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Marronage, Here and There: Liberia, Enslavement's Conversion, and the Settler-Not

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  29 November 2019

Tryon P. Woods
Tryon P. Woods*
Affiliation:
University of Massachusetts, Dartmouth
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Abstract

This proposed contribution to the special issue of ILWCH offers a theoretical re-consideration of the Liberian project. If, as is commonly supposed in its historiography and across contemporary discourse regarding its fortunes into the twenty-first century, Liberia is a notable, albeit contested, instance of the modern era's correctable violence in that it stands as an imperfect realization of the emancipated slave, the liberated colony, and the freedom to labor unalienated, then such representation continues to hide more than it reveals. This essay, instead, reads Liberia as an instructive leitmotif for the conversion of racial slavery's synecdochical plantation system in the Americas into the plantation of the world writ large: the global scene of antiblackness and the immutable qualification for enslavement accorded black positionality alone. Transitions between political economic systems—from slave trade to “re-colonization,” from Firestone occupation to dictatorial-democratic regimes—reemerge from this re-examination as crucial but inessential to understanding Liberia's position, and thus that of black laboring subjects, in the modern world. I argue that slavery is the simultaneous primitive accumulation of black land and bodies, but that this reality largely escapes current conceptualization of not only the history of labor but also that of enslavement. In other words, the African slave trade (driven first by Arabs in the Indian Ocean region, then Europeans in the Mediterranean, and, subsequently, Euro-Americans in the Atlantic) did not simply leave as its corollary effect, or byproduct, the underdevelopment of African societies. The trade in African flesh was at once the co-production of a geography of desire in which blackness is perpetually fungible at every scale, from the body to the nation-state to its soil—all treasures not simply for violation and exploitation, but more importantly, for accumulation and all manner of usage. The Liberian project elucidates this ongoing reality in distinctive ways—especially when we regard it through the lens of the millennium-plus paradigm of African enslavement. Conceptualizing slavery's “afterlife” entails exploring the ways that emancipation extended, not ameliorated, the chattel condition, and as such, impugns the efficacy of key analytic categories like “settler,” “native,” “labor,” and “freedom” when applied to black existence. Marronage, rather than colonization or emancipation, situates Liberia within the intergenerational struggle of, and over, black work against social death. Read as enslavement's conversion, this essay neither impugns nor heralds black action and leadership on the Liberian project at a particular historical moment, but rather agitates for centering black thought on the ongoing issue of black fungibility and social captivity that Liberia exemplifies. I argue that such a reading of Liberia presents a critique of both settler colonialism and of a certain conceptualization of the black radical tradition and its futures in heavily optimist, positivist, and political economic terms that are enjoying considerable favor in leading discourse on black struggle today.

Type
Articles
Information
International Labor and Working-Class History , Volume 96: Blackness and Labor in the Afterlives of Racial Slavery , Fall 2019 , pp. 38 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © International Labor and Working-Class History, Inc. 2019

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References

NOTES

1. Settler colonial discourse addresses itself to contexts as varied as Palestine, Southern Africa, Australia and New Zealand, Latin America, and North America. Given Cedric Robinson's reminder that “Europe” began as a colonized peninsular outpost of the Asian continent, with its much older and more advanced Asiatic and Arabic civilizations, and that European civilization developed through internal colonial processes of invasion, settlement, expropriation, and racial hierarchy, Robin D. G. Kelley, in turn, suggests that we should approach the study of European development within a settler colonial context. See Robinson, Cedric, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2000)Google Scholar and An Anthropology of Marxism (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2001)Google Scholar; and Kelley, Robin D. G., “The Rest of Us: Rethinking Settler and Native,” American Quarterly 69 (2017): 267–76CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Indigenous studies largely refers to the study of peoples indigenous to the Americas and Oceania, but not to Africa or to the many Asian societies that also bear histories of conquest, invasion, occupation, and settlement.

2. In this essay, I use “blackness” to refer to that position, and to all human beings and social spaces associated with this position, that represents humanity's negation within the onto-epistemic order created through the slave trade and exported by Western slaveholding societies to the world writ large, as if it were the natural and timeless order of human existence. “Antiblackness,” for purposes of this essay, indexes the force of this onto-epistemic structure at work through various kinds of violence. In the context of this essay, “racial slavery,” “slavery,” “slaveholding,” and the “slave trade” are more or less synonymous and used interchangeably as referents for the theft of black people from Africa, and for the onto-epistemic regime for which this heist continues to serve as base. I am well aware of the risks of treating slavery as transhistorical, as fixed over time, and acknowledge that there have been many different slave trades throughout human history, many of which did not involve racialism. This essay is part of a larger endeavor, however, to analyze the racialization of slavery in structural and ontological, not merely historical and contingent, terms. Although the racialization of slavery through time was unstable and in flux, the eventual equation of the slave with blackness in modern world civilization is a function of African enslavement across space and time.

3. The literature on slavery is too vast to cite here. Beginning with the 1944 publication of Eric Williams’ Capitalism and Slavery, however, there has been ongoing debate as to the place of slavery in the historical development of capitalism. This debate itself is testament to how capitalism and the various intellectual cultures arising from it such as Marxism have set out questions of political economy, labor exploitation, and alienation as the guiding terms for the study of human suffering. For a critical perspective, see Eltis, David, The Rise of African Slavery in the Americas (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar. Much recent scholarship has reemphasized the centrality of slavery for capitalist development. See Seth Rockman's overview, “Slavery and Capitalism,” Journal of the Civil War Era online (https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/forum-the-future-of-civil-war-era-studies/the-future-of-civil-war-era-studies-slavery-and-capitalism/.) Other notable examples of historiographical and social science approaches to historical and contemporary world problems that rely upon framing slavery in narrowly economistic or forced labor terms are Blackburn, Robin, The Making of New World Slavery: From the Baroque to the Modern, 1492–1800 (London: Verso, 1997)Google Scholar; Davidson, Julia O'Connell, Modern Slavery: The Margins of Freedom (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Sassen, Saskia, Expulsions: Brutality and Complexity in the Global Economy (Cambridge: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

4. See Baptist, Edward E., The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism (New York, 2014)Google Scholar; Hartman, Saidiya V., Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (New York, 1997)Google Scholar.

5. See Baucom, Ian, Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005)CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Robinson, Black Marxism, 101–20.

6. See Wilderson, Frank B. III, Red, White & Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

7. Recent critical scholarship in Black Studies demonstrates that gratuitous antiblack violence continues despite changes to the slavocracy and to the political economy of capitalism, leading scholars to note that manumission did not mark an end to racial slavery, but rather its transition into what Hartman has termed an “afterlife.” See, for example, Hartman, , Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2008)Google Scholar; Binder, Guyora, “The Slavery of Emancipation,” Cardozo Law Review 16 (1996): 2063–102Google Scholar; Blackmon, Douglas A., Slavery By Another Name: The Reenslavement of African Americans from the Civil War to World War II (New York: Anchor, 2008)Google Scholar; and Woods, Tryon P., Blackhood Against the Police Power: Punishment and Disavowal in the “Post-Racial” Era (East Lansing, MI: Michigan State University Press, 2019)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

8. Clarke, John Henrik (ed.), with Garvey, Amy Jacques, Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa (New York: Vintage, 1974), xxixGoogle Scholar.

9. On the importance of this impunity for antiblack solidarity and national belonging, see Martinot, Steve, Rule of Racialization: Class, Identity, Governance (Philadelphia, 2002)Google Scholar and Martinot and Sexton, Jared, “The Avant-Garde of White Supremacy,” Social Identities 9 (2003): 169–81Google Scholar.

10. Judy, Ronald A. T., (Dis)forming the American Canon: African-Arabic Slave Narrative and the Vernacular (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 20–21Google Scholar; Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 40.

11. On the general dishonor and natal alienation of the slave, see Patterson, Orlando, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982)Google Scholar.

12. Most approaches to the process of race-making privilege phenomenology over structure. I rather understand “race” as the aftereffect of violence; in other words, racism creates “race,” not the other way around. See Saucier, P. Khalil and Woods, Tryon P., “Racial Optimism and the Drag of Thymotics,” in Conceptual Aphasia in Black: Displacing Racial Formation, Saucier and Woods, eds. (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2016): 1–34Google Scholar.

13. Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 35–53. According to Wilderson, the native is positioned in ways similar to, and yet also divergent from, black people. The present essay is a modest contribution towards exploring these connections and disconnections between blackness and indigeneity, but my treatment of this issue is far from exhaustive.

14. Farley, Anthony P., “Perfecting Slavery,” Loyola University Chicago Law Journal 36 (2005): 225–56Google Scholar; Binder, “The Slavery of Emancipation,” 2068; Wagner, Bryan, Disturbing the Peace: Black Culture and the Police Power after Slavery (Cambridge: Harvard University Press: Duke University Press, 2009), 1CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

15. Sexton, Jared and Copeland, Huey, “Raw Life: An Introduction,” qui parle 13 (2003): 53CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

16. Wilderson, Red, White & Black, 38.

17. Binder, “The Slavery of Emancipation,” 2064.

18. Binder, “The Slavery of Emancipation,” 2067.

19. Armah, Ayi Kwei, Two Thousand Seasons (Popenguine, Senegal, 2000), xixGoogle Scholar.

20. See, for example, Hartman, Lose Your Mother.

21. Day, Iyko, “Being or Nothingness: Indigeneity, Antiblackness, and Settler Colonial Critique,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1 (2015): 102–21Google Scholar.

22. Day, “Being or Nothingness,” 102–3.

23. Ibid., 117–18.

24. King, Tiffany Lethabo, “New World Grammars: The ‘Unthought’ Black Discourses of Conquest,” Theory & Event 19 (2016), n.pGoogle Scholar. Also see King's forthcoming book The Black Shoals: Offshore Formations of Black and Native Studies (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019)Google Scholar.

25. Byrd, Jodi A., The Transit of Empire: Indigenous Critiques of Colonialism (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xixCrossRefGoogle Scholar.

26. Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, “Imehri,” Savacou 2 (1970): 38Google Scholar; “Rebellion” in The Arrivants: A New World Trilogy—Rites of Passage, Islands, Masks (London: Oxford University Press, 1973), 209Google Scholar; Kehinde, Ayo, “Edward Brathwaite's The Arrivants and the Trope of Cultural Searching,” The Journal of Pan-African Studies 1 (2007): 184Google Scholar.

27. Byrd, The Transit of Empire, 21.

28. Wolfe, Patrick, Traces of History: Elementary Structures of Race (London: Verso, 2016), 63–67Google Scholar. On black marronage in North America, see, for example, Diouf, Sylviane A., Slavery's Exiles: The Story of the American Maroons (New York: New York University Press, 2016)Google Scholar; and Sayers, Daniel O., A Desolate Place for a Defiant People: The Archaeology of Maroons, Indigenous Americans, and Enslaved Laborers in the Great Dismal Swamp (Gainesville, FL: University Press of Florida, 2016)Google Scholar.

29. See, for example, Beachey, R. W., The Slave Trade of Eastern Africa (New York: Harper & Row, 1976)Google Scholar; Lovejoy, Paul, Transformations in Slavery: A History of Slavery in Africa, 2nd ed. (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000)Google Scholar; Segal, Ronald, Islam's Black Slaves: The Other Black Diaspora (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 2001)Google Scholar.

30. See Judy, (Dis)forming the American Canon; and Hartman, Saidiya V. and Wilderson, Frank B. III, “The Position of the Unthought,” qui parle 13 (2003): 183–201CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

31. See Robinson, Black Marxism, 71–166.

32. The erasure of black positionality makes it possible for settler colonial studies and indigenous studies to argue that enslaved Africans, and their black descendants, displace indigenous peoples from land, sovereignty, and standing. See, for example, Kauanui, J. Kehaulani, “Tracing Historical Specificity: Race and the Colonial Politics of (In)Capacity,” American Quarterly 69 (2017): 257–65CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Black participation in indigenous genocide no more displaces the ontology of antiblackness installed by slavery than Native American participation in the African slave trade overrides the structural context of indigenous genocide and settler colonialism. Jared Sexton has addressed this problem in indigenous and settler colonial studies in “The Vel of Slavery: Tracking the Figure of the Unsovereign,” Critical Sociology 42 (2016): 583–97CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

33. Gueye, Adama, “The Impact of the Slave Trade on Cayor and Baol: Mutations in Habitat and Land Occupancy,” in Fighting the Slave Trade: West African Strategies, Diouf, Sylviane A. (ed.). (Athens, OH: Ohio University Press, 2003), 53Google Scholar.

34. This point is supported by an immense body of scholarship and political interventions that cannot be adequately cited here. For starters, one might consider the following selections: Payne, Charles M., I've Got the Light of Freedom: The Organizing Tradition and the Mississippi Freedom Struggle (Berkeley, CA: California University Press, 1995)Google Scholar; Wahad, Dhoruba bin et al. , Still Black, Still Strong: Survivors of the War Against Black Revolutionaries (New York: Semiotexte, 1993)Google Scholar; James, and Boggs, Grace Lee, Revolution and Evolution in the Twentieth Century (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1974)Google Scholar; DuBois, W. E. B., Black Reconstruction in America (New York: Atheneum, 1979)Google Scholar; Garvey, Amy Jacques, Garvey and Garveyism (Baltimore, MD: Black Classic, 2014)Google Scholar; Horne, Gerald, White Supremacy Confronted: U.S. Imperialism and Anti-Communism vs. The Liberation of Southern Africa from Rhodes to Mandela (New York: International Publishers, 2019)Google Scholar.

35. The World Bank and the various regional development banks are sources of this discourse today. See, for example, recent World Bank programs “supporting Guyana's reform efforts”: http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/489761528122701470/Guyana-First-Programmatic-Financial-and-Fiscal-Stability-Development-Policy-Credit-Project.

36. On underdevelopment, see Rodney, Walter, How Europe Underdeveloped Africa (London, Washington: Howard University Press, 2018)Google Scholar; and Sachs, Wolfgang, ed., The Development Dictionary: A Guide to Knowledge as Power (London: Zed Books, 2009)Google Scholar.

37. Jackson, Shona N., Creole Indigeneity: Between Myth and Nation in the Caribbean (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), 92CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

38. Rodney, , Walter Rodney Speaks: The Making of an African Intellectual (Trenton: Africa World Press, 1990), 77Google Scholar.

39. Robinson, An Anthropology of Marxism, 1–2.

40. Ibid., 27.

41. Ibid., 111.

42. Ibid., 15.

43. Ibid., 12–13.

44. Rodney, , A History of the Upper Guinea Coast, 1545 to 1800 (New York: Monthly Review Press, 1970), 258Google Scholar.

45. Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 187; Manning, Patrick, Slavery and African Life (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 124Google Scholar (as cited in Hartman, Lose Your Mother, 246 note 94). Hartman also cites Klein, Martin and Lovejoy, Paul, “Slavery in West Africa,” in The Uncommon Market, ed. Gemery, Henry A. and Hogendorn, Jan. S. (New York: Academic Press, 1979)Google Scholar.

46. Rodney, A History, 265.

47. Cortez, Jayne, Festivals and Funerals (New York: Phrase Text, 1971), 9–11Google Scholar, as cited in Dworkin, Ira, Congo Love Song: African American Culture and the Crisis of the Colonial State (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017), 247CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

48. Toni Cade Bambara, for one, carries on this African oral tradition about the ancestors who could fly in The Salt Eaters (New York, 1992)Google Scholar and in her posthumous Deep Sightings and Rescue Missions: Fiction, Essays, and Conversations (New York: 1996)Google Scholar.

49. Dworkin, Congo Love Song, 81.

50. Stefan M. Wheelock asserts that “in all likelihood” Walker was involved with Vesey. See Wheelock, , Barbaric Culture and Black Critique: Black Antislavery Writers, Religion, and the Slaveholding Atlantic (Charlotesville, VA: The University of Virginia Press, 2016), 104Google Scholar.

51. Perhaps the most well-known version of this principle comes from Martin Luther King Jr.’s April 16, 1963 Letter from a Birmingham Jail: “Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”

52. Clegg, Claude A. III, The Price of Liberty: African Americans and the Making of Liberia (Chapel Hill, NC: North Carolina University Press, 2004), 44Google Scholar.

53. Scott, Julius S., The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of the Haitian Revolution (London: Verso, 2018), 10, 15, 44, 131, 141Google Scholar; Horne, Gerald, Confronting Black Jacobins: The United States, the Haitian Revolution, and the Origins of the Dominican Republic (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2015), 12Google Scholar.

54. See Magness, Phillip W. and Page, Sebastian N., Colonization After Emancipation: Lincoln and the Movement for Black Settlement (Columbia: University of Missouri Press, MO, 2011)Google Scholar.

55. Dayan, Joan, Haiti, History, and the Gods (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 205Google Scholar.

56. Horne, Confronting Black Jacobins, 15.

57. Clarke, , “Years of Triumph and Tragedy, 1920–1925,” in Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa, ed. Clarke, with Amy Jacques Garvey (New York: Vintage, 1974), 104Google Scholar.

58. Levitt, Jeremy I., The Evolution of Deadly Conflict in Liberia: From “Paternaltarianism” to State Collapse (Durham, NC: Carolina Academic Press, 2005), 25Google Scholar.

59. Levitt, The Evolution, 20.

60. See Inikori, Joseph E., Forced Migration: The Impact of the Export Slave Trade on African Societies (London: Hutchinson, 1982)Google Scholar.

61. Rodney, A History, 105–8.

62. Diop, Cheikh Anta, Precolonial Black Africa (Chicago, 1987), 162–75Google Scholar.

63. Rodney, A History, 236–37.

64. Armah, Two Thousand Seasons, xvii–xviii.

65. Wiley, Bell I. (ed.). Slaves No More: Letters from Liberia 1833–1869 (Lexington, VA: University Press of Kentucky, 1980), 4Google Scholar.

66. Patterson, Slavery and Social Death, 38, 5.

67. Wiley, Slaves No More, 34.

68. Slaves No More, throughout. It should be noted that Wiley's editorialship of the letters from Liberia reveals his own fondness for slaveholding culture, if not for slavery itself. His racism should, in the least, remind readers of Slaves No More that these were select voices from Liberia, not necessarily definitive ones. There is no analysis of slavery in Wiley's text, so it remains beyond him that the letters he curates (and the curation itself) are an indictment of slaveholding pathology, not its vindication, as he intimates.

69. On “borrowed institutionality,” see Wilderson, Red, Black & White; and “Social Death and Narrative Aporia in Twelve Years a Slave,” Black Camera 7 (2015): 134–49CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

70. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection, 125, 116–17.

71. Ibid.,, 131.

72. Slaves No More, 16.

73. Ibid., 28.

74. Ibid.,, 155.

75. Quoted in Dayan, Colin, The Law is a White Dog: How Legal Rituals Make and Unmake Persons (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2011), 141Google Scholar.

76. Robinson, , Black Movements in America (New York: Routledge, 1997), 134Google Scholar.

77. Levitt, Evolution, 3.

78. Rodney, A History, 253.

79. The topic of industrial education, Booker T. Washington, BWI, Firestone, colonialism, and the philanthropies warrant an extended discussion that space constraints do not permit here. It is worth noting, however, the role of philanthropic foundations in forwarding political agendas through specific knowledge formation, while crowding out others. Money for research and education today is being spent hand over fist on “implicit bias theory.” Philip Atiba Goff is one of the main figures in the study and dissemination of implicit bias theory and has received funding from a long list of private and state funders, including law enforcement. Goff may very well be the twenty-first century's Booker T. Washington. For an analysis of implicit bias theory, see Woods, Tryon P., “The Implicit Bias of Implicit Bias Theory,” Drexel Law Review 10 (2018): 631–72Google Scholar.

80. Spivey, Donald, The Politics of Miseducation: The Booker Washington Institute of Liberia 1929–1984 (Lexington, VA, 1986), 5, 13Google Scholar. Marcus Garvey's project for Pan-African solidarity was informed by his early travels throughout the Americas encountering black labor subjection at every stop. Garvey recounted how the mutilated bodies of black fruit plantation workers in Costa Rica were common sights in the rivers and bush, hacked to death for their meager week's pay; in Panama, where black workers building the Canal were dying by the thousands; and more of the same in Nicaragua, Honduras, Colombia, Venezuela, and Ecuador. Amy Jacques Garvey claims that Garveyism was one of the key factors that set in motion African independence in the mid-twentieth century, paving the way for all of the local leaders who emerged after Garvey's demise. See Garvey, Amy Jacques, Garvey and Garveyism (Baltimore: Black Classic, 2014), 6–7Google Scholar; and Clarke, John Henrik (ed.), “Commentary,” in Marcus Garvey and the Vision of Africa, (New York: Vintage, 1974), 372Google Scholar.

81. See Spivey, The Politics of Miseducation, 42, 45–65.

82. Spivey, The Politics of Miseducation, 151.

83. Levitt, Evolution, 7.