The Barbados Slave Act of 1661, or “An Act for the better ordering and governing of Negroes,” is an important document to study and revisit, especially if one is committed to interrogating histories of the present.
There is much that stands out in this historically unprecedented endeavor to impose a comprehensive slave law in the English colonies, a mechanism of brutal containment in response to the heightened population of enslaved subjects in Barbados (and one that would become a template, a master copy, for plantation regimes in places like South Carolina). For one, the slave act authorizes itself as a form of protection, a law for the greater good, a way of offering “the right rule of reason and order” to “an uncertain dangerous kind of people.” In other words, this legal-juridical event establishes itself as a quasi-republican alternative to arbitrary violence, an attribute that is implicitly attached to black flesh, prior to delineating the forms of punishment to be distributed to unruly slaves (nose slitting, burning of skin) and unscrupulous slave owners (forfeiture of sugar).
One aspect of this legalization of terror that strikes me is the antagonism that is set up between the Christian and the Negro. In the second clause of the slave act, Negro men and women are prohibited from striking a Christian, except when the violence of the enslaved aims to protect their owner and their owner’s property. As Saidiya Hartman has shown us, enslaved property was permitted to exercise will within the regime of slavery but in ways that intensified the slave’s subordination to plantation rule.
Prior to establishing this antagonism between the Christian and the Negro, the document already associated the slave with “heathenish and brutish” ways and the Christian with a kind of reasonable order that is authorized to use gratuitous punishment to manage the “danger” of the Negro and maintain colonial rule. Therefore, it should not be surprising that the final clause of the Barbados slave act “ordains and authorizes” that the law be recited and publicized in parish churches. Sacred rituals often discipline us into and inure us to the brutality that is our world – in the name of the good.
One might read this document as a testament to a moment in the history of the Americas before racial categories, such as black and white, were sedimented, a time when religious and theological differences organized planetary imaginaries and world-ordering projects. While there is some truth to this interpretation, Sylvia Wynter’s work has helped me think about the inextricable relationship between race and religion, and anti-blackness and the sacred. To borrow a term from the work of Judith Weisenfeld, Wynter’s work directs attention to the “religio-racial” underpinnings of slavery and colonial modernity.
Wynter is committed to showing how certain shifts in knowledge/power regimes—from theo-centric to bio-centric, from the proper Christian to Western imperial Man, from reason-centered descriptions of the human to fit-ness and survivability-based conceptions of humanity—carry with them recurring commitments to non-homogeneity. To put it differently, the division between the Christian and the heathen or the demarcation between the settler and the indigenous or the color lines between global north and archipelagos of the South are not simply ideological instruments to defend and advance economic interests. They point to various ways that prevailing practices and grammars divide and separate the world into disparate kinds of human beings, including those who are worthy of optimal life and those that deserve, or are already embodiments, of death and dissolution.
Racial taxonomies and hierarchies, often reproduced in the name of universal humanism, position peoples and regions with greater or lesser proximity to life, health, and order, and inversely, to death, sensuality, enslavement, and terror. In the process, the terrifying quality of life, health, and order, or the sanctity of Man, is accepted as collateral damage for survivability and the preservation of things. If race is a way of defining who counts and does not count as a proper human being, then it is also part of a religious imaginary that establishes who can approximate wholeness and completion, or the divine predicates.
But Wynter never loses sight of the auto-poetic or socio-genic nature of human beings. In other words, she claims that part of humanity’s bane is that humans create their social worlds and then tend to treat these worlds as natural and immutable. In the process, the mechanisms of world-making become opaque to us. And yet in the shadows and fissures of regnant practices and discourses, there are always poets, jesters, heretics, witches, and those that cannot quite be assimilated within what seems to be inexorable.
At times, Wynter uses the language of the demonic to name the indeterminate and un-representable, a quality that she associates with the absence/presence of black women in Shakespeare’s The Tempest. What would it mean to pursue, or even practice, the un-representable? How does the unruliness of the demonic differ from the unruliness that sovereign Man has always been able to claim as a special right, in the name of order and protection? How does Wynter’s work respond to those who disconnect fascism, then and now, from colonial violence? What does her corpus have to say to those who think that current realities such as “Trumpism” or the ongoing slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza can be described primarily in terms of political economy, apart from something like economies of the sacred? These questions will continue to haunt as the imperial and fascist underpinnings of the present become more (un)-deniable.
