![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Book Review: What Slaveholders Think
Nov. 29th, 2016 08:47 amAustin Choi-Fitzpatrick's book What Slaveholders Think is in some ways quite misnamed: he's very careful not to speculate about what slaveholders think, but instead reports what they have told him with a large grain of salt. Although not quite large enough; as the slaveholders nattered on about respect and reciprocal duties between landlords and bonded labors, I kept thinking about antebellum southern slaveholders, who could turn on a dime between enthusing about the paternalistic nature of slavery to shrieking about the looming possibility of slave insurrection and the necessity to treat disobedient slaves with utmost harshness.
Choi-Fitzpatrick is writing about contemporary bonded labor in rural India, so of course the landlords might have a slightly less bifurcated consciousness than antebellum southern slaveowners. But I nonetheless came away with the feeling that he hadn't really gained his interviewees' trust and they didn't tell him what they really think - the kind of thing they would say at a dinner with like-minded men, once the ladies have left the table and the men are relaxing over bourbon and cigars.
This is slipping into the American South again. Possibly the problem is simply that my frame of reference is so different than Choi-Fitzpatrick's.
Although Choi-Fitzpatrick does have some countervailing interviews from former bonded laborers, which show that their former landlords would in fact use threats of violence (and occasionally actual violence) to keep them in line. I guess I feel that without getting even an acknowledgement of that violence from the perpetrators - not even their justification, just an acknowledgement - the interview data from the perpetrators is more or less a puff piece.
The book also suffers from the fact that Choi-Fitzpatrick is trying insistently (one might also say repetitively) to correct a movement that has gotten bizarrely out of touch with reality in some ways. Why else would it come as a surprise to anyone that "resources and opportunities shape the decisions made by targeted incumbents" (that is, slaveholders)? Yet Choi-Fitzpatrick repeats this many times, as if he expects his readers to be amazed that slaveholders don't exist in a vacuum of pure evil.
The book picked up a bit in the final chapter, when Choi-Fitzpatrick begins to talk about the way that unjust systems become normalized: "oppression is not pathological: it is instead embedded in broader cultural systems and legitimizing myths that render the horrible somehow normal and everyday and banal." Humans tend to accept that whatever is, is right; and that's part of why injustice endures so tenaciously.
But I've read this before, and said better, in Hannah Arendt and Solzhenitsyn (whom Choi-Fitzpatrick actually quotes) and Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams. Unless you're very specifically interested in bonded labor in India, there's no reason to read this book.
Choi-Fitzpatrick is writing about contemporary bonded labor in rural India, so of course the landlords might have a slightly less bifurcated consciousness than antebellum southern slaveowners. But I nonetheless came away with the feeling that he hadn't really gained his interviewees' trust and they didn't tell him what they really think - the kind of thing they would say at a dinner with like-minded men, once the ladies have left the table and the men are relaxing over bourbon and cigars.
This is slipping into the American South again. Possibly the problem is simply that my frame of reference is so different than Choi-Fitzpatrick's.
Although Choi-Fitzpatrick does have some countervailing interviews from former bonded laborers, which show that their former landlords would in fact use threats of violence (and occasionally actual violence) to keep them in line. I guess I feel that without getting even an acknowledgement of that violence from the perpetrators - not even their justification, just an acknowledgement - the interview data from the perpetrators is more or less a puff piece.
The book also suffers from the fact that Choi-Fitzpatrick is trying insistently (one might also say repetitively) to correct a movement that has gotten bizarrely out of touch with reality in some ways. Why else would it come as a surprise to anyone that "resources and opportunities shape the decisions made by targeted incumbents" (that is, slaveholders)? Yet Choi-Fitzpatrick repeats this many times, as if he expects his readers to be amazed that slaveholders don't exist in a vacuum of pure evil.
The book picked up a bit in the final chapter, when Choi-Fitzpatrick begins to talk about the way that unjust systems become normalized: "oppression is not pathological: it is instead embedded in broader cultural systems and legitimizing myths that render the horrible somehow normal and everyday and banal." Humans tend to accept that whatever is, is right; and that's part of why injustice endures so tenaciously.
But I've read this before, and said better, in Hannah Arendt and Solzhenitsyn (whom Choi-Fitzpatrick actually quotes) and Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams. Unless you're very specifically interested in bonded labor in India, there's no reason to read this book.
