I am almost finished with this paper and there are two magazine articles which have served as inspiration.
One is on Saidiya Hartman. In print it is called “Secret Histories;” it is by one Alexis Okeowo and it is in the October 26, 2020 New Yorker, pp. 44-51.
Scenes of subjection is Foucauldian — interested in the ways people are subjected to power. The book says Emancipation was a new phase of enslavement, saying slavery had an “afterlife” or that it did not really end. She is interested in “challenging the assumptions of history” (47).
The other is about Orlando Patterson, and in the print edition of The Nation it is on pp. 32-42 and I am cutting it out of the magazine, Patterson is just too good. Patterson does many things, one which is take up slavery as a social and political institution and not primarily one of ownership; slavery, he said, was often a “conditional commutation” of a death sentence that cut people off from both society and family or heritage (35).
There is much more to say on this.
Axé.
