Measuring Value:The Legacies of Slave Racial Capitalism after Emancipation Amanda Laury Kleintop (bio) Aaron Carico, Black Market: The Slave's Value in National Culture after 1865. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 296 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. Aaron Carico, Black Market: The Slave's Value in National Culture after 1865. Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2020. 296 pp. Notes, bibliography, and index. $29.95. Since the publication of Walter Johnson's River of Dark Dreams (2013), Ed Baptist's The Half Has Never Been Told (2014), and Sven Beckert's Empire of Cotton (2014), the new history of capitalism has contributed to scholarly and public conversations about enslavement's relationship to the growth of capitalism in the United States. These histories highlight the complex legal and financial systems that the peculiar institution engendered. Before the Civil War, people could buy, sell, and mortgage property in humans, generating massive profits for enslavers, bankers, and others. In light of this research, a growing group of scholars has reconsidered the process of emancipation in the South. Formal abolition may have ended the legalized trade in Black bodies, but what happened to the legal and financial practices that the value of enslaved people necessitated? Aaron Carico's Black Market: The Slave's Value in National Culture after 1865 is one of the first books to answer this question. Carico argues that formal abolition did not end the commodification of Black bodies or their representations as relations of exchange, accumulation, and domination in U.S. culture. "Though no longer chattel," he says, "blacks in America weren't relieved of the commodity's mark. Blackness is realized in a historical matrix of economic exchange and cultural production, a real abstraction" (p. 9). Black Market is a work of cultural criticism that contributes to American Studies and interdisciplinary studies of racial capitalism. Carico explores eclectic texts like court cases, paintings, performances, photographs, novels, poetry, and music. This broad source base puts the book in conversation with U.S. and art historians, legal and literary scholars, and especially historians of capitalism. The book's theoretical framework relies on analyses of slave racial capitalism, a coin termed by Johnson in River of Dark Dreams to denote how race-based enslavement enabled and required westward expansion in the antebellum era. Carico also pulls from Black radical thinkers and Afro-Pessimists [End Page 561] like Cedric Robinson, Hortense Spillers, Saidiya Hartman, and W. E. B. Du Bois, particularly his Black Reconstruction (1935). Carico seeks to refocus scholars' attention from bondage and racist violence in the post-emancipation era to an exploration of what Black people's value meant in American culture after 1865. He writes, "to focus on physical bondage and racist violence misrecognizes the systemic nature of slavery as an institution" and portrays it as a localized problem endemic to the South (p. 7). By making enslavement a Southern problem rather than a national one, northerners and eventually white Americans writ large could justify pernicious legal, financial, and cultural practices that exploited Black labor after the Civil War. White Americans' cultural productions celebrated emancipation as the realization of universal freedom in American life and glorified the United States as the beacon of economic, industrial, and democratic progress. By extolling freedom, these narratives obscured the history of enslavement and justified the United States' imperialist ventures across the continent and abroad. The book follows a roughly linear chronology. Its four chapters, each of which could stand alone for research or teaching, are organized around close readings of a wide array of engaging source materials from the antebellum era through the New Deal. Over the course of the book's first two chapters, Carico explores how white cultural producers reshaped and profited from portrayals of Blackness after 1865. In Chapter 1, Carico lays the historical groundwork for the book's arguments. Here, he treads familiar territory for historians. He contends that capitalists continued to develop coercive modes of accumulation influenced by practices created under enslavement after the ratification of the Thirteenth Amendment. Legal freedom meant, at most, the freedom to contract, and so the "political economy of abolition determined that ex-slaves would...
Search from 250 M+ research papersSearch from 250 M+ research papers
Feb 11, 2021
Gregory M Collins 
Open Access