Liberal, Libertario, Libertino

Uma resenha, em inglês, comparando dois livros-chave sobre escravidão e relações raciais, enfatizando o modo como o conceito de liberdade, tão importante no pensamento ocidental, só faz sentido quando oposto à experiência da escravidão.

* * *

The Centrality of Freedom to Western Thought
A Review of Gilroy's Black Atlantic and Patterson's Slavery and Social Death

Ever since its publication, Paul Gilroy's The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness (Harvard University Press, 1993) has been very successful and influential. [em português: O Atlântico Negro. Editora 34, 2001.]

Gilroy's major thesis is engaging: he argues that modernity as we know it was shaped and created by the experience of the Atlantic slave trade, which allowed the western countries to achieve its economic and cultural hegemony. The shared experience of the horrors of slavery created a transnational black identity, putting the African-American diasporic culture at the very core of modernity. Moreover, the intensity of the slavery experience marked blacks as the first truly modern people, already handling in the nineteenth century many of the existential dilemmas that would shape the twentieth.

The thesis itself is not new. Sixty years before Gilroy, C. L. R. James, in his brilliant The Black Jacobins, later echoed by Laurent Dubois, among several others, had already argued about the centrality of black experience to western history.

Throughout the eighteenth century, Enlightenment thinkers created and refined universal axioms such as the declaration of the rights of man, but these universal rights were strangely defined in very restrictive terms. The Founding Fathers had no trouble combining this philosophy with the institution of slavery, for example. In Haiti, however, for the first time, western thought was forced to confront the untenability of this paradox. Its black inhabitants, suddenly playing the quasi-simultaneous roles of slaves, soldiers and citizens, were quick to demand that the same universal rights of man also apply to them. And, by doing this, they suddenly burst open the previously not so universal western philosophy.

But Gilroy goes a lot further. While the importance of the Haitian revolution is undeniable in changing the paradigms of western thought, can we really extrapolate this argument so far as to say that black experience was the crucial, defining element of modernity? Is there even a way to adequately prove such a far reaching point?

However, before we even get to this question, we would first need to define modernity. What does Gilroy mean by that? He throws this word around in the very title of his book but never even tries to define it. One assumes the meaning should be self-evident but it is not. Although long used in French (and also in Spanish), the word modernity has only recently become popular in Anglophonic academic circles and is still to be properly defined.

Many scholars equate modernity with the Enlightenment project that begins in the eighteenth century, others link it to the globalization that started with the Great Discoveries of the sixteenth century, still others say modernity is synonymous to western thought (which itself is a gigantic and complex structure dating back to Heraclitus), while some view it as simply a chronological category, considering that modernity is the age that opens with the French Revolution.

Given those many discrepancies in understanding and that the term itself has not been in usage for long in English, not defining it at the start is a serious flaw. If the reader is not on firm footing as to what Gilroy means by modernity, how can he follow the thesis that black experience was central to it? Central to what? To the period starting with the French Revolution, to globalization, to the Enlightenment project, to western thought in general? We have no way to be sure.

To salvage something out of Gilroy's argument we could turn it upside-down and focus more on freedom than on slavery. Both are, after all, two sides of the same coin. And one way to do this is through Slavery and Social Death (Harvard University Press, 1982), by Orlando Patterson.

Gilroy and Patterson have a lot in common. Both are Afro-British sociologists that have been teaching at Harvard for the past decades. But while Gilroy's book reads like French literary criticism, Patterson's reads like good solid history.

The aim of Slavery and Social Death is to "define and explore empirically, in all its aspects, the nature and inner dynamics of slavery and the institutional patterns that supported it." To achieve this highly ambitious global analysis, Patterson considers almost a hundred slave societies throughout human history.

Summarizing brutally, Patterson defines slavery not by ownership or property, but by natal alienation and dishonor. He views enslavement, slavery and manumission as three different phases of the same extended rite of passage: symbolic execution, social death, symbolic rebirth.

Enslavement equals symbolic execution because the events that lead to slavery (such as being captured in battle) would usually result in death. Being spared by his master, the slave must in exchange reciprocate with total obedience and service. In the act of repaying, the slave loses his social life. Thus, slavery is a form of social death.

Consequently, manumission is not a purchase of a commodity in which currency changes hands but rather the creation of something altogether new, a symbolic rebirth. What the master loses is never the same as what the slave gains. The money does not buy freedom but is merely a token of gratitude for a gracious master. Freedom cannot be bought.

The basic concept of freedom would be meaningless outside of a slavery context. It can only begin to exist as a concept from the slave's perspective.

Patterson shows how the idea of freedom and the concept of property were intimately bound up with slavery. The joint rise of slavery and the cultivation of freedom was a sociohistorical necessity.

It was also no accident that some of the most articulate defenders of their own freedoms, like Washington and Jefferson, were unrepentant slave owners. No one values their freedom more than he who withholds it from someone else.

Before slavery, says Patterson, what we call freedom would simply be inconceivable. Slaves were the first to yearn for freedom. Freedmen were the first to think of themselves as free in any meaningful way.

Patterson ends his book with the following question: are we to esteem slavery for creating freedom or should we reevaluate freedom?

If Gilroy is right, if the black experience is really central to modernity (whatever modernity is), it is because black slavery put freedom definitely on the agenda of western thought.

* * *

Se usar, cite:

Castro, Alex, “The Centrality of Freedom to Western Thought. A Review of Gilroy's Black Atlantic and Patterson's Slavery and Social Death.” Post em blog. Liberal Libertário Libertino. [data de publicação do post] [data em que você leu o texto] [http://www.interney.net/blogs/lll/a_centralidade_da_liberdade_no_pensament/]
* * *

* * *

Veja todos os posts sobre Raça do LLL e acompanhe a conversa, assinando o RSS dos comentários. Para divulgar toda a série, use esse link ou o botão ao lado.

* * *

REFERENCES
GILROY, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993.
JAMES, C. L. R. The Black Jacobins. Toussaint L'Ouverture and the San Domingo Revolution. New York: Vintage, 1989.
PATTERSON, Orlando. Slavery and Social Death. A Comparative Study. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982.

* * *

A Revolução Haitiana não ser parte do currículo obrigatório de História é um absurdo. Sem conhecer a Revolução Haitiana, não dá pra entender NADA sobre a História das Américas no século XIX. Aliás, não dá pra entender nem mesmo a Revolução Francesa e as fraturas internas do projeto liberal-iluminista. Tudo o que se tentou e (mais importante) se deixou de tentar politicamente nas Américas foi em função da Revolução Haitiana. Em cada discussão, em cada conversa, em cada debate no Plenário, depois de muito hesitar, alguém sempre mencionava o grande bicho-papão: "Mas... e o Haiti?" Leia meu outro post sobre a Revolução Haitiana.

O melhor livro sobre o tema, disparado, ainda é Os Jacobinos Negros, de C. L. R. James. A edição brasileira, pela Boitempo em 2000, está esgotada. Abaixo, a versão original que pode ser comprada pelo Submarino.