Analysis Of The Slave Community By John W Blassingame

The Slave Community by John W Blassingame is a significant revisionist work that places the slave as an individual at the centre of its analysis and argument. In this book, Blassingame challenges the Elkin's thesis, arguing that slaves were able to retain significant sections of their African cultures through examination across several early chapters of cultural features such as music, religion, and folklore, and analysing slave familial structures and relationships. Blassingame rejects suggestions that slaves passively accepted their enslavement, contending that slaves kept up continual resistance both through the creation of an African slave culture, and through rebellion and flight, which he examines in a separate chapter. He acknowledges …show more content…
In the second half of the book, the focus shifts to examining the behaviour and personality of slaves, and the extent of the influence of slave-holders on slave personalities. Blassingame contests the widespread existence of Sambos espoused by historians such as Elkins, arguing that such stereotypes were over-exaggerated. Blassingame employs the psychological theories of role theory and interpersonal theory to analyse the institutional roles played by slaves, and examine the variation in personality types among slaves. He argues that slaves had multiple referents for their self-esteem, challenging the previous historiographical argument that slave-holders were the only significant figure in the development of slave personalities. The slave community comes front and centre in this, with Blassingame asserting the importance of the community in preserving a sense of identity. Though Blassingame acknowledges the potential for slaves to become Sambos, he reasserts the wide variation of responses slaves exhibited to …show more content…
There are several issues associated with slave sources, and Blassingame makes a considerable effort to address these in a critical essay included in the book. Blassingame argues that despite their subjectivity, these sources are useful because the subject of study – slaves' experiences in the Antebellum South and the development of slave personality – requires a personal perspective. Some of Blassingame's assertions relating to these sources are doubtful, such as his arguments that "an unguarded slip of the pen here and an innuendo there" is sufficient to provide an understanding of topics not fully breached by slave autobiographies. There is a danger here of making incorrect assumptions based on insufficient information. However, Blassingame somewhat remedies this by emphasising the use of other "independent" sources to support subjective slave sources, and by cross-referencing slave narratives to identify common and recurring themes in an attempt to verify the likelihood of the claims made by the