We Who Were Slaves

Abstract

Working from the injunction of C. L. R. James about the requirement to understand the “new forms created in the context of slavery,” this essay argues that there is a political requirement for the study of the intellectual history and political thought of the African enslaved. The essay also notes that the Black enslaved body represented a distinct form of labor in which it produced commodities while itself being a “property in person.” Such a historical process produced “thingfication,” and unique forms of domination and alternative frameworks of freedom.