Effects of European Expansion in Arkansas’s Delta, Research Paper Example

A History of Psychosomatic Revolt in the Antebellum South of the U.S.

Nineteenth-century medical record offers important historical evidence of the employment of epileptic fits as a tool of slave resistance in the American South – and in particular the instrumental impact of psycho-somatic disorders on slave sale negotiations. According to Dea H. Boster (2009), in her case study of a fifteen-year-old bondswoman in Virginia, diagnosed with epilepsy in 1843, “Epeleptick” Bondswoman: Fits, Slavery, and Power in the Antebellum South, the presence of epilepsy in slaves should be looked at as central, rather than microcosmic, within the history of the political economy of slavery in the United States, in that the diagnosis had direct influence on purchase of slaves by way of ‘no guarantee’ sale agreement clauses within legal writings at the time, and the entrance of this issue in that discussions on the ‘value’ of those human lives as plantation inputs traded on the open market. As an institution of economy, slavery was predicated on the work relationships that such servitude of able bodied labor afforded to plantation enterprises. Epilepsy became fuel for abolitionist and ex-slave activism in the North which centralized epilepsy as a formative representation of cruelty.

The import of disease and disorders within the U.S. historical record reveals nearly two centuries of population decimation as instrumental to economic relationships in the country. As Boster discusses, cases of epileptic fits in slaves came to underscore struggles among white masters, physicians, and slaves themselves over the control of African American bodies. Indeed, early colonial efforts by Europeans in the Northern States were greatly advanced by the ravages of diseases brought by those immigrants to the New World, as Native American were killed in great numbers in the 1600s and 1700s (Maddison, 2007). Those left, were largely forced to out migration toward the plains, and into continuous struggle in what became known as the ‘Trail of Tears.’ Still, the story of slavery reveals a distinction in terms of the level of oppression exercised over indigenous and African slave populations in the North, and only five percent of the population was constituted of slave inhabitants with the majority of the population reported to be white farmers.

European gains in plantation economies in the South, however, institutionalized slavery of Africans trafficked to the United States as chattel, and the resultant long-term economic and social relationships were affected intensely by the export of addictive and (i.e. cacao, tobacco, and sugar) exotic (i.e. cotton) products to Europe; produced by way of free contribution to labor intensive plantation production systems (Mintz, 1986). Europe had discovered addictive products, and European consumer demand for such plantation produced delicacies only increased with the transformation of industrial complex. Sugar production alone increased ten-fold between 1600 and 1780. Given the dependency of plantation owners on free labor, the disenfranchisement of those slaves was so complete that only disease and disorders, recognizably ‘human’ provided the single most effective enactment of price reduction in a market only debilitated in response to contraction of new diseases by African slaves. Not surprisingly, the close to eleven million slaves shipped to the New World from Africa reveals that human bodies were loss leaders in the plantation system of trade, with more than half dying on sea (Maddison, 2007). Despite the economic impact of such loss, the dehumanization of one group of people toward the goal of free labor, meant that ship captains stood to gain, yet so too did the plantation system, as the massive number of free human labor was put on the auction block, and a perfect economic circle of trade found completion in psycho-somatic, addictive disorders valued at any price. Epileptic fits stood in the way of purchase of sale, where ‘no guarantee’ devalued the owner’s worth.

The Globalization of Post-Antebellum Models of Resistance    

Counter-articulation of Capitalism’s disenfranchisement of certain classes of people learnt much from its precedent economic form, The Plantation. In Aiwa Ong’s examination of late-capitalist free-trade zone workers in Malaysia, she looks at the supply sided pattern of flexible accumulation since the 1970s – where capital shifts at almost lightening speed around the globe to meet competitive demand-is mirrored by the development of flexible labor regimes in areas of inexpensive, semi-skilled labor markets. Much like the gender division present in the original incentive behind capture of able bodied men by Africans, on the West Coast of Africa for the slave trade, many third-world governments have been complicit in the organization of free-trade zones to absorb excess male migrant labor. However, also parallel to the History of the Antebellum South, the actual formation of certain kinds of intensive, semi-skilled labor in producing goods, coupled with the particularities present within market demand that foreign capital might be ‘attracted to,’ are in fact qualities that are thought to be essentially feminine qualities such as nimble fingers and good eye sight, and the unspoken term ‘sex.’ According to Ong, the incorporation of young Malay factory women in coterminous structures of corporate and native discipline and patriarchy has created a battleground over women’s reproductive processes; reconstituting them as a radical new ‘class’ of highly violated workers. Pointing to the pervasive increase in hantu or spirit possessions of factory workers, Ong argues that these new sexual subjects are mobilizing this residual cultural form as a means of combating physical and mental discipline.

Where Ong has been perhaps most effective, is in response to feminist insights into feigned and uncontrolled psycho-somatic disorders in the context of indentured relationships. Pointing to the problem with Marxist theories directed at capitalist production, she argues that feminism shores up History where Marxism cannot, in that Left thinkers “frequently assume that capitalist relations of production have an over-determined logic, based on the extreme separation of mental and physical labor.” Instead, argues Ong, more sufficient theories are being generated in recent feminist discourses which speak to the “link individual consciousness to the workings of international capital” (Mohanty 1991, p.296). It is through the lens of Ong’s factory workers that we can read continuity within the South’s slave epilepsy record. Where enslavement or other relations of servitude have been present, medical records must be seen not only as instruments of power, but as an official, albeit unwittingly, repository of resistance by the very instantiation of pain. ‘Fits’ then, must be looked at not by way of mere Leftist or material activism against hegemonic dominion, but rather insistence to torture without directed culpability. The sheer randomness of the epileptic fit as a condition and tertiary response to work, rather than a target offense as it is understood in felony law, speaks to a history of abuse and total contradiction to the dehumanized classification of slaves as non-human bodies, and to the inhumane treatment that was left in this somewhat subtle, yet indelible record of harm. The discussion of the Master-Slave relationship once resituated in an entire human history of violence reaps rewards through this discursive furtherance, yet denunciation of Marxism as a ‘total’ theory against oppression. As Klaus Theweleit writes on the dismantling of fascism in Europe:

“The language of the Left excludes the mysteries of the body; those who feel that they are suffering are treated as ignorant; it is assumed they merely lack information. Over and over again, the Left blunders into engagements with the language of dominant groups without realizing it has mistaken its terrain. Such language cannot be ‘refuted’ on the level of ‘political meaning’: its primary territory is effectively elsewhere” (p. 109).

Indeed, in the Antebellum South of the United States, as elsewhere, authoritarian psychology, and its attendant technologies, gender and race, must be seen in absolute political relationship to processes of production, and especially where there is an ‘extreme separation of mental and physical labor.’

Conclusion

Boster’s “Epeleptick” Bondswoman emerged from a realm of substitution and revolt by slaves in repudiation of dislocation and servitude that prefaces late-capitalist spirit possession amongst free-trade zone workers in Malaysia almost seamlessly where consumption of labor is virtually ‘free,’ and ‘full cost pricing’ is mitigated through those worker’s status as labor with unsecured legal rights (Ong 2010, p.291).The repetitive incidence of ‘fits’ by indentured or slave labor is both evidence of the reduction or total retraction of legal rights, and historical record of a developing collective consciousness amongst dislocated individuals with amnesty in mind (Ong 2010, p.213). The History of Hysteria indicates that ‘fits’ might be restated as residual forms of culture – deployed as symbolic response to extreme economies of ‘difference’ produced through inequities in material distribution and individual rights.

In the last instance, the ‘fit’ is recuperated into Marxism’s trajectory of historical materialism: as the oppressed are forced to reconstitute identity(s) in official record, in the face of coercive domination. Lacking civil and political protections, African slaves sought empowerment through medical record. From the perspective of Historiography, something seemingly benign as record of epilepsy, then, can serve as rather sccinct record of resistance to an environment of extreme violence. Since the Plantation era, the world has advanced, rather than moved away from, a political economy where mechanistic bodies matter most. What medical records do in terms of reconstitution of a dialogue about the past, is reveal  a parallel system, where hierarchies of difference are distinguished, and dehumanization of labor, and especially slaves, is built into social understanding over time. The literalism present in the ‘disassembly’ and ‘reassembly’ of the worker by way of the ‘fit’ in medical record is nothing short of a compendium of human revolt; a somatic semiotics and desperate stand toward self-determination and redefinition of political ‘subject-hood’ in a futures market where there are no guarantees.

References

Boster, D.H. (2009). An ‘Epeleptick’ Bondswoman: Fits, Slavery, and Power in the Antebellum South. Bulletin of the History of Medicine, 83(2), Summer 2009. Retrieved from: DOI: 10.1353/bhm.0.0206

Maddison, A. (2007). Contours of the World Economy 1-2030 AD: Essays in Macro-Economic History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Marler, S.P. (2008).  ‘An Abiding Faith in Cotton’: The Merchant Capitalist Community of New Orleans, 1860–1862. Civil War History, 54 (3), September 2008, pp. 247-276. Retrieved from: DOI: 10.1353/cwh.0.0017

Mintz, S.W. (1986). Sweetness and Power: The Place of Sugar in Modern History. New York: Penguin.

Mohanty, Chandra et.al., eds. (1991). Third World Women and The Politics of Feminism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Ong, A. (2010). Spirits of Resistance & Capitalist Discipline: Factory Women in Malaysia, Second Edition. Albany: SUNY Press.

Otto, J.S. (1999). The Final Frontiers, 1800 –1930: Settling the Southern Bottomlands. Westport: Greenwood Press.

Klaus Theweleit (1989). Male Fantasies Vol 2: Male Bodies: Psychoanalyzing the White Terror. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Webster, G.R. & Bowman, J. (2008). Quantitatively Delineating the Black Belt Geographic Region. Southeastern Geographer, 48(1), pp. 3-18. Retrieved from: DOI: 10.1353/sgo.0.0007