The Punished Self: Surviving Slavery in the Colonial South - Book Review

Journal of Social History, Winter, 2003 by Bernadette Pruitt

The Punished Self is a groundbreaking work. The monograph does a fine job capturing the true essence of African slavery as a social death. Chattel slavery not only fostered physical abuse, degradation, drudgery, sexual exploitation, permanent servitude, and racism: the institution also involved mental agony and cultural oppression for those enslaved. Colonial slavery invoked a racial caste system that left people of African descent living in the Western Hemisphere with two options: resist oppression and die, or submit to capture and live. Regrettably, survival also involved drama social and cultural death. Utilizing the words, opinions, and artistry of whites concerning blacks, Bontemps has done a particularly effective job delving into the psychosomatic effects of the African slave trade and enslavement in the southern colonies of British North America. At the same time, the reviewer appreciates the author's ability to interpret the black consciousness through colonial newspaper advertisements and other sources. Undoubtedly, the author's unique use of newspapers, portraitures, plantation records and diaries, and traveler's accounts, allows readers to get a glimpse of slaves' own insights regarding their nightmarish circumstance. For this reason, a bibliography following the text would have been quite useful.

Finally, The Punished Self gives merit to recent interdisciplinary scholarship that describes both the trans-Atlantic slave trade and system of slavery as vestiges of cultural and societal genocide. In fact, some social and behavioral scientists make parallels between African slavery as a holocaust and current challenges faced by African Americans--drug addiction and trafficking, the high incarceration level of African-American males, black-on-black crime, street violence, poverty, rising disparities in education, high underemployment and unemployment figures, teenage pregnancies and single-parent households, gender disharmony, African-American and African-born American cultural conflict, intra-racial divisions, institutionalized racism, and often, deteriorating interracial discourse. Psychologist Na'im Akbar, in Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery, writes, "The 300-year captivity of Africans in America is an indisputable fact which too many have sought to deny as relevant to anything more than an event in the past. Our formulation suggested that the blemish of these inhumane conditions persists as a kind of post-traumatic stress syndrome on the collective mind of Africans in America and though its original cause cannot be altered, the genesis can be understood." (2)

ENDNOTES

(1.) Maulana Karenga, Introduction to Black Studies, 3rd ed. (Los Angeles,2002), 134-35.

(2.) Na'im Akbar, Breaking the Chains of Psychological Slavery (Tallahassee, 1997), i.

Bernadette Pruitt

Sam Houston State University