The Punished Self: Surviving Slavery in the Colonial South (review)

Bontemps' The Punished Self is an odd little book. Its thesis is promising: Slavery in the eighteenth-century U.S. South entailed a "systematic assault on [the slave's] sense of self" (ix). In order to survive slavery, slaves had both to accept and reject the terms of their enslavement. The result was a divided self, one that was both "Negro," that is appropriately slavish, and not-Negro. "Slavery's true brutality was the psychic condition it imposed on survivors" (ix).

Some of Bontemps' observations are fascinating. From the numerous descriptions of missing toes and other disfigurements in the advertisements for runaway slaves, he surmises that this sort of maiming was an intrinsic part of the process of enslavement. Bontemps persuasively reads the silences in planters' diaries and correspondence about their slaves as a "systematic denial of [the slaves's] subjectivity" (13). Bontemps is able to dig new nuggets out of well-mined sources.

Unfortunately, his shrewd insights never add up to a sustained analysis. The book almost leaves the impression that it is still in rough-draft form or was pieced together from parts of other works. In his "Note on Sources," Bontemps begins, "As indicated in the preface, this book, although intended to stand alone, is in a number of important yet silent ways connected to a prior and continuing project" (181). Yet, the preface makes no mention of this other project. The note on sources describes the research method—a semisystematic survey of the runaway ads—for what Bontemps calls "the originating study" but not the method for the work that he has actually written (182). Bontemps opens lines of discussion and drops them abruptly before he has developed them or provided any evidence. He begins one chapter with a tantalizing observation about "the sexual violence committed against black women" but quickly abandons it, never returning (103).

A book with a title such as "the punished self" is presumably informed by some psychological or psychoanalytic theory, but the only discussion of theories of the self comes in an early note in which Bontemps says that he defines the self phenomenologically, citing the work of Csordas. ¹ Does Bontemps believe that we are all engaged in the same conversation and will hence recognize his oblique references, or did he forget to discuss his theoretical premises, or perhaps accidentally delete them when he was revising the manuscript? For example, the chapter "Being Hailed" clearly refers to Althusser's notion of interpellation, in which persons are "hailed" into specific subject positions, even if no mention is made of Althusser in the text, because one of Bontemps' notes cites Judith Butler's discussion of the French theorist. ² But is the chapter "The Divided Self" an allusion to R.D. (Ronald David) Laing's book of the same name (New York, 1969)? Maybe—but maybe not. Furthermore, by describing slaves as "survivors," does Bontemps mean to invoke the Holocaust or incest or child abuse?

Most disappointing of all is Bontemps' failure to demonstrate that colonial slaves indeed experienced a divided self. The evidence that he adduces in his final chapter—the biographies of three unusual, highly cultured free black men and snippets of information from several runaway ads—does not even close the case for these individuals, let alone slaves more generally. Unfortunately, Bontemps has not been able to draw individual slaves with complex personalities and unique histories out of the shadows into which their owners pushed them.

Although Bontemps' writing is in places poetic, at other times it collapses into incoherence. Of one slave he writes, "although he was literate, little of what he wrote has survived. That may be because he wrote very little" (164). On several occasions, Bontemps analyzes paintings of Africans and African-Americans, but the book provides no illustrations of these paintings. How odd that a book that tries to show...