painter2002

@InCollection{ painter2002,
    author = {Nell Painter},
    booktitle = {Southern History Across the Color Line},
    title = {Soul Murder and Slavery: Toward a Fully Loaded Cost Accounting},
    address = {Chapel Hill},
    publisher = {University of North Carolina Press},
    pages = {15--39},
    year = 2002,
}

Argues that despite historians reluctance to endorse Elkins’s “Sambo Thesis,” they must be careful not to swing to other extreme of denying personhood and psychology to enslaved subjects. A “fully loaded cost accounting” is one sensitive to how repeated instances of child abuse, sexual abuse, and violence (though sometimes concealed between the lines of written sources) impacted enslaved and enslavers alike. Builds on insights from second wave feminism and psychoanalysis to make these arguments.

• “means by which societies forge gender out of the physical apparatus of sex”
• redescribing “discipline” and “seduction” as “child abuse” and “rape” –> what psychologists call “soul murder” (depression, lowered self-esteem, and anger)
• p. 18: discussion about applying psychological categories to history
• reluctance to deal with slaves’ psychology because of Elkins, but imperative to grant personhood and psyches to black enslaved people.
• the problem of the concealment of family violence and sexual abuse, which compounds difficulty of getting a sense of scale and requires historians to “transcend complete reliance on the written record” (39)