The Punished Self: Surviving Slavery in the Colonial South - Softcover

Bontemps, Alex

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0801474825 ISBN 13: 9780801474828

Publisher: Cornell University Press, 2008

Synopsis

The Punished Self describes enslavement in the American South during the eighteenth century as a systematic assault on Blacks' sense of self. Alex Bontemps focuses on slavery's effects on the slaves' framework of self-awareness and understanding. Whites wanted Blacks to act out the role "Negro" and Blacks faced a basic dilemma of identity: how to retain an individualized sense of self under the incredible pressure to be Negro? Bontemps addresses this dynamic in The Punished Self.

The first part of The Punished Self reveals how patterns of objectification were reinforced by written and visual representations of enslavement. The second examines how captive Africans were forced to accept a new identity and the expectations and behavioral requirements it symbolized. Part 3 defines and illustrates the tensions inherent in slaves' being Negro in order to survive.

Bontemps offers fresh interpretations of runaway slave ads and portraits. Such views of black people expressing themselves are missing entirely from other historical sources. This book's revelations include many such original examples of the survival of the individual in the face of enslavement.

About this title

About the Author

Alex Bontemps is Assistant Professor of History at Dartmouth College.

From the Back Cover

"The Punished Self is the most imaginative work on slavery I've ever read. Alex Bontemps leaps right over the old binaries of resistance/accommodation; African/American; ethnicity/race, and goes straight to the fundamental question: how did these human beings survive slavery? He discovered that the physical and psychic survival of enslaved Africans often depended on their ability to play a "Negro" without becoming one. The Punished Self is a monumental intervention that will force everyone to rethink not only slavery studies but also our understanding of identity."-Robin D. G. Kelley, author of Yo Mama's DisFunktional!: Fighting the Culture Wars in Urban America

"In many ways and in the best senses, this is a very difficult book. Its startling insights repay an arduous search for colonial sources speaking to the subjectivities of slaves and of masters. Bontemps laboriously reads those largely elite sources against their grain, winnowing out what they reluctantly tell us about slaves as well as masters. Bontemps develops, among much else, a history of what master could not imagine and harrowingly situates slaves in a system based on terror in many forms."-David Roediger, University of Illinois at Urbana/Champaign, author of The Wages of Whiteness

"In this enthralling and extremely impressive book, Alex Bontemps thinks about slavery in a strikingly original and penetrating way. The Punished Self is an important book that will challenge our understanding of Eighteenth Century African-American and American culture."--Shane White, University of Sydney

Edition details

• Publisher: Cornell University Press
• Publication date: 2008
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0801474825
• ISBN 13: 9780801474828
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 240