Slavery and the origins of parasitic social dishonor

Fiona Greenland, Assistant Professor of Sociology, University of Virginia

Slavery is a savage struggle for domination, and a central lesson of Slavery and Social Death is that this struggle is defined and sustained by relational liquidity and intimate repertoires of survival. More recently, critical race theorists and post-colonial sociologists have demonstrated that the violence of the subaltern capture is totalizing such that all of human life is constrained and connected through this capture. They argue that enslavement is not a peculiar moment, but rather a condition of human experience that is fundamental to the transition to modernity. My paper builds on these ideas to revitalize a specific concept from Patterson's argument, parasitic dishonor, to examine the legacy and persistence of the lived effects of this dialect of violence. I draw on and compare visual and textual evidence from two major periods of slavery: ancient Rome and the 18th century Black Atlantic.