The Sociology of Slavery. Orlando Patterson. Читать онлайн. Newlib. NEWLIB.NET

Автор: Orlando Patterson
Издательство: John Wiley & Sons Limited
Серия:
Жанр произведения: Социология
Год издания: 0
isbn: 9781509550999
Скачать книгу
and that it is what ‘distinguishes genocide from other mass murders’.183 Card focuses on the fact that a people’s social identity, based on their distinctive way of life, is what gives meaning to their existence, and destroying this is what most critically defines genocide: ‘Social vitality exists through relationships, contemporary and intergenerational, that create an identity that gives meaning to life. Major loss of social vitality is a loss of identity and consequently a serious loss of meaning for one’s existence. Putting social death at the centre takes the focus off individual choice, individual goals, individual careers and body counts, and puts it on relationships that create community and set the context that gives meaning to choices and goals.’184 In making this philosophical move, Card was actually returning to the pioneering student of the subject, Raphael Lemkin, who coined the term ‘genocide’, and for whom ‘the destruction of cultural symbols is genocide’, as well as actions that ‘menace the existence of the social group which exists by virtue of its common culture’. It also, of course, involved ‘the criminal intent to destroy or cripple permanently a human group’.185 The fact that it does not do so completely does not make it any less genocidal, since ‘Lemkin made clear that total extermination was not necessary for genocide to occur.’186 Some Jews survived. Some Jamaicans survived.

      When British slavery was finally abolished in 1838, Jamaicans, as we have noted, had experienced it for 183 years. I write this introduction in 2021, exactly 183 years after the abolition. The island has never fully recovered from the uniquely violent decimation of that first half of its history. ‘One of the characteristics of traumatic memory’, Dan Stone has written, ‘is that it cannot be suppressed at will’, and societies remain scarred long after its experience.190 The Prime Minister of Jamaica, the Most Honourable Andrew Holness, in his 2021 Emancipation Day speech commemorating the abolition of slavery in the island, noted the facts that it has been 183 years since abolition, and the role that the last great rebellion of the enslaved, led by National Hero, the Rt Excellent Samuel Sharpe,191 played in helping to bring it about. But then he added something with which his entire nation would have somberly agreed: ‘The use of violence has followed us from our history.’192 Today, Jamaica remains one of the most violent nations on earth, as it was in the eighteenth century, with a homicide rate that places it in the top five of all nations, and a rate of femicide, the murder of women, consistently at the very top of the world’s nations.193 The dead yards of the nation’s slums194 bear ghoulish witness to the plantation dead yards of that first half of its existence.195 For Jamaica, ‘the politics of post-genocidal memories are matters of life and death’.196

      That first half of our history has never been fully told. If the truth be known, it can never be fully known. Genocide, fast or slow moving, is unknowable. Unimaginable. We try as historians and sociologists to fathom and feel its horror, its sorrow, its unrelenting grief, its preternatural evil. But in its hollowing banality,197 it defies all understanding. Having reached the limits of historical and sociological understanding I tried to imagine that first half of our past in the literary sequel to The Sociology of Slavery, my novel, Die the Long Day,198 which drew on the materials I had collected for the earlier work to re-create a day of death and celebratory mourning on an 18th-century slave plantation. During the mourning for the murdered heroine (butchered by the Maroons at the request of the white overseer), an old Fanti woman, slightly crazed, wanders amidst the mourners, repeatedly wailing in a voice as dark as death, a dirge that was all she had remembered from her deracinated African past. It went like this:

      O Mother, Sister,

      Do not say anything.

      For anything you say, will be too much,

      And nothing you say, will be enough.

      Orlando Patterson,

      Harvard University

      1 1. My warmest thanks to Professors Loïc Wacquant and Chris Muller for encouraging the publication of this new edition and for their valuable comments on an earlier draft of this introduction. Thanks also to the anonymous readers of the introduction for their very useful comments.

      2 2. Anne Walmsley, The Caribbean Artists Movement 1966–1972: A Literary and Cultural History, New Beacon Books, 1992.

      3 3. My last contribution to New Left Review included a strong critique of one of the most abstruse, though well-received versions of the slave mode of production by Barry Hindness and Paul Hirst, 1975, Pre-Capitalist Modes of Production, Routledge. See my ‘Slavery in Human History’, New Left Review, 1/117, Sept./Oct. 1979, pp. 31–67.

      4 4. C. L. R. James, 1938, 1963, The Black Jacobins, New York, Random House, Inc.

      5 5. C. L. R. James, 1964, ‘Rastafari at Home and Abroad’, Review of Orlando Patterson, The Children of Sisyphus, New Left Review, Vol. 1/25.

      6 6. Douglas Hall, 1959, Free Jamaica, 1838–1865. Yale University Press. In 1962, Hall published a very general paper on slavery, in the course of thirteen pages dealing with the socio-economic dilemmas of the planters, the economic effects of emancipation, and the consequences of slavery and post-emancipation society for his day. Hall, 1962, ‘Slaves and Slavery in the British West Indies’, Social and Economic Studies, Vol. 11, No. 4, pp. 305–18. Nearly three decades later, he published a well-edited edition of the Thistlewood diary, crafted in his thorough and understated style, that introduced Caribbean scholars to this important diary.

      7 7. Philip Curtin, 1968, Two Jamaicas: