The Logic of Slavery
Debt, Technology, and Pain in American Literature

This book meditates on the conceptual underpinnings of slavery and investigates its impact on other areas of Western culture.

Tim Armstrong (Author)

9781107607811, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 27 August 2012

262 pages, 7 b/w illus.
22.8 x 15.3 x 1.4 cm, 0.37 kg

'The book is an extraordinarily erudite, intellectually sophisticated, and beautifully written contribution to the wider project - which must necessarily be multifaceted - of disinterring slavery's continuing impact on contemporary American culture.' Anita Rupprecht, Cultural Critique

In American history and throughout the Western world, the subjugation perpetuated by slavery has created a unique 'culture of slavery'. That culture exists as a metaphorical, artistic and literary tradition attached to the enslaved - human beings whose lives are 'owed' to another, who are used as instruments by another and who must endure suffering in silence. Tim Armstrong explores the metaphorical legacy of slavery in American culture by investigating debt, technology and pain in African-American literature and a range of other writings and artworks. Armstrong's careful analysis reveals how notions of the slave as a debtor lie hidden in our accounts of the commodified self and how writers like Nathaniel Hawthorne, Rebecca Harding Davis, Booker T. Washington, W. E. B. Du Bois, Ralph Ellison and Toni Morrison grapple with the pervasive view that slaves are akin to machines.

Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Slavery, insurance, and sacrifice: the embodiment of capital
2. Debt, self-redemption, and foreclosure
3. Machines inside the machine: slavery and technology
4. The hands of others: sculpture and pain
5. The sonic veil
6. Slavery in the mind: trauma and the weather
Notes
Index.

Subject Areas: History of the Americas [HBJK], African history [HBJH], Literary studies: general [DSB], Literary theory [DSA]