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47 On the Genocidal Aspect of Certain Subaltern Uprisings A Research Note ADAM JONES T his short chapter builds on those preceding by examining the genocidal strategies and motifs deployed in di-verse genres of subaltern mass violence . I examine slave rebellions, indigenous uprisings, peasant revolts (jacqueries), and modern anti-colonial revolts. It should be acknowledged at the outset that individual events are not easily slotted into particular, mutually exclusive categories. For example, the Caste War of Yucatán (1847–49), considered below, can be viewed as a war of national liberation, a peasant uprising, a native (indigenous) uprising, and a social revolution—even as a quasi-slave rebellion, given the hyper-exploitative labor conditions that prevailed on the plantations of the Yucatán peninsula. For a given event, therefore, I adopt the framing that seems most appropriate. Slave Uprisings I was never so glad to hear anything in my life. . . . I could slay the white people like sheep. —King, an American slave, on learning of an impending rebellion, Virginia, 1800, quoted in Egerton, Gabriel’s Rebellion The epic slave uprising in Haiti that began in 1791 and culminated in Haitian independence in 1804 (see Introduction) may be the slave rebellion best suited to a genocide studies perspective. It is to my knowledge the only one to have received a sustained scholarly treatment in this context.1 As with the peasant uprisings discussed below, it is hardly surprising that, despite their oppressive conditions, slaves rarely rose up against their masters. Like serfs and other populations whose labor is highly coerced, they were usually unarmed and tightly constrained in their contacts with potential 48 confederates (and were, moreover, overwhelmingly illiterate). Only in exceptional circumstances did conditions support widespread eruptions, and even these were highly unlikely to succeed against the massed repressive forces of the state or other constituted authority. In the Haitian case, these circumstances included the heavy concentration and demographic preponderance of slaves on the Northern Plain of Saint-Domingue, as well as the high proportion of slaves born in Africa. Tens of thousands of slaves shared memories of African freedom, along with cultural and linguistic bonds that greatly facilitated conspiracy. A dialectic thus emerged in which the genocidal institution of slavery in Saint-Domingue, by importing so many new slaves unaccustomed to bondage to replace those rapidly worked to death, sowed the seeds of its own genocidal destruction. Given the constraints described, most slave rebellions containing a genocidal kernel were brief and localized (or regional) outbreaks. Usually, they were rapidly suppressed, at mortal cost to their planners and participants. An early nineteenth-century example, directly inspired by the Haitian rebellion, was the Aponte Rebellion in Cuba (1812). It killed relatively few whites (fewer than a dozen), but was so palpably a reflection of subaltern frustrations and hatreds and elite fears that, according to Matt Childs, it galvanized Cuban culture at both popular and elite levels for decades—at least through to the final abolition of slavery in 1886. Reflecting the overlap between performative and atrocious aspects of subaltern genocide (see chapter 9), Childs notes the influence of revolutionary “songs and chants” on the Aponte rebels. These “played an important role in organizing the rebellion,” and included such classic subaltern articulations of a “world turned upside down” as the following (sung in Spanish, language of the oppressor): Donde come mi amo, Where my master eats, como yo; I eat; donde duerme mi amo, Where my master sleeps, duermo yo; I sleep; donde jode mi amo, Where my master fucks, jodo yo. I fuck.2 David Brion Davis’s magisterial summary of a lifetime’s research on Atlantic slavery, Inhuman Bondage, cites diverse examples from the United States of a genocidal strand manifested in violent slave insurrections. In the 1822 Denmark Vesey conspiracy in South Carolina, for example, witnesses stated that slave leader Vesey “exhorted his followers ‘not to spare one white skin alive, as this was the plan they pursued in Santo Domingo’”—that is, during the Haitian revolution . Vesey also cited biblical verses such as Deuteronomy 20:10–18, which he presented, in another witness’s recollection, as God’s command “that all should be cut off, both men, women, and children.” (Rolla Bennett, another slave leader, supplied a different interpretation of the passages from Deuteronomy. Women, he argued, should be preserved alive after white males were killed, because “we know what to do with the wenches.” According to Davis, he “even boasted that the governor’s daughter would...

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