With the recent passing of historian Eugene Genovese, I was asked to write about him. Here is what I came up with.
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Over the past two decades historian Eugene
Genovese has been an object of scord, even hatred, by “the Left.” Meanwhile
various right wing and conservative figures have embraced him and he developed
a number of friendships and alliances that seemed to undermine his long and
unflinching career as a radical scholar. I will confess the perception of two
Eugene Genoveses – the radical historian gifted with great analytical powers
and the rightwing ideologue – has been puzzling. In 1993 I discovered Genovese’s
prodigious critical powers in his class Roll,
Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. I was in awe of the way he
rejected the simple moralism inherent in liberal assessments of slavery by
drawing an authoritative picture, bewildering in all its contradictory details,
of the manner in which slaves and their owners created a society. I navigated
my way through Genovese’s corpus largely unguided, which left me oblivious of his now legendary
shift to ‘‘the Right’’(see Genovese 1994). To say the least, my
enthusiasm for Genovese went over like a lead balloon as I began to traverse my
way through the political landmines of academia. My admiration for Genovese’s intellectual powers met hushes, awkwardsilences, raised eyebrows, and the occasional
didactic lecture to disabuse me of my ignorance. Over the past twenty years I have continued to pay attention to
Genovese’s work—while ignoring much of his incendiary political rhetoric—and
believe that he offers many insights necessary for a dialectical approach
to anthropology. Any scholar interested in understanding contemporary global
capitalism and changing forms of nationalism and racism, will ignore Eugene
Genovese’s work at her own peril.
........
From the mid-1960s to the mid-1970s, Genovese made an indelible mark—drawing, it seems, equal parts of praise and criticism—with the rapid-fire publication of four classic texts:
The Political Economy of Slavery (1965), The World the Slaveholders Made
(1969), In Red and Black (1971), and finally Roll, Jordan, Roll
(1974). Armed with a sophisticated understanding of Marxist theory he made a
valiant effort to reorient the discipline of American history. At the time, the
study of slavery in the United States was mired in parochial notions of American
Exceptionalism that presumed slavery was an aberration to the United States’
core ideals, a nation that was ultimately viewed as having, through godly
ordinance, the mission to spread liberty and democracy.
Inspired by Antonio Gramsci’s concept of cultural hegemony
(see Genovese 1967), he found within pro-slavery ideology an antagonism to the
market-based bourgeois society of the antebellum North. In the end, he showed
that the southern planters constituted a forceful opposition to the expansion
of modern capitalist social relations (Lichtenstein 1997). Yet it produced a
class hegemony through paternalism—a process that bound planters and slaves into fraught
yet tight social relationships, which he chillingly described in the
opening passage of Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made:
Cruel, unjust, exploitative, oppressive,
slavery bound two peoples together in bitter antagonism while creating an organic relationship so complex and
ambivalent that neither could express the simplest feelings without reference to
the other. By definition and in essence it was a system of class rule, inwhich some people lived off the labor of others. American slavery subordinated
one race to another and thereby rendered its fundamental class relationships
more complex and ambiguous; but they remained class relationships.
The racism that developed from racial subordination influenced every aspect of
American life and remains powerful. But slavery as a system of class rule
predated racism and racial subordination in world history and once existed
without them (Genovese1974: 3–4).
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