The Slave Ship, Memory and the Origin of Modernity by Martyn Hudson

Author:Martyn Hudson [Hudson, Martyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub, pdf
Tags: Social Science, Slavery, History, Social History
ISBN: 9781317015901
Google: _gckDwAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2017-05-15T04:31:59+00:00

Chapter 5

The Slave Ship, Plantations and Materiality of Memory

We here examine the materiality of both the slave ship and its multiple productions through images and discourse. The empirical work here lies in a sociological examination of the relations of production in the slave ship and plantation and their materiality by working through primary materials about the ships and the material cultures produced by slavery including illustrations, archives and collections available through access to a variety of archives nationally and internationally. If, as Paul Gilroy, the slave ship is a chronotope of migration and modernity — what then does it mean that the materiality of the slave itself has been dispersed, found only in marine archaeological wreckage and material objects found on plantations? If the very basis of modernity is that passage and that experience what can we glean from an understanding of the ‘machine’ or ‘engine’ of transportation? Understanding the ‘living, micro-cultural, micro-political system in motion’ (Gilroy 1993:4) of the slave ship means understanding the ‘wooden world’ of the ship not just as a social and civil formation of capture and transport but as a wood and iron material assemblage of objects. Understanding the plantation machine and system means understanding its territory as a material array of objects — each object embedded in memory and narrative — what Gilroy calls the cultural and political artefacts of the societies that slavery would initiate (1993:4). The phenomenology of the ‘invisible forms’ of memory and of what we have called the ‘wooden life-worlds’ of the slaves are worlds which were literally wood as part of the machine of accumulation and passage. As Peter Linebaugh has said of the ship ‘All the contradictions of social antagonism were concentrated within its timbers’ (1982:109).

There has been much attention to the archaeology and material culture of the plantation system. Theresa Singleton’s work in developing conceptual and practical work on the materiality of slave systems revolutionised archaeological slave studies in the United States (1985). Important work has been developed by Douglas Armstrong on the Drax Hall plantation at St. Ann’s Bay, Jamaica specifically around the relation between house and territory, the African village and the ownership and management of the estate (1985, 1990). Further territorial analyses of space in the plantation system of Jamaica have been provided by James Delle (1998, 1999, 2000) and in the Chesapeake by Bell (2005) and Epperson (1990, 1997, 1999) with the latter work of both Bell and Epperson focusing on the development of ideologies of ‘whiteness’ in colonial administration and discipline.

There have been multiple strands developed in the emergence of African-American archaeology including the spatial analysis of place, location and identity (Feder 1994, Fitts 1996), the relation between archaeological and the birth of racial politics (Franklin 1997, 2001), the archaeology of resistance and specifically maroon societies (Funari 1999, Weik 1997, 2005), the relations of master and slave (Paynter 2001), the system of plantation control and administration (Handler and Lange 1978, Kelso 1984, Lewis 1985), the emergence of metropolitan, liberated identities (Harris 2003,

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