Orlando Patterson Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge, Massachusetts, & London, England, 1982) ("Slavery is one of the most extreme forms of the relation of domination, approaching the limits of total power from the viewpoint of the master, an total powerless from the viewpoint of the slave. Yet it differs form other forms of extreme domination in very special ways. If we are to understand how slavery is distinctive, we must first clarify the concept of power." "The power relation has three facets. The first is social and involves the use of threat of violence in the control of one person by another. The second is the psychological facet of influence, the capacity to persuade another person to change the way he perceives his interests and his circumstances. And third is the cultural facet of authority, 'the means of transforming force into right, and obedience into duty' . . ." Id. at 1-2. "A consideration of the relation of slavery to caste leads us back to where we began: the liminality of the slave is not just a powerful agent of authority for the master, but an important route to the usefulness of the slave for both his master and the community at large. The essence of caste relations and notions of ritual pollution is that they demarcate impassable boundaries. The essence of slavery is that the slave, in his social death, lives on the margin between community and chaos, life and death, the sacred and the secular. Already dead, he lives outside the mana of the gods and can cross the boundaries with social and supernatural impunity." Id. 51. "There is absolutely no evidence from the long and dismal annals of slavery to suggest that any group of slaves ever internalized the conception of degradation held by their masters." Id. at 97.).
Solomom Northup, Twelve Years a Slave (Vancouver: Engage Books, 2013).
