Great talk by Professor Catherine Hall of UCL at CUNY yesterday (Oct 1, 2015). Just a few observations / developments on the theme of disavowal:
1) Hall pointed out a move by Locke: Africans did the enslaving via right of conquest; Europeans just bought the enslaved. But this makes enslavement into a essential property attributed once and for all to a subject, whereas Hall reminded us that in reality enslaving was a continually re-worked process through countless daily practices of humiliation and torture.
2) In her discussion of a landscape description in Long's History of Jamaica she pointed out how, behind a waterfall, there was a grotto where maroons could hide.
3) The ever-present possibility of flight that is marronage (I've been reading Neil Roberts lately) was one of the reasons for the need for continual enslaving as an ongoing process.
4) Long's continual disavowal of the humanity of slaves was particularly acute in describing the tortuous execution of rebels, whose agonies were disavowed with a claim that they didn't really suffer all that much.
I didn't get to make a comment at the talk, but if I had it would have been this:
5) But this disavowal renders inexplicable the practice of public torture with the aim of terrorizing the gathered slaves: if the tortured didn't really suffer all that much due to their sub-human nature, then what was the use of gathering the others? They could only be terrorized by sharing the pain of the tortured, but that pain is what was disavowed.
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