Domesticating the Plantation: The Politics and Tragedy of Slave Kinship in the British Atlantic World

This essay first examines how early modern British observers denigrated white domestic life in the plantation colonies, marveling instead at the integrity of African slave kinships. I compare anti-slavery writers, who stressed the grave threats facing these kinships, with pro-planter advocates, who perceived familial affection as a tool for placating rebellion. I then argue that literary accounts of slaves willing to kill themselves or their loved ones to defend kinship bonds ultimately minimize the revolutionary implications of slave violence. By isolating such bloodshed to the private, and not the public, sphere, these texts imply that slaves were primarily concerned with their domestic lives and not with their political bondage. I conclude by suggesting that these accounts of tragic heroism, circumscribed as they may be, nonetheless pave the way for increasingly political representations of slave violence towards the mid-eighteenth century.