The Slave Ship, Memory and the Origin of Modernity

Martyn Hudson

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781317015901
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Slavery
• Index: Social Sciences

Traces; slave names, the islands and cities into which we are born, our musics and rhythms, our genetic compositions, our stories of our lost utopias and the atrocities inflicted upon our ancestors, by our ancestors, the social structure of our cities, the nature of our diasporas, the scars inflicted by history. These are all the remnants of the middle passage of the slave ship for those in the multiple diasporas of the globe today, whose complex histories were shaped by that journey. Whatever remnants that once existed in the subjectivities and collectivities upon which slavery was inflicted has long passed. But there are hints in material culture, genetic and cultural transmissions and objects that shape certain kinds of narratives - this is how we know ourselves and how we tell our stories. This path-breaking book uncovers the significance of the memory of the slave ship for modernity as well as its role in the cultural production of modernity. By so doing, it examines methods of ethnography for historical events and experiences and offers a sociology and a history from below of the slave experience. The arguments in this book show the way for using memory studies to undermine contemporary slavery.

Chapter 1
The Sea, the Passage, and Slavery

Traces; slave names, the islands and cities into which we are born, our music and rhythms, our genetic compositions, our stories of our lost utopias and the atrocities inflicted upon our ancestors, by our ancestors, the social structure of our cities, the nature of our diasporas, the scars inflicted by history. These are all the remnants of the middle passage of the slave ship for those in the multiple diaspora’s of the globe today, communities whose complex histories were shaped by that journey. Whatever remnants of memory that once existed in the collectivities upon which slavery was inflicted has long passed. There is no inventory, no taxonomy that we can use to look up who we are and where we came from. There are hints in material culture, there are genetic and cultural transmissions, there are objects that shape certain kinds of narratives — this is how we know ourselves and how we tell our stories. These are the things that tell the stories of the dead of the middle passage. Our social memory is locked into material assemblages and accounts that we have to address and think about again and again.

Rethinking and reworking those stories, testifying to the actuality of Atlantic slavery, means speaking truth to power if only because the dead of that passage are not safe from those who would deny that actuality, that materiality, and the fact that modernity and capital were built upon that passage, a passage for which there has been little accounting and no redress. Under and upon the Atlantic decks of the Zong, the Jesus of Lubeck, the Fredensborg, Amistad, and Brookes a new world was being born. This means that the Atlantic is both a real presence and a ‘conceptual Atlantic’ (Curto and Soulodre-La France 2005:1). The imaginaries of the Atlantic are not fictions or fabrications. Stories of the crossing, visual representations of the ships abound even when their material remnants are obliterated or dispersed. History leaves its traces upon territories and on the land — memory is enmeshed in its field patterns and archaeological remnants. The vast material but constantly moving presence of the Atlantic is not written upon in the same way — memory is amorphous, and quite literally fluid.

How then can we write a history of the sea, of the Atlantic, when each wave submerges the moment before it? As Michel Tournier has said ‘Thus the island, swept throughout by the ocean breeze, is part of the sea’s domain. And if land is memory, alteration, torment inflicted by time, the sea greets every storm with the same elastic, unalterable surface. The sea does not know how to grow old. A stone tells its own history, a millennial tale embodied in every crack and eroded surface. The ocean wave is no older than the first day of creation’ (1989:248). Traces of the slave ship are lost to the sea. Thousands of slave bodies entered the waves at the hands of slavers or, in despair, at their own hand sometimes singing songs as they cast themselves into the waves. These slaves were in the process of losing their African names, they were numbered and part of the cargo and the metrics of the ships. And the bare metrics of slave numbers and those states engaging in it are horrifying enough as David Eltis, Stephen D. Behrendt and David Richardson have noted (2005). But we can also talk not just about the metrics of a cargo but of the metrics of their subjectivities and understanding — how they themselves measured and calculated their world, how they mapped it in memory and understood their own passage. The sea itself remains multi-vocal, it is an archive of the dead and dispossessed even if at the same time, as Braudel says ‘Its character is complex, awkward, and unique. It cannot be contained within our measurements and classifications’ (1975:17). If the complexity of the Atlantic cannot be measured and classified how far can we understand today the experience of the slaves? How can we in turn ethically account for the measurement and classification of the slaves as merchandise and cargo? Can the techniques of memory and historical practice elucidate much beyond the pornography of violence that some commentators see in the visual representation of the slave ship? Fictional accounts of traders have attempted to reconstruct those lost ocean histories, as Bruce Chatwin has noted of the slaver da Silva — ‘He saw fleets of medusas, ribbons of sea-wrack, the prismatic colours on the backs of bonitos and albacores and the pale fire of phosphorence streaming into the night’(1980:71).

For Braudel, the history of oceans can only be known through the vast memory archives that surround it (1975:18) and this means understanding those expanses as products of both natural and human relations and understanding their significance in those very catalogues of slave numbers. The methods of memory studies can give us some guidance in understanding something about both the specificity of the slave experience and the reason why that experience is so central to the birth and the definition of modernity. But the passage across those expanses have left little trace except tangentially in the memory structures and cultures of African-America — in fact even when memory is dispersed its remnants continue. They are coded in music and rhythms and folktales and entwined with other memories and cultures, impure and constantly in movement, like the sea.

Not only is Braudel’s understanding of the sea central to redefining the land and the social relations upon the ships, it creates a concept of history ‘integrated by the sea’ (Thornton 1998:1). In John Thornton’s magisterial work on the African origins of the new world the sea itself has mastery as ‘the regime of wind and current’ (Thornton 1998:17). It was this regime through which the slavers navigated that became the setting for a particular event that took place and which became a central motif of abolition — the massacre of the Zong to which we will return. For Ian Baucom, if ‘the sea is history’ (2005:310) then understanding what happens in the space and scene of the ‘Atlantic abyss’ is central to understanding modernity (2005:314). Marcus Wood recounts, in his histories of slave representation, his experience of standing and watching the sea at three geographical locations central to the practice of slavery and notes that perhaps it is the ocean itself which should represent those experiences, ‘And on each occasion I watched the Atlantic waters moving, cold salt water still suffused with the particles of the flesh, blood, and bones of slave bodies, which dissolved in the great ocean, particles that have moved in their repeated diurnal round now for centuries, a solution that is rich and strange indeed’ (Wood 2010b:34).

Twelve million captives were taken from the African littoral between 1500 and 1870 and an estimated one and a half million of them died in the middle passage (Blackburn 1997/2010ed:3). The ocean did not for long bear witness to this catastrophe. The abyssal, integrated and connected regime of the Atlantic defined modernity and its cultures but the memory of the passage was dispersed and fragmented with the bodies of its dead. It was left largely to other commentators than the slaves themselves to provide commentaries and visual representations of those experiences. The few memory accounts of the transportees themselves became, however, central to abolitionist discourse and supported the development of new modes of solidarity around the Atlantic coasts and cities. Some captives escaped and formed new societies of their own in the fractures between civilisations, on the edge of the abyssal Atlantic. Sometimes these enclaves were on the ships themselves — captives turned freebooter and pirate. The new multi-ethnic societies of the pirate, the sailor and the maroon would in turn be exemplary for the multi-ethnic societies which were the result of the slave experience particularly Louisiana with its creole, cajun, African and native American populations. And memories and re-memories of that passage continued, often memorialised in dance, or ritual, even architecture. The lost homeland itself was encapsulated in ritual accounts of origins and genesis. Suffice to say that the material machine and artefact of the ship itself would be the genesis and creation myth of entirely new syncretic peoples and cultures.

1.1 The long Massacre

The case of the slave ship Zong haunts these pages as they do many commentaries upon slavery. The murder of 132–142 African captives at the hands of the slavers was a consequence of the fear of running low on water as the ship made the passage. Captain Luke Collingwood initiated the throwing overboard of the victims on the basis that ‘if the slaves died a natural death, it would be the loss of the owners of the ship; but if they were thrown alive into the sea, it would be the loss of the underwriters’¹ (Walvin 1992:16). We will return to the ethics of the visualisation of events such as the Zong massacre. But Ian Baucom in his study of capital and the Zong as a ‘counter-archive’ to the mastery of capital notes one telling fact: that of the 440 slaves purchased by Collingwood not one name survives (2005:11),

Four hundred forty slaves. Four hundred forty items of property valued at 30 pounds each. Thirteen thousand two hundred pounds. Four hundred forty human beings. We know almost nothing of them, almost nothing of Captain Collingwood’s conduct in “acquiring” them, almost nothing of their entry, as individuals, into the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Not as individuals. As “types” they are at least partially knowable, or imaginable. Indeed what we know of the trans-Atlantic slave trade is that among the other violences it inflicted on millions of human beings was the violence of becoming a “type”: a type of person, or, terribly, not even that, a type of nonperson, a type of property, a type of commodity, a type of money. (2005:11).

This production of types, of categories, of humans as capital or product, becomes central to modernity. The ‘counter-archive’ is ‘tracking a critical path through the circum-Atlantic archive of discourses and texts that has built up around the massacre over the past two centuries’ (Baucom 2005:31). And then the question might be asked — who are we countering and who are we are archiving against? The sociology and anthropology of the slave ship that we develop here is an archival, gesture of memory. Not just to commemorate an abolition of slavery because there are many problems with that, or indeed celebrate the tropes of both master and abolitionist as in the Brookes illustration. It is designed to support the retrieval of whatever memory of the slave ship experience that we can, to restore the remains of the rhythms, languages, and memories that were transferred across a passage embedded in the stripped bodies of the slaves. To assert that that experience defines not just African-America but also the world that is being born with the empire of capital. It is an archival assault upon the very Atlantic sea which has submerged the materials of ships, bodies, and memories and upon and within which this history took place. The memories of those experiences have been all but erased, there are multiple aporias. But that passage defines what would become a universal sense of oppression, liberation and solidarity — from the slave spirituals to the cultures of New York, the West Indies and beyond. As the Atlantic cycles of capital accumulation and the ‘speculative regime’ of capital initiated waves of ships (Baucom 2005:31), so the accumulation of a new world and new peoples took place. In many ways the slave ship is the central motif in the creation myth of new peoples, hybrid and recomposed, emerging not as ‘types’ but as the real people of African-America.

The Zong counter-archive and accounts were themselves important to the struggle against slavery but it was a painting of the catastrophe that was most illustrative in a literal sense. Turner’s painting of the ‘Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and the Dying better known as ‘Slave Ship’ encapsulates in a single painting that relation between the passage and modernity. As David Dabydeen has said, the shackling and drowning of the captives, was almost elided by Turner and in Ruskin’s essay on the painting (Dabydeen 1994:ix). The foregrounded slave head drowning in the picture in Dabydeen’s poem only begins to have memories and awakes long after death,

My poem focuses on the submerged head of the African in the foreground of Turner’s painting. It has been drowned in Turner’s (and other artists’) sea for centuries. When it awakens it can only partially recall the sources of its life, so it invents a body, a biography, and peoples an imagined landscape. (1994:ix).

The slave creates an inventory, recovering a set of memories about where it finds itself. Dabydeen’s poem gives voice to the slave against the slave master but also against the painter who savours the spectacle, objectifies the slave, and relegates the slave into a position of silence (1994:x). Again the transport itself reaffirms the power of observation against the silence of the slave and the eclipse of memory, memory which we already find so problematic in terms of accounts of the passage. The Turner painting is also the beginning of Paul Gilroy’s attempt to understand slavery in the context of ‘Black Atlantic’ cultures,

Turner’s extraordinary painting of the slave ship remains a useful image not only for its self-conscious moral power and the striking way that it aims directly for the sublime in its invocation of racial terror, commerce, and England’s ethico-political degeneration. It should be emphasized that ships were the living means by which the points in that Atlantic world were joined. They were mobile elements that stood for the shifting spaces in between the fixed places that they connected. Accordingly they need to be thought of as cultural and political units rather than abstract embodiments of the triangular trade. They were something more — a means to conduct political dissent and possibly a distinct mode of cultural production. The ship provides chances to explore the articulations between the discontinuous histories of England’s ports, its interfaces with the wider world. Ships also refer us back to the middle passage, to the half-remembered micro-politics of the slave trade and its relationship to both industrialisation and modernisation. As it were, getting on board promises a means to reconceptualise the orthodox relationship between modernity and what passes for its prehistory. It provides a different sense of where modernity might itself be thought to begin in the constitutive relationships with outsiders that both found and temper a self-conscious sense of western civilisation. For all these reasons, the ship is the first of the novel chronotopes presupposed by my attempts to rethink modernity via the history of the black Atlantic and the African diaspora into the western hemisphere. (Gilroy 1993:16–17).

Gilroy’s ‘mobile’ unit of the ship, was not, as he says, an abstract embodiment or exemplar of the trade. The ship was not a metaphor for carrying over meaning but was the vital means by which the whole system was made and unified. The ship made modernity.

Marcus Wood, in his work on the visual representation of slavery, has problematized the notion of a recoverable reality through aesthetic productions such as Turner’s painting. The sea for Wood is both executioner and emancipator — ‘The sea, however, is not only a personification of the tortured slave, but other personifications, simultaneously. The sea has many functions: it is the agent of death, but it suffers with those it makes suffer. The sea in its relation to the dying slaves is witness, executioner, victim and tomb’ (Wood 2000:63). Modernity as it emerges in the dead of that ocean emerges as at once a liberator of collective, human possibilities and the eliminator of specific lives.

This points to the need for what Eugene Genovese once called a ‘hemispheric perspective’ on slavery (1971:23) but also to understanding the slave experience specifically and phenomenologically rather than institutionally (Bryce-Laporte 1971:290). Understanding as much as we can about the specific memory and the material assemblage of the slave ships is profoundly important but at the same time we must understand the global import of that passage. As Richard Long has said,

The African Diaspora is the primary demographic and cultural product of the present world system, now five hundred years old. Indeed, while plans for celebration of the epitomizing event, the Columbian Discovery, are advancing, it is well to call to mind what indeed is being celebrated: nothing less than the abrupt rearrangement of millennial geopolitical patterns and the imposition by arms and fiat of the first planetary super polity. (Long 1995:3).

The construction of the first planetary super polity of capital accumulation and the subjugation of vast numbers (and numbers not names) of slaves within that polity also suggests for us an aspiration for what Paul Gilroy calls ‘planetary humanism’ as a response to the ‘Black Atlantic’. One hopes that this humanism can at once account for the failures of an Enlightenment so implicated in slavery and provide redress through counter-archives and counter-histories to that of a capital which numbers, catalogues and rips the names from slaves. As Alex Van Stipriaan has noted ‘Stripping Africans of their African identity was a crucial part of the enslavement process’ (2008:150) but memory survived and often was the only thing that survived carried in the minds of the subjected slaves.

For Paul Gilroy, the memory work around slavery has to be both creative and communicative in terms of the actual history of slavery but also to reconstruct an alternative account of the history of modernity from a slave perspective (1993:55). The subaltern, alternative accounts of memory are often based on the traces that we can find in the official catalogues, accounts and histories — it is this that signifies what Gilroy calls that ‘half-remembered micro-politics’ (1993:16–17). What is the status of the half-remembrance? The fact that memories and cultures were forcibly stripped from the slave identities by the captivity experience is clear in the historical record. It is also true that those half-memories are often found in the memory accounts of masters rather than slaves. Understanding the ship and the passage from those accounts can elaborate not just specific information about experiences that can be curated and sustained in a database but elaborate significant questions about whole civilisations as in the work of Gwendolyn Midlo Hall on Africans in Louisiana (1992, 2005). But it also hints at the limitations of counter-archival processes — that that experience can never be restored and that amendments can never be made, nor lives repaired.

The restoration of memory is impossible — all we can do is to think about and collect the fragments of those experiences and use to it to contest or even dismantle the archives of governance and mastery made by that ‘first planetary super polity’. It is perhaps even fitting that we leave some aspects of those lives to silence. There can never be a memorial or a commemoration of the Zong massacre or a fitting moment or space for re-memorialisation but it can inform our contemporary ‘micro-politics’ and do much to illuminate both our ancestries and sustain our memory resources for contemporary projects of solidarity. Dabydeen’s poem to the dead of the Zong is as we have seen some way of addressing both the visualisation of genocide and massacre but it is also a way of forging genealogies. The head of the slave as it awakens ‘can only partially recall the sources of its life, so it invents a body, a biography, and peoples an imagined landscape’ (1994:ix). We might think that those imaginary landscapes are fictions and in a way they are — like any story of identity it is the story we tell ourselves. But those inventions are a way of addressing our histories and counter-histories. We can’t unmake the massacre of the Zong and neither is there much currency in developing alternative histories of modernity that are counterfactual or somehow counter-modern. But counter-archiving does give us the capacity though to undermine singular narratives of identity in favour of what we might call the abyssal, Atlantic circulation of identity, memory and culture and confront the official, governing powers of memory.

1.2 Capital and Slavery

It is not for this book to address the question of whether slavery was anomalous or central to the development of capital — it was contradictorily enmeshed with it and decisive in the production of some of its forms as well as in the birth of the Atlantic and African-American labouring classes. Eric Williams sees slavery as central to the birth of capitalism in his classic account (1994). Others have seen slavery as a form of primitive accumulation enmeshed in merchant capital that was somehow contradictory to the development of metropolitan productive forces. Fox-Genovese and Genovese and their study of slavery and merchant capital point to wh...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Introduction The Slave Ship, Memory and the Origin of Modernity
• 1 The Sea, the Passage, and Slavery
• 2 The Dark Hold: The Slave Ship and the Middle Passage
• 3 Marx and the Pirates: ‘Forcing Houses of Internationalism’ and the Nautical Proletariat
• 4 Wooden Life-worlds: Memory Studies and the Experience of Slavery
• 5 The Slave Ship, Plantations and Materiality of Memory
• 6 The Passage, Syncretic Memory and Sound
• 7 Traces, Memory, and the Human
• 8 Conclusions – Memory, Slavery, Modernity
• References
• Index