>In a message dated 10/13/00 11:08:47 PM Eastern Daylight Time,
>furuhashi.1 at osu.edu writes:
>
><< Chattel slavery did not require the consent of the enslaved, and one
> may say that this absence of consent on the part of slaves
> distinguishes it from pre-capitalist slave societies. . . . . Had American
>slaves
> been ruled by consent as ancient Roman slaves had been, slaves'
> interests -- the foremost of which would be to become manumitted --
> would have been partially taken into account, and there would have
> been no legal restriction on the freeing of slaves.
>
>Not so: the survival of chattel slavery in societies where slaves were in
>many parts of the country the majority surely did require the consent of the
>slaves.
Slave owners could _do without_ the consent of slaves, because the federal & other governments were on their side. Local majorities of slaves meant nothing, when the governments supported by the hegemonic bloc of slave owners, capitalists, non-slave-owning whites, etc. could be counted upon to enforce the laws that kept blacks enslaved (& returned them to owners if they ran away).
>Consent requires taking intio account the interests of the
>subordinate group, but whether a particular interest is taken into account is
>contingent on the relative strength of the various groups and the parallogram
>of forces. You cannot say: no manumission, no consent. Anyway, manumission
>was only forbidden in the last 60 or so years of American slavery.
Gramsci's concept of hegemony demands that the subordinate classes be morally & intellectually led by the ruling class & become incorporated as subordinate members into the hegemonic bloc. If slave owners had needed to exercise hegemony by winning the consent of slaves, they would not have forbidden the teaching of writing to slaves. It would have made Gramscian sense to foster the shared culture between masters and slaves, especially by cultivating organic intellectuals amongst slaves who would advocate the legitimacy of the "peculiar institution" among slaves and to the outside. The "one drop rule" would have made no Gramscian sense; racism would have been tempered by intermarriage in the Latin American style. Only under such a context -- real possibilities of manumission, frequent inter-racial marriages, cross-racially shared culture with black organic intellectuals incorporated in the hegemonic bloc for the "peculiar institution," etc. -- would it have made Gramscian sense to speak of slaves' "consent" to the slave owners' hegemony.
What interests of slaves were met by slavery, which could not have been better met by their running away, becoming maroons, wage laborers, indentured servants, peasants, members of Native American tribes, etc.? What did they gain that they could not have gained without becoming slaves except their lives? That they were fed, clothed, & kept alive? Sure, but even animals were better taken care of than most slaves (remember that 4 out of 10 died in the Middle Passage -- traders would not have allowed such a giant waste of horses, cows, etc.). And slaves' interests in food, clothes, shelter, etc. would have been better satisfied if they had not become & remained slaves. What kept them slaves, _despite_ the fact that there was _nothing_ in slavery for them -- was the monopoly of force by slave owners who had the support of non-slave-owning whites.
Why did rich colonists introduce slavery as a widespread institution fundamental for the Southern economy? _Because_ parts of America could not be colonized satisfactorily by labor of white indentured servants & wage laborers (or Native Americans for that matter), whose _consent_ masters did have to win, colonists eventually resorted to chattel slavery, which could be practiced _without_ the consent of slaves. The _absence of consent lowered the costs_ of colonizing the "New World."
> > Gramsci developed his idea of consent _only within his theory of the
> hegemonic bloc_, and black slaves were _in no way_ part of the
> hegemonic bloc of the South or the entire America; it was
> _non-slave-owning whites_ who consented to the rule of slave owners
> and formed the hegemonic bloc with them. According to Gramsci, those
> who fall outside of the hegemonic bloc can be simply _subjugated
> without consent_:
>
>You are correct in your reading of Gramsci. Well, I don't say that Gevonese
>(or I) are orthodox Gramscians. We adapt the apparatus, which is in any case
>somewhat vexed--see Perry Anderson's fine essay onm Gramsci in NLR 100 (old
>series). In fact, I adapt it through Milton Fisk's transmogrification of the
>idea. I think that simple subjugation is only possible when the group is so
>weak that its interest need not be taken into account in ensuring the
>stability of society. That was true of the European Jews and the Korean
>confort women. It was decided not true of the majority of the population of
>the American South.
>
> > You may speak of American slaves' "consent" to slavery in the sense
> of preferring life to death, but certainly slaves' preference of life
> to death did _not_ constitute "consent" in the Gramscian sense of
> consenting to become a subordinate member of the hegemonic bloc.
>
>No, there was a lot more to it than that. What more there was is painstaking
>detailed in Roll Jordan Roll, which is part of its greatness.
One learns much more by reading Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, Olaudah Equiano, David Walker, etc., whose testimonies & observations are much more believable than Genovese's theory of paternalism. White masters and even non-slave-owning whites may have given their consent to the idea of paternalism, but most slaves didn't think that masters were paternalistic (with the exception of a few kind-hearted masters), even when they had to behave -- but never "spontaneously" in the sense that Gramsci uses this term -- as if they had thought so.
In short, Genovese's application of Gramsci paints a misleading picture of slaves, though I believe he's quite right about how slave owners thought of themselves.
If you have to find an "unorthodox" Gramscian on the question of how slavery has been represented, you'd do better by turning to Stuart Hall:
***** Can Gramsci's theory of hegemony help us to understand the representation of ethnic minorities in western television and cinema?
By Reena Mistry
...In order to see how hegemonic ideals of white supremacy hide themselves in current media, it is first necessary to illustrate the racist stereotypes which evolved in the media of a less liberal society. Hall outlines three base images of the 'grammar of race' employed in 'old movies'. The first is the slave figure which could take the form of either the 'dependable, lovingŠ devoted "Mammy" with the rolling eyes, or the faithful fieldhandŠ attached and devoted to "his" master' (Hall, 1995:21). The underlying message of such images is clear: the slave is someone who is willing to serve their master; their devotion allows a white audience to displace any guilt about their history of colonialism and slavery. The consequence of such messages relates to Gramsci's idea of 'spontaneous consent' (Strinati, 1995:165) or 'consensual control', whereby individuals '"voluntarily" assimilate the world-view or hegemony of the dominant group' (Ransome, 1992:150). Thus the practice of slavery has been made acceptable and therefore goes unquestioned; the destructive potential of such images is evident - especially when you consider that the slave figure is prominent in the classic film Gone With the Wind (Hall, 1995:21)....
Hall, Stuart (1995), 'The Whites of Their Eyes - Racist Ideologies and the Media' in Dines, Gail and Humez, Jean M., Gender, Race and Class in Media - A Text Reader, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, London and New Dehli.
<http://www.theory.org.uk/ctr-rol6.htm> *****
Yoshie