender), determinate existence controls the Bondsman (“the immediate self-consciousness” whose “absolute object” is “the simple ego”), and the Master alone promulgates the essential laws that govern the Bondsman. [24] Being an arrested self-consciousness, the Bondsman loses the ability to do unto the Master what the Master can do unto it. As Hegel further tells the story, the continued domination of the “dead” by the “living” generates another series of problems in that the fallen thinghood that emanates from the slave’s capitulation is now simultaneously the placeholder of the slave’s own effete (in)dependence and the material form in which the master experiences his victory. [25] An immitigable gap, as it were, separates mastery from its experience. Even so, the slave’s consciousness remains “unessential” in that the master need not reckon with it.

Hegel notes further that in the Bondsman’s “serving and toiling” [26] is carried out his “total dissolution” of independent self-consciousness. However, the same motions of “work and labor” [27] that manifest his spiritual nothingness also alert him to the exact character of his existence: “In the master, the bondsman feels self-existence to be something external, an objective fact; in fear self existence is present within himself; in fashioning the thing, self-existence comes to be felt explicitly as his own proper being, and he attains the consciousness that he himself exists in its own right and on its own account” [28]. It is not clear from this description whether the experience of “independence” enabled by the relation of the slave to his labor—which also services the master’s existence—shall ever rise to the level of that which the Master enjoys in relation to the slave. In other words, Hegel does not state explicitly if the “dead” and enslaved self -consciousness can ever truly regain “life.”

Hegel’s allegory describes an almost unbreachable phenomenological enclosure within which entities are defined completely by “a continuous relation of elements within their unity” [29]. In this enclosure, the slave is really not the invention of the master but its consciousness opposite and the master is the systemic name of the consciousness that is not scared by the possibility of dying. But it is evident beyond the compelling logic of the story that Hegel does not view the slave and the master as moral equivalents. He speaks of the master as some entity that cannot be blamed for being what it cannot help and depicts the slave as something that falls into its nothingness because it lacks the moral courage to embrace death. As Hegel writes later, “If a man is a slave, his own will is responsible for his slavery, just as it is its will which is responsible if a people is subjugated. Hence the wrong of slavery lies at the door not simply of enslavers or conquerors but of the slaves and the conquered themselves” [30].

Slavery, Social death, and the Truth of Black Existence

Hegel’s systemic characterization of subjectivity, in my view, is the basis of his appeal to new conceptualizations of modern black cultural and intellectual history. As it is now conceived, black subjectivity, being a function of modern slavery, cannot “cut loose from its containing circumference” and, to paraphrase Hegel, obtain an existence all its own, gain freedom and independence on its own account. [31] Gilroy is very clear about Hegel’s place in his conceptualization of black modern intellectual and cultural history. He says, “Hegel’s allegory . . . correctly places slavery at the natal core of modern sociality” [32] and supports that view with an explication of Frederick Douglass’s depiction of his transfigurative fight with Edward Covey, the slave breaker. According to Gilroy, the common tenor of Douglass’s three versions of his duel with Covey indicates that the articulate militant slave may have been rewriting—“a supplement if not exactly a trans-coding” [33] —Hegel’s allegory from the vantage point of his experience. At the end of Douglass’s famous fight, Gilroy says, “It is the slave rather than the master who emerges . . . possessed of ‘consciousness that exists for itself,’ while his master becomes the representative of a ‘consciousness that is repressed within itself’”. [34] As if the slave lived his life to show Hegel something, Gilroy says Douglass embraces literal death over an abbreviated existence and chooses the “moment of jubilee” over the “pursuit of utopia by rational means”. [35] Douglass’s narration of his act of rebellion “underscored the complicity of civilisation and brutality while emphasising that the order of authority on which the slave plantation relied cannot be undone without recourse to the counter-violence of the oppressed”. [36]

This interpretation of the slave’s “counter-violence” yields to the resistance paradigm of writing about African American cultures. But, unlike traditional accounts of foundational opposition, Gilroy is not convinced that Douglass’s privileging of militant representation derives from a “black” aesthetics that exists outside the “normative” imperatives of relations engendered by slavery. The survival of the objectively fittest narrative pursued by Douglass is a feature of the philosophical and cultural dominant of Douglass’s immediate modern world. The militant slave constitutes his self-consciousness within the very condition of his struggles, like all modern men and women: in favor of manly calculations of risk and benefits, for example, Douglass rejects as irrational the “black magic” of herbs deemed capable of protecting the slave against the white master’s lash. Like a perfectly modern person, Douglass also realizes after the fight that “to make a contented slave, it is necessary to make a thoughtless one. It is necessary to darken his moral and mental vision . . . to annihilate the power of reason” [37].

The dominant motifs of spiritual nothingness, emptiness, and the completely encircling macabre conviviality that Achille Mbembe uses to characterize modern African reality indicate that his conception of Africa’s historical subjugation is not unlike the conditions captured in Hegel’s allegory. Africans became slaves literally and conceptually at the moment of conquest, and the gross distortions apparent in Africa’s modern history manifest the fate of the defeated party in the battle of self-consciousness. As far as Mbembe is concerned, to the question “‘Who are you in the world?’ the African of this century could say without qualification, ‘I am an ex-slave’”. [38]

Orlando Patterson, whose main interest is not to make grand statements about the black condition in the modern world, also adopts Hegel for his conceptualization of the meaning of slavery in Slavery and Social Death. Slavery, Patterson says in a concise definition filled with echoes of Hegel, “is the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons” [39]. Patterson argues that slavery, as a form of exercising power, is not at all peculiar, illogical, or strange. Everywhere and across centuries, the slave is a dishonored and powerless person whose main mark is not his exploitation but his dehumanization, his “social death.” He agrees with Ali Abd Elwahed that “‘all the situations which created slavery were those which commonly would have resulted, either from natural or social laws, in the death of the individual’”. [40] To this way of thinking, violence, or the threat of it, is inherent to slavery. Slavery begins at the moment of capture in war when the victim’s life is spared so that power can be continually exercised over the captive’s body afterward. After the war, violence is still administered liberally on the slave’s body and the specter of death preserved, usually in social rituals, to remind the slave of his withheld fate.

Conceptually, the slave is an “interim” person kept alive literally but treated as if he were dead, mainly through exclusions “from all formal, legally enforceable ties of ‘blood,’ and from any attachment to groups or localities other than those chosen for him by the master”. [41] The social institutions from which Patterson says the slave is excluded are nothing more than symptoms of what Hegel may call the “living” Master’s transcendence. [42]

Patterson, Gilroy, and Mbembe all take Hegel’s allegory very seriously: Patterson’s definition of the enslaved as the “socially” dead casts in sociological terms Hegel’s allegorical notion that the slave’s consciousness is a “dead” one; by depicting pervasive tyranny in postcolonial Africa as concrete evidence of the as yet unremedied loss of self-consciousness that occurred in the conquest of Africans, Mbembe endorses the Hegelian interpretation of the slave’s condition as that of abject, possibly fatal, loss; Gilroy—like Patterson, who concludes that “the first men and women to struggle for freedom . . . were freedmen” [43] —finds a fruitful and comforting prospect for analysis in Douglass’s inversion of Hegel. Of the three authors, only Gilroy considers the theoretical consequence of the possibility of the slave restarting the battle for self-consciousness and extracting freedom from slavery’s barbarity: by fighting Edward Covey and writing about it later, Gilroy says, Frederick Douglass single-handedly liberates himself into a “self-conscious freedom.” Other writers seem to agree with Hegel that the fight has been concluded at the moment of surrender. While Gilroy’s reading is remarkably different from the other studies in this respect, it is surprising that he is still reluctant to query the supremacy of the “containing circumference” of slavery. Gilroy is not willing to admit, as Neil Lazarus puts it, that “the counter-culture of modernity” may not be “a theory of modernity,” or that the goal of the slave’s violence may be different from the master’s. Douglass clearly doubts the rationality of believing that ordinary herbs can influence a master’s disposition toward a belligerent slave, but he still carries the root on his body according to the conjure man’s precise instructions.

Douglass, perhaps, did not win the battle of self-consciousness after his fight with Covey, in spite of what he writes to the contrary. If, as Patterson says, slavery is “the permanent, violent domination of natally alienated and generally dishonored persons” [44], Douglass did not cease to be a slave after the fight. In the 1845 account of the duel, Douglass says, “I now resolved that, however long I might remain a slave in form, the day had passed forever when I could be a slave in fact”. [45] I take these words to mean that the slave has vowed to bring about his own literal death, if the need arises. Without committing suicide, however, literal death can only come by the grace of the masters, who are not positioned to give it. Edward Covey cannot desire Douglass’s literal death because the slave breaker’s interest can be well served only if Douglass is alive in slavery. When the psychologically and philosophically “free” Douglass is caught while trying to leave the slave territory some years later, his life is spared again; this time the masters lock him up.

According to Alexandre Kojève, the sentiment Douglass expresses in his freedom resolution amounts to no more than a “stoicism” with which “the slave [still living under bondage] tries to persuade himself that he is actually free simply by knowing that he is free—that is, by having the abstract idea of freedom” [46]. If one were to agree with Kojève, then Douglass’s elegant resolution, so long as it remains a mental act, “obliges him to be content with talking”. [47] But, as Kojève says, the slave knows that “freedom is not an empty word, a simple abstract idea, an unrealizable ideal”. [48] Hence, the slave still has to negate the master literally and not just intellectually. The most remarkable element of Douglass’s biography, therefore, is not the counterviolence that did not end his bondage but the “counter-violence” his running away inflicts on the master.

In theory, as Douglass’s treatment after his fight with Covey shows, options for resolving the battle of “consciousness” are three (life, death, or captivity) and not two (life or death). Sane warriors do not ordinarily enter a battle to be captured or killed but actually risk their lives to survive first, then capture or kill their adversaries. If, unfortunately, they end up in captivity, the burden of sustaining the defeated’s life falls on the captor desiring to enslave, and not kill, a sworn adversary. The warrior that enslaves thus brings upon himself the responsibility of managing a reluctantly living person. That is why in slaveholding societies, there is a permanent tension that frequently breaks into outright wars between the master and the slave. Slavery breeds permanent unrest because the slave is constantly attempting to be free of the “normative” circumference instituted when the initiative to die was taken away from him, and also because the master, knowing that the slave may not at all be grateful that his life is saved, issues draconian regulations to prevent the slave from fulfilling his “death wish.” The master has to devise preoccupations, or instruments of “social death,” that would prevent the slave from thinking about restarting the war of captivity. One could say, therefore, that preventing the slave’s literal death is the beginning of mastery. Once the master is instituted, I believe, death—his and his slave’s—becomes anathema to him. The master is not, as such, defined alone by the will to live, as Hegel’s allegory suggests, but also by the will to prevent the defeated from dying, either by suicide or through a rebellious mutiny.

To claim, as I am doing here, that the slave survives the moment of capture because the master is fulfilling a desire should not be misconstrued as saying that the slave lacks the capacity to exercise subjective will. Within slavery, the subjected person continues to seek an opportunity to exercise the will to “die,” or, to say the same thing, to be free. Slave rebellions, or the fear of them, are constant preoccupations in all slave societies because the slave’s wish to literally die conflicts with the master’s desires to live and also to prevent the slave from exercising his death wish. The condition of being enslaved, I would suggest, is that of struggling to terminate, by fomenting either the slave’s or the master’s literal death, the sham “deferral” of death which the master believes he has earned the power to give and take when the slave is captured. When C.L.R. James says that slavery is the cause of slave rebellion, we ought to believe that he is not just being curt; he is stating a phenomenological truth that Hegel did not analyze in Lordship and Bondage. The slave may be melancholic, as Hegel suggests. It may also be true that the slave’s consciousness entails, as Gilroy says, an “extended act of mourning” [49]. The source of the slave’s sadness is the unending regret of the master’s prevention of the slave’s literal death. The motivation for the slave’s self-liberation struggle, which almost always involves some effort to rebel physically, also emanates from the desire to snap, once and for all, out of the melancholy that arises from the master’s prevention of the bondsman’s literal death.

The alternative captivity milieu being presented here is meant in part to reaffirm the claims of the intellectual tradition that says the slave’s existence inherently consists of battling against forces that stifle it. When Frantz Fanon, for instance, applies the Hegelian allegory to the black condition under chattel slavery, he finds that the master in the modern Atlantic world “laughs at the consciousness of the slave. What he wants from the slave is not recognition but work”. [50] Fanon insists that the slave cannot induce full recognition from the master as long as he remains a slave and the master remains a master. [51] This discussion is also intended to indicate that it may be a misinterpretation to presume that the slave’s struggle can one day result in his becoming the master qua master. Within the captivity environment against which the slave fights, there can only be one master who, once deposed, cannot be replaced. Knowing this, the object of the right thinking slave’s striving would be the elimination of the office of the master. That is why, I believe, leaders of slave insurrections often speak in millenarian and apocalyptic terms of a new earth and a new heaven. Indeed, when Hegel is not writing about slavery, he acknowledges that normativity, because of its dependence on boundaries, invites a phenomenological unrest:

The circle, which is self-enclosed and at rest, and, qua substance, holds its own moments, is an immediate relation, the immediate, continuous relation of elements with their unity, and hence arouses no sense of wonderment. But that an accident as such, when cut loose from its containing circumference,—that what is bound and held by something else and actual only by being connected with it,—should obtain an existence all its own, gain freedom and independence on its own account—this is the portentous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of pure ego. Death, as we may call that unreality, is the most terrible thing, and to keep and hold fast what is dead demands the greatest force of all. [52]

The cataclysmic death Hegel speaks of in this passage as something “unreal” and terrible has been rethought in the question Judith Butler poses as: “If subordination is the condition of possibility for agency, how might agency be thought in opposition to the forces of subordination?” [53]. Butler cautions that the conundrum inherent to this question cannot be left unaddressed or else a logical aporia may transpose into political inertia. As Butler argues it, there is no doubt that slavery’s normativity “initiates” the determinant facets of a slave’s acts: “to persist in one’s being means to be given over from the start to social terms that are never fully one’s own”. [54] But the slave is that subject duty bound to “desire something other than its continued ‘social existence’” [55] and to test the contingency of norms. Certainly, the venturesome slave who acts on this desire and refuses to persist in the position assigned him or her within the norm faces “some kind of death” or dissolution (as Hegel suggests above). But acknowledging this fact should not lead to the fatalistic conclusion that there is no outside to the subjecting enclosure’s power and affirming indirectly the naturalness of the norm.

To use Judith Butler’s terms, the slave rebel’s life shows that “agency exceeds the power by which it is enabled”. [56]

If slavery is “social death,” as Orlando Patterson argues, what is slave rebellion? A short and direct answer will be that it is a sure means to “literal death.” But that response will be inadequate because death, as Patterson has shown, entails more than the cessation of breath. In literature and history, I would say, the slave’s rebellion is a name given to the path to a revolution (the annihilation of master and slave alike) that has no model. Rebellions crystallize the struggle to break the “normativity” that constraints existence, either as chattel slavery or colonialism, racism, or sexism. The world sought by the slave rebel, fundamentally a realm without masters and slaves, is always different from the one against which the struggle is launched. Antebellum African American novels projected that realm as Emancipation; between Emancipation and 1965, historians and novelists believed that the future may come in the form of socialism; in late-twentieth-century Africa, decolonization was expected to usher in that masterless and slaveless future. Although in every instance the future never arrived exactly as envisaged, I hesitate to label the projections as futile strivings against “normativity.” Butler makes a similar point more cogently in the following words: “Without a repetition that risks life—in its current organization—how might we begin to imagine the contingency of that organization, and performatively reconfigure the contours of the conditions of life?” [57].

Recent empirical studies of shipping records show that rebellions were frequent on slave ships and that the resisters did not act in vain. Mutinies or some other form of the slave’s counter-violence occurred on about one in ten transatlantic slave voyages and constituted the largest single set of risk to slavers. Planning against mutinies forced ship owners to carry more personnel and equipment than they would otherwise. The extra cost imposed by anti-mutiny precautions reduced by no less than 10 percent the total number of slaves that would have been shipped across the Atlantic. [58] I see in these studies that the hopes for liberation which the writers studied below reposed in the historical slave rebel were not misplaced.

[1] Achille Mbembe, On the Postcolony, (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2001) p.9.

[2] Mbembe, p.7

[3] Paul Gilroy, The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, (Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1993) p.2.

[4] Habermas says a modern society is defined by Hegel as that which “has to create its normativity out of itself.” Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourses of Modernity, (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1990) p.7.

[5] I owe this formulation to my colleague Anna Brickhouse.

[6] Gilroy, p.44

[7] Two good examples of Black Atlantic works are Charles Piot and Lorand Matory. The phrase is also sometimes used to name the work of “nation-less” eighteenth century Black writers like Equiano and Cugoano. As it happens, “Black Atlantic” is replacing what used to be called diaspora studies. See Brent Edwards and James Clifford in this regard.

[8] Gilroy p.48

[9] The handling of “origin” is, in my view, the most convincing criticism of the transnationalist tenets of “Black Atlanticism.” See Laura Chrisman; Joan Dayan; Simon Gikandi, “Introduction”; and Ntongela Masilela.

[10] Mbembe, p.9.

[11] Mbembe, p.14.

[12] Mbembe, p.183

The words are Hegel’s quoted by Jurgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990) p.16.

[14] Gilroy, p.55.

[15] Simon Gikandi made this point in his review of Gilroy (“In the Shadow of Hegel: Cultural Theory in the Age of Displacement”, Research in African Literatures, 27.2, Summer 1996, p.146) See Gilroy Chapter 2.

[16] Mbembe, p.234.

[17] G.W.F. Hegel, The Phenomenology of Mind, (New York: Harper Torchbooks, 1967) p.230.

[18] Ibid, p.231.

[19] Ibid, p.83.

[20] Ibid, p.233.

[21] Hegel, p.233.

[22] Ibid, p.234.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid.

[25] Hegel, p.236.

[26] Ibid, p.237.

[27] Ibid, p.238.

[28] Ibid, p.239.

[29] Hegel, p.93 emphasis added.

[30] Quoted in Susan Buck-Morss, “Hegel and Haiti”, Critical Inquiry 26 Summer 2000, p.849.

[31] Hegel, p.93.

[32] Gilroy, p.63.

[33] Gilroy, p.60. I consider very tenuous Gilroy’s evidence for the notion that Douglass may have been literally influenced by a reading of Hegel. For the 1845 edition at least, it is not very likely that Douglass would have read Hegel.

[34] Gilroy, p.60.

[35] Ibid, p.68. Gilroy also cites in this regard the case of Margaret Garner, the Cincinatti, Ohio, fugitive slave woman who in 1856 chose to kill her children rather than let them be returned to slavery. For Garner and Douglass, “the repeated choice of death rather than bondage articulates a principle of negativity that is opposed to the formal logic and rational calculation characteristic of modern western thinking and expressed in the Hegelian slave’s preference for bondage rather than death.”

[36] Gilroy, p.63.

[37] Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, (New York: Mentor Books, 1845, 1987) p.315. emphasis added.

[38] Mbembe, p.237. Mbembe stresses, in my view, that this kind of answer will be a miscomprehension because Africanists have not even begun to consider deeply the ramifications of what it means to be a slave.

[39] Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1982) p.13.

[40] Quoted by Patterson, p.5.

[41] Ibid, p.7. The concept of “social death,” the most intriguing part of Orlando Patterson’s formulation, emanates from the slave’s double alienation from the land of capture and the place of servitude. The slave must first be “violently uprooted”(p.38) from his natal community and the introduced to his new status as a nonbeing in the new society. Many times, especially in the case of criminals, the changed social status takes place in the same locale.

[42] Patterson could thus be said to conceive slavery as the result of “an act of force, hence a political act” – Frederick Engels, Anti-Duhring, (Peking, Foreign Language Press, 1976).

[43] Gilroy, p.342.

[44] Patterson, p.13.

[45] Douglass, p.299.

[46] Alexandre Kojeve, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel, (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1969) p.61.

[47] Ibid, p.62.

[48] Kojeve, p.63. Hence slaves embrace Christianity and create another universe that demonstrates their worldly inability to realize freedom literally.

[49] Gilroy, p.63.

[50] Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, (New York: Grove Press, 1967) p.220.

[51] See Nigel Gibson, “Dialectical Impasses: Turning the Table on Hegel and the Black.” Parallax 8.2 April 2002 pp.30-45.

[52] Hegel, p.93. emphasis added.

[53] Judith Butler, The Psychic Life of Power: Theories in Subjection, (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1997) p.10.

[54] Ibid, p.28.

[55] Ibid.

[56] Butler, p.15.

[57] Butler, pp.28-29.

[58] See Steven D. Behrendt, David Eltis and David Richardson, “The Costs of Coercion: African Agency in the Pre-Modern Atlantic World.” Economic History Review 44-3 2001 pp.454-476. Bernard Bailyn, “Considering the Slave Trade: History and Memory.” William and Mary Quarterly 58.1 January 2001 pp.244-251.

Excerpted from Adeleke Adeeko, The Slave’s Rebellion, (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005) pp.9-21.