Rites and Power: Reflections on Slavery, Freedom and Political Ritual

Only as abstract symbols, wrenched from social contexts, can slavery and freedom be construed to denote unrelated or opposite conditions. Whether analysed as a global phenomenon, as a social process, or as a model of power relations, the history of slavery and freedom is a matter of interrelationships rather than fixed antagonisms. Since the turn of the century a substantial body of scholarship has viewed ‘Atlantic studies’ as a particularly well-suited vantage from which to explore the changing interrelationships between slavery and freedom. The work of many historians, anthropologists, and more recently, specialists in cultural studies – notwithstanding interpretative differences whose consideration lies outside the scope of this discussion – has approached ‘Atlantic studies’ as something other than an organizational rubric for studying the land masses and archipelagoes that rim an ocean. ¹ In political philosophy no less than in labour systems, an Atlantic world’ – a shifting realm of production, exchange, and consumption whose networks began in the seventeenth century to link the experiences and imaginations of peoples in various parts of Europe, Africa, the Americas, and eventually parts of Asia as well – has been an arena of necessary connections between slavery and freedom, colony and metrópole, the so-called ‘primitive’ and the so-called ‘modern’. ²