This claim is based on a rather inadequate conception of ideology rooted in a vulgar Marxist base - superstructure paradigm: first you have social, material relations, then you have systems of ideas which are constructed to justify/legitmate those social relations. This is simply an untenable notion of ideology in the wake of discourse theory, which has pretty definitively established that one can not separate the social relation from the discursive expression of it. Further, new world slavery was not a simple throwback to pre-capitalist social relations -- the very existence of a massive 'market' in enslaved people indicates this, but the fact of its integration into a capitalist world market does not make it capitalist either. On this point, Laclau's now classic critique of Ander Gundre Frank (reprinted in _Politics and Ideology in Marxist Theory_), with its notion of the articulation of different modes of production, is right to the point.
Now Genovese had a glimpse of that more advanced notion of ideology because Gramsci was an important influence on him. His was a particular reading of Gramsci's concept of "hegemony," one which did stress accommodation over struggle, but it was an important advance in the history of American slavery.
Yoshie again: << One can't say that slaves' resistances were minimal because outright revolts like Nat Turner's & Denmark Vesey's were few. Slaves resisted in a variety of ways: pretending to be stupid, making deliberate mistakes, sabotaging equipment, slowing down, running away, etc. One readily understands this wide range of resistance by reading slave narratives & oral histories of ex-slaves. >>
Two points:
1. This is unfair to Genovese, who makes this very point at some length in his _From Rebellion to Revolution: Afro-American Slave Revolts in the Making of the Modern World_. This text was originally written as part of _Roll, Jordan, Roll_, but given its length and the voluminous character of _Roll, Jordan, Roll_, Genovese published it as a separate text.
2. There is still a need to look at resistance in a comparative perspective, because open rebellions and maroon societies were a prominent feature of slavery in the Caribbean and Latin America. It is a mistake to talk of slave resistance in the abstract, as if it followed the American pattern of few open rebellions. To the contrary, America was the anomaly, not only in the sparsity of open rebellion, but also in the social structure of enslavement -- for example, in the US, most slaves lived on small farms with the slaveowning family and a handful of other slaves; by contrast, in the Caribbean and Latin America, most slaves lived on large plantations with scores, if not hundreds, of other slaves. The reasons for the differences in the form of resistance are many and interesting, but somewhat a digression from the main topic here.
Leo Casey United Federation of Teachers 260 Park Avenue South New York, New York 10010-7272 (212-598-6869)
Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never has, and it never will. If there is no struggle, there is no progress. Those who profess to favor freedom, and yet deprecate agitation are men who want crops without plowing the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightening. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its waters. -- Frederick Douglass --