Two Faces of Eugene Genovese

With the recent passing of historian Eugene Genovese, I was asked to write about him. Here is what I came up with.


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, awkward silences, 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.
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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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