re Re: MDDM Gershom's non-Intervention

[Doug Millison]

jbor :
>What I found absurd was ...

...not nearly as absurd as your insistence that Pynchon's  Washington could
own Gershom, holding him in the legal bondage of slavery, and at the same
time be said to "grant him absolute liberty."
We're all still chuckling about that one. Thanks for the laughs.


With his creation of the Jewish African American, Gershom, Pynchon could be
said to offer a character not altogether unlike  the African Americans
Walker describes as: "complex amalgams of African and European cultures" in
the introduction to her book, _African Roots/American Cultures_.


Here's a little something Walker quotes in her introduction, about the way
that folks like Washington and the rest of his class accounted for their
human property, which was made part of the US Constitution, and I suspect
it's the sort of historical background that Pynchon expects his readers to
know or have access to:


[...] Africans enslaved in the Americas found themselves in a situation in
which they could not possibly tell the truth to their European and
Euro-American enslavers who did not even acknowledge them as human beings.
According to the introduction to The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade, "for those
Europeans who thought about the issue, the shipping of enslaved Africans
across the Atlantic was morally indistinguishable from shipping textiles,
wheat, or even sugar."


These Africans would hardly reveal their truths to those who bought and
transported them "tightly packed" or "loosely packed" based on calculations
of what percentage of African lives they could lose and still make a
profit, in the holds of ships they specifically conceived and constructed
to transport human beings as if they were inanimate merchandise referred to
in French, for example, as bois d'ébène (ebony wood); who literally worked
them to death in order to enrich themselves, as demonstrated by the
skeletal remains that Michael Blakey (chapter 12) discusses from New York's
African Burial Ground; and whose concept of truth, whatever it may have
been, was obviously the antithesis of that of the people they sought,
unsuccessfully, to dehumanize.


A telling example of ways in which European enslavers thought of African
human beings in nonhuman, commoditized terms is found in the concept of a
pieza de India(s) (a "piece of the Indies"), the "Indies" Columbus was
seeking referring to the Americas he "discovered." Often shortened to
pieza, the term piece, according to historian Leslie Rout, referred to "the
theoretical mean used to define the ideal slave; an African male between
the ages of eighteen and thirty, with no physical defects, and at least
five feet tall."


According to Philip Curtin:

"Most asiento contracts gave the quantities to be delivered in piezas de
India, not individual slaves. A pieza de India was a potential measure of
labor, not of individuals. For a slave to qualify as a pieza, he had to be
a young adult male meeting certain specifications as to size, physical
condition, and health. The very young, the old, and females were defined
for commercial purposes as fractional parts of a pieza de India. This
measure was convenient for Spanish imperial economic planning, where the
need was a given amount of labor power, not a given number of individuals.
For the historian, however, it means that the number of individuals
delivered will always be greater than the number of piezas recorded. Market
conditions in Africa made it impossible to buy only prime slaves and leave
all the rest, but the extent of the difference varied greatly with time and
place. The asiento of the Portuguese Cacheu Company in 1693, for example,
provided for an annual delivery in Spanish America of 4,000 slaves, so
distributed in sex, age, and condition as to make up 2,500 piezas de India."


The concept of Africans and African Diasporans as fractional was not
limited to Spanish America. The U.S. Constitution, in fact, designated
enslaved African Americans as three-fifths of a person for purposes of
federal apportionment of taxation and congressional representation:


"Representative and direct Taxes shall be apportioned among the several
States which may be included within this Union, according to their
respective Numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole Number
of free Persons, including those bound to Service for a Term of Years, and
excluding Indians not taxed, three fifths of all other Persons."


Whereas Euro-Americans endeavored to define the total reality of the
Africans they purchased to do with as they pleased, enslaved Africans and
their descendants, who considered themselves full, not partial, human
beings, insisted upon defining themselves by and for themselves in their
own terms, some of which still maintain explanatory power. That enslaved
Africans also succeeded in defining themselves on their own terms, in spite
of all the powerful, colonial and national government-enforced efforts to
make it impossible for them to do so, is evident in their creation of the
many original cultures and cultural forms of the African Diaspora, as well
as in their important recognized and unrecognized contributions to the
cultures of all of the Americas and to global society. [...]



By the way, the people Walker refers to above, those "who literally worked
them  [enslaved Africans and African Americans] to death in order to enrich
themselves,"  don't sound so very different from the wonderful folks who
worked Holocaust slaves to death in WWII manufacturing V-2 rockets, as
Pynchon depicts in GR.


If you and Malign feel the need to continue with the ad hominem attacks on
Walker, I hope you realize that it shows just how lame your argument is.


Judging from Malign's last post, in addition to needing to demean African
American studies scholars, I guess you have something against the UN and
the University of Texas, too.
I can't say I'm really surprised.



[ http://rpuchalsky.home.att.net/libfaq.html
Do the Libertarians really believe that slavery should be legal?
Some do, you bet! Many Libertarians of the anarcho-capitalist variety
believe that you can't really own something unless you can sell it.
Therefore, since you own yourself you can sell yourself. They have no
problems with selling yourself into slavery as long as it is "voluntary"
(i.e. as long as you are starving and see no other way to get food, for
instance.) Some Libs will indignantly claim that they don't believe in
slavery. Usenet threads on the subject generally reveal that at least 1/3
of Libertarians support slavery and think that it should be legal for one
human being to
own another.]