Object to Subject in Antebellum Slave Resistance
Compiled by Bianca V. Borrero
B. A. Philosophy, 2011
B. A. Sociology, 2011
M. A. University of Alabama, Women’s Studies, 2018.
B. A. Philosophy, 2011
B. A. Sociology, 2011
M. A. University of Alabama, Women’s Studies, 2018.
Abstract
Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation is a film about Nat Turner’s often ignored slave revolt, and it powerfully conveys the struggle of slave against master. One of philosopher Georg Wilhem Friedrich Hegel’s most important contributions is that of his slave/master dialectic, in which he describes the importance of the slave’s overthrowing of his master to establish himself as an independent subject, no longer an object that only exists on the masters’ terms. This conversion from object to subject is the central focus of this project. Using both Birth of a Nation and Hegel as jumping off points to examine this idea, this essay will give theoretical perspectives to the establishment of subjectivity, as well as concrete examples of other ways in which slaves established themselves as independent from their masters. Overall, the sources listed here show the complexity and importance of both the objectification and subsequent forms of resistance to this objectification which were all part of antebellum slavery and resistance. Slave resistance functioned as a challenge to the dehumanization of enslaved peoples, and by challenging this dehumanization, slaves reclaimed their status as independent, free agents.
Primary and Secondary Sources
Abstract: Nate Parker’s Birth of a Nation is a film about Nat Turner’s often ignored slave revolt, and it powerfully conveys the struggle of slave against master. One of philosopher Georg Wilhem Friedrich Hegel’s most important contributions is that of his slave/master dialectic, in which he describes the importance of the slave’s overthrowing of his master to establish himself as an independent subject, no longer an object that only exists on the masters’ terms. This conversion from object to subject is the central focus of this project. Using both Birth of a Nation and Hegel as jumping off points to examine this idea, this essay will give theoretical perspectives to the establishment of subjectivity, as well as concrete examples of other ways in which slaves established themselves as independent from their masters. Overall, the sources listed here show the complexity and importance of both the objectification and subsequent forms of resistance to this objectification which were all part of antebellum slavery and resistance. Slave resistance functioned as a challenge to the dehumanization of enslaved peoples, and by challenging this dehumanization, slaves reclaimed their status as independent, free agents.
Hegel’s Theory
Slaves as Objects
Nat Turner’s Rebellion
Other Forms of Resistance
Hegel’s Theory
- Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti, and Universal History (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2009).
- Jacob Denz, “Bondsmen and Slaves: Servile Histories in Hegel and Nietzsche,” History and Theory 55, no. 3 (October 2016): 357-374.
- Georg Wilhem Friedrich Hegel, “Self-Consciousness,” in Phenomenology of Spirit (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), 104-119.
Slaves as Objects
- Mel Chen, “Language and Mattering Humans,” in Animacies: Biopolitics, Racial Mattering, and Queer Affect (Durham: Duke University Press, 2012), 23-55.
- Maurie D. McInnis, Slaves Waiting for Sale: Abolitionist Art and the American Slave Trade. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011).
- Alexander Weheliye, “Depravation: Pornotropes,” Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theory (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 89-124.
Nat Turner’s Rebellion
- Adéléke Adéèkó, A Slave’s Rebellion: Literature, History, Orature (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005).
- Kenneth S. Greenberg, Nat Turner: A Slave Rebellion in History and Memory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2003).
Other Forms of Resistance
- Antonio T. Bly, “Pretty, Sassy, Cool: Slave Resistance, Agency, and Culture in Eighteenth-Century New England,” The New England Quarterly 89, no. 3 (2016): 457-492.
- Heather Andrea Williams, Self-Taught: African-American Education in Slavery and Freedom (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2005).
