Exh Jasoo

 from Jacobin  https://jacobin.com/2022/06/afro-pessimism-frank-wilderson-socialism-flattening-racism

"Yet when it comes to “natal alienation,” the historical record is replete with examples of enslaved people throughout the Americas demonstrating agency in forming and protecting their own kin and progeny, as well as creating and maintaining creolized cultures throughout the hemisphere and maintaining differences of rank among the enslaved themselves.

For example, in Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600-1700, Michelle A. McKinley uses a wealth of archival material to tell the stories of how enslaved Limeño litigants used the courts to keep their families together. She found two hundred fifty spousal unity cases between 1593 and 1699 from the ecclesiastical court records, detailing the struggles of slaves like María de Terranova, who protested the prolonged absence of her husband Francisco in Lima’s ecclesiastical court in January 1693.

If enslavement rendered its victims into a class of the living dead, as non-persons, as Patterson’s absolutist thesis holds, then how do we explain the widespread survival of creolized Afro-diasporic cultures throughout the hemisphere? How do we explain the differences of rank among the enslaved themselves?

Historians have provided answers to both questions. Take, for example, Juan Nepomuceno Prieto. According to historian Henry B. Lovejoy’s Prieto: Yorùbá Kingship in Colonial Cuba during the Age of Revolutions, Prieto was of Yorùbá descent, enslaved in Cuba, and, after winning manumission while serving in the militia, became leader of a Havana cabildo, or religious brotherhood, that preserved African culture in the form of Santeria.

Afro-pessimists take the slaveholders at their word and mourn that the nonhumanness of the slave is marked onto their very being — ignoring the tenacious humanity exercised by the enslaved at every turn.

Through the centuries, in country after country, the enslaved resisted the threat of social death, natal alienation, and psychic annihilation in a variety of ways, some quiet and subtle, others bloody and tumultuous. The enslaved constantly reinvented themselves in newer contexts, always reaching out to others and thus creating new bonds in the process. They enforced a continuum between accommodation and resistance, the pendulum swinging either way for any number of historically contingent reasons.

As Vincent Brown has asserted, “To see social death as a productive peril entails a subtle but significant shift in perspective, from seeing slavery as a condition to viewing enslavement as a predicament, in which enslaved Africans and their descendants never ceased to pursue a politics of belonging, mourning, accounting, and regeneration.” Social death and natal alienation were perhaps the goals of a slaveholding class that never could accomplish them in the face of the slaves’ dogged reassertions of their humanity."