A more theoretical aspect of manumission that I hope to explore in my dissertation is how slave-owners and slaves strategized for manumission in different ways. Part of this aspect is simply justifying using such jargon as “strategy” to explain the process and act of manumission. Such a proposition seems pretty obvious if one simply adopts the position that owners and slaves were in an obviously had competing interests: slaves wanted to be free and owners wanted to keep them enslave. However, such a position, which I want to make clear is the one that I share, does run into theoretical problems. First is the issue of projection: is such a position simply transferring the narratives and assumptions that we have about slavery in the modern Americas? Second is the issue of evidence: if slaves and owners had an antagonistic relationship, why are there so many examples of intimacy and concordance between them?
The first issue of projection is one that a number of scholars of ancient slavery have explored (e.g. Finley, Garnsey and Dubois), who articulate the problem primarily so that they can acknowledge it and then describe ancient slavery. However, I wonder if doing so we undermine just how close the two types of slavery are. Are we scholars just projecting? I wonder if it would be productive to take more seriously how American slave-owners quoted Aristotle in their defense of slavery.
The second issue of the evidence from antiquity about slavery. When I got to this section of the post, I realized that I am very much reacting against the thesis that Mckeown lays out in his book The Ancient of Ancient Slavery?, a work that is intended to highlight the numerous assumptions that scholars surreptitiously adopt when writing about Greek and Roman slavery. Such reminders are very necessary, but what I am worried about is that we can lose our own critical edge when coming to the evidence if we place too much value on letting the evidence “speak for itself”. In other words, let’s not kid ourselves: just as jailers are going to defend the practice of jailing, bankers the practice of banking, writers the practice of writing, so too are slave owners going to defend the practice of slavery.
Which brings me back to the issue of strategy. If I am starting my investigation of Greek and Roman slavery with the assumption that owners are going to defend slavery, how can I account for manumission? Here, I think that it is easy to agree with the standard answer: owners used the promise of manumission as a yet another tool, along with beatings, sexual violence and the threat of torture and crucifixion, to ensure their slaves’ loyalty. But to consider manumission in this way is to ignore how the slaves themselves had to then act in such a way as to be worthy of this reward. Indeed, I think that we can be bold and say that some slaves even went so far as to preemptively act (without explicit commands from their owners) in such a way as to create the persona of a slave who is worth of manumission. In other words, slaves had to cultivate the image of a manumission worthy slave, similar to how Judith Butler describes gender:
“The notion of a ‘project’, however, suggests the originating force of a radical
will, and because gender is a project which has cultural survival as its end, the term
‘strategy’ better suggests the situation of duress under which gender performance
always and variously occurs. Hence, as a strategy of survival, gender is a performance
with clearly punitive consequences.” (522, Performative Acts and Gender Constitution)
The first issue of projection is one that a number of scholars of ancient slavery have explored (e.g. Finley, Garnsey and Dubois), who articulate the problem primarily so that they can acknowledge it and then describe ancient slavery. However, I wonder if doing so we undermine just how close the two types of slavery are. Are we scholars just projecting? I wonder if it would be productive to take more seriously how American slave-owners quoted Aristotle in their defense of slavery.
The second issue of the evidence from antiquity about slavery. When I got to this section of the post, I realized that I am very much reacting against the thesis that Mckeown lays out in his book The Ancient of Ancient Slavery?, a work that is intended to highlight the numerous assumptions that scholars surreptitiously adopt when writing about Greek and Roman slavery. Such reminders are very necessary, but what I am worried about is that we can lose our own critical edge when coming to the evidence if we place too much value on letting the evidence “speak for itself”. In other words, let’s not kid ourselves: just as jailers are going to defend the practice of jailing, bankers the practice of banking, writers the practice of writing, so too are slave owners going to defend the practice of slavery.
Which brings me back to the issue of strategy. If I am starting my investigation of Greek and Roman slavery with the assumption that owners are going to defend slavery, how can I account for manumission? Here, I think that it is easy to agree with the standard answer: owners used the promise of manumission as a yet another tool, along with beatings, sexual violence and the threat of torture and crucifixion, to ensure their slaves’ loyalty. But to consider manumission in this way is to ignore how the slaves themselves had to then act in such a way as to be worthy of this reward. Indeed, I think that we can be bold and say that some slaves even went so far as to preemptively act (without explicit commands from their owners) in such a way as to create the persona of a slave who is worth of manumission. In other words, slaves had to cultivate the image of a manumission worthy slave, similar to how Judith Butler describes gender:
“The notion of a ‘project’, however, suggests the originating force of a radical
will, and because gender is a project which has cultural survival as its end, the term
‘strategy’ better suggests the situation of duress under which gender performance
always and variously occurs. Hence, as a strategy of survival, gender is a performance
with clearly punitive consequences.” (522, Performative Acts and Gender Constitution)