Idea Transcript
Outline
The historical debate – Did slaves have a distinct and legitimate culture? – Was there a distinct slave “personality”? – Of what consequence was the master-slave relationship on the psyche and culture of the enslaved?
Understanding African-American culture
Concepts Master-slave relationship Paternalism Africanisms/retentions Slave community
Key works
U.B. Phillips, American Negro Slavery (1918) Melville Herskovits, The Myth of the Negro Past (1941) Frank Tannenbaum, Slave and Citizen (1947) E. Franklin Frazier, The Negro in the United States (1949) Kenneth Stampp, The Peculiar Institution (1956) Stanley Elkins, Slavery: A Problem in American Institutional and Intellectual Life (1959) John Blassingame, The Slave Community (1972) Eugene Genovese, Roll, Jordan, Roll (1972) Sidney Mintz and Richard Price, The Birth of AfroAmerican Culture (1976) Peter Kolchin, Unfree Labor (1987)
Phillips, American Negro Slavery (1918)
The plantation slave was a product of oldworld forces. His nature was an African's[,] profoundly modified but hardly transformed by the requirements of European civilization. Ceasing to be Foulah, Coromantee, Ebo or Angola, he became instead the American negro. His genius was imitative. The planters had a saying, always of course with an implicit reservation as to limits, that a negro was what a white man made him.
Melville Herskovitz, The Myth of the Negro Past (1941)
“In all the new World retention manifested itself in a continuum from pure African carry-overs to behavior indistinguishable from that which characterizes the dominant culture of European derivation.”
Melville Herskovitz, The Myth of the Negro Past (1941)
“Nowhere do Africanisms manifest themselves to the same degree in the several parts into which any human culture can be divided. . . . While Africanisms in material aspects of life are almost lacking, and in political organization are so warped that resemblance are discernible only on close analysis, African religious practices and magical beliefs are everywhere to be found in some measure as recognizable survivals, and are in every region more numerous than survivals in other realms of culture.” (111)
Frazier, “Significance of the African Background”
“There is scarcely any evidence that recognizable elements of the African social organization have survived in the United States.” “Rare and isolated instances of survivals associated with the Negro family only indicate how completely the African social organization was wiped out by slavery.”
Frazier, The Negro Church (1969)
“Because of the manner in which the Negroes were captured in Africa and enslaved, they were practically stripped of their social heritage.” (9) “In the New World the process by which the Negro was stripped of his social heritage and thereby, in a sense, dehumanized was completed. . . . New slaves with their African ways were subjected to the disdain, if not hostility, of Negroes who had acquired the ways of their new environment.” (10-11)
Frazier, The Negro Church (1969)
“The organization of labor and the system of social control and discipline on the plantation both tended to prevent the development of social cohesion either on the basis of whatever remnants of African culture might have survived or on the basis of the Negroes’ role in the plantation economy. . . . In fact, there was hardly a community among the slaves despite the fact that on the larger plantations there were slave quarters.” (11-12)
Frazier, The Negro Church (1969)
“The enslavement of the Negro not only destroyed the traditional African system of kinship and other forms of organized social life but it made insecure and precarious the most elementary form of social life which tended to sprout anew, so to speak, on American soil – the family.” (13)
Herskovits v. Frazier
What did slavery do to the culture of the enslaved? “retentions” (Herskovits) v. complete obliteration (Frazier) Comparative approach: worse in USA? (Frazier) (implicit): how do we measure these things? What historical factors conditioned the processes?
Stanley Elkins, Slavery (1959)
“Looking back on the energy, vitality, and complex organization of West African tribal life, we are tempted to reverse the question altogether and to wonder how it was ever possible that all this native resourcefulness and vitality could have been brought to such a point of utter stultification in America.”
Stanley Elkins, Slavery (1959)
“No true picture, cursory or extended, of African culture seems to throw any light at all on the origins of what would emerge, in American plantation society, as the stereotyped ‘Sambo’ personality.” “The thoroughness with which African Negroes coming to America were detached from prior cultural sanctions should thus be partly explainable by the very shock sequence inherent in the technique of procurement.”
Elkins Shock and disruption Slavery = ‘closed system’ or ‘total institution’ Infantilization Significant other Sambo
Gunnar Myrdal, The American Dilemma (1944)
"In practically all its divergences, American Negro culture is not something independent of general American culture. It is a distorted development, or a pathological condition, of the general American culture.“
Motif of “imperfect assimilation”: people of African descent subjected to conditions that make their “assimilation” into American life dysfunctional, unlike European immigrants
Elkins: Domination
Master
Slave
Elkins: Domination Bruno Bettleheim and the Nazi parallel “total” slave system Comparative approach: Latin America v. USA “Sambo” was real The slave personality Infantilization, domination
“In a word, most Negro youth are in danger of being caught up in the tangle of pathology that affects their world, and probably a majority are so entrapped. Many of those who escape do so for one generation only: as things now are, their children may have to run the gauntlet all over again. That is not the least vicious aspect of the world that white America has made for the Negro…. It was by destroying the Negro family under slavery that white America broke the will of the Negro people. Although that will has reasserted itself in our time, it is a resurgence doomed to frustration unless the viability of the Negro family is restored.”
The Negro Family: The Case For National Action (aka, the 1965
“Moynihan Report”) was written by Assistant Secretary of Labor Daniel Patrick Moynihan, a sociologist and later U.S. Senator.
Genovese: Paternalism
Master
Slave
Genovese: Paternalism Patron-client relations Class relations “Nationalism”? Marxian trajectory of history impeded
Culture/community interpretation
Master
? Other slaves
Slave
Other slaves
Understanding African-American culture
Key terms: – Acculturation: General term referring to the processes through which two or more cultures meet and interact. – Creolization: From the word “creole,” meaning the first generation born on American soil. Refers to process of cultural production in which cultures from the Old World are adapted to New World settings, producing new cultural forms.
Understanding African-American culture
Key terms: – Retention/survival: Refers to a cultural form which has “survived” migration to the New World, and hence is a cultural form “retained” from Africa. – Adaptation: Refers to a cultural form taken from a new culture and changed (“adapted”) in some way to new needs. – Appropriation: Refers to a cultural form taken from a new culture almost entirely without alteration.
Understanding African-American culture
Key terms: – Reinforcement: the process by which similar cultural forms from different cultures are mutually reinforced. Often mistaken as appropriation. – Syncretism: reinforcement, in which the reinforced form of a new culture is layered over existing practice. – Attenuation: the process by which dissimilar cultural forms from different cultures are lost or attenuated. The Old World culture of politically dominant groups is attenuated less frequently or easily than is the Old World culture of dominated groups.
Understanding African-American culture
What happens to culture of Africans in the Americas? – Maintenance (of African culture) – Cultural synthesis (melding of different African cultures) – Cultural inter-penetration (melding of African and European cultures) – Creolization (creation of new cultural elements into (“Afro-American culture”)
Look for reinforcement and attenuation in these exchanges
Understanding African-American culture
Material culture Social institutions Family organization Cultural practices (naming, music) Language “Deep structure” or “grammatical principles” of a culture (elements of worldview) – Time – Ontology
Understanding African-American culture
Factors conditioning cultural interaction: – – – –
Are planters resident or absent? How large is the enslaved population? What is the ratio of enslaved Africans to Europeans? Are there constant infusions of Africans from the slave trade? – Do enslaved Africans have a chance to form stable families and community lives? – Can the slave population reproduce itself?
Understanding African-American culture
Factors influencing patterns of acculturation: – Economic activity (“follow the crop”) – Climate and geography – Patterns of European settlement (settler, hybrid, exploitation colony) – Difficulty of the work – Slave trade (demand for imports, African sources of slaves) – Demographics of enslaved population (births and deaths) – Structures of control
Understanding African-American culture
Phenomena influenced by patterns of acculturation – – – –
Culture of black society Family life and gender roles Religion Development of black and white society (social hierarchy) – Patterns of control and resistance – Racial definitions (“Negro,” “mulatto,” etc.)