From Cultural Violence to Cultural Resistance in Antebellum America

This study is about how the ideology of African inferiority was embedded into the culture of colonial America. The focus is on early Virginia law because it was initially used as the primary mechanism to begrudge the image of Africans in the American colonies. Virginia law synthesized and transported the ideology of African or black inferiority generated decades earlier in Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, France, and England before race theory. Depraving the African image through law in colonial Virginia represents the continuousness of an ideology which began in the fifteenth century. While an abundance of research exists about the imposition of slave law as a primary apparatus of control over the African population, there are a dearth of studies about the relationship between ideology and law in the context of African subjugation. The central thesis of this study is that Virginia law promoted the ideology of African (black) inferiority and European (white) superiority into the cultural fabric of the colonies. According to Johan Galtung, when the dominant ideology is incorporated into the cultural sphere of a society it becomes a system of "cultural violence." Winthrop Jordan's seminal study, White Over Black: American Attitudes Toward the Negro, 1550-1812, has been invaluable for documenting attitudes and ideas in Europe and colonial America about their professed superiority over Africans. Yet, detailing European attitudes is a step toward establishing ideology as a stable structure of oppression. Connecting the ideology of African inferiority which undergirded Virginia law with the pre-colonial ideology propagated by Europeans is imperative to establish the continuity of these ideas as the basis of a system of "cultural violence." Conceptualizing the propagation of European ideology as a system of "cultural violence" helps to modify classic approaches of studies about African resistance. Historians often study African resistance to enslavement. Many of these studies have the following themes of resistance: emigration, abolitionism, revolts, ship mutinies, day-to-day resistance (destroying crops, breaking tools), alliance between Africans and Mexicans, guerrilla warfare (establishing maroon or independent communities), and an alliance between Africans and Native Americans. Providing an analysis of how Virginia law debased the image of Africans helps to contextualize African resistance to ideology rather than resistance to their enslavement. A critique of the writings of Africans in antebellum America reveals that they produced literary works as a key strategy to oppose the ideas propagated by white cultural leaders about their innate inferiority through the system of "cultural violence." Rather than study the numerous memoirs, which detail the accounts of enslaved Africans in America, I studied the protest literature of Africans in America. Memoirs include important information about the daily and life-long experiences of enslaved Africans, but I studied protest literature because it contains the views of Africans about their undesirable portrayal. My analysis of the protest literature of Africans in America demonstrates how they responded to "cultural violence" before the Civil War.