You should prefer a narrative of slave life from the perspective of the slave – historical acts of resistance prove that enslaved Africans maintained agency and the possibility for new modes of life.

To argue that there is more to the popular conception of slaves as victims who experienced social death within the abusive regime of transatlantic slavery is not to say that these subjectivities did not exist. When considering the institution of slavery we can quite confidently rely on the assumption that it did indeed destroy the self-hood and the lives of millions of Africans. Scholar Vincent Brown (2009) however, has criticised Orlando Patterson’s (1982) seminal book Slavery and Social Death for positioning the slave as a subject without agency and maintains that those who managed to dislocate from the nightmare of plantation life ‘were not in fact the living dead’, but ‘the mothers of gasping new societies’ (Brown 2009, 1241). The Jamaican Maroons were one such disparate group of Africans who managed to band together and flee the Jamaican plantations in order to create a new mode of living under their own rule. These ‘runaways’ were in fact ‘ferocious fighters and master strategists’, building towns and military bases which enabled them to fight and successfully win the war against the British army after 200 years of battle (Gotlieb 2000,16). In addition, the story of the Windward Jamaican Maroons disrupts the phallocentricism inherent within the story of the slave ‘hero’ by the very revelation that their leader, ‘Queen Nanny’ was a woman (Gotlieb 2000). As a leader, she was often ignored by early white historians who dismissed her as an ‘old hagg’ or ‘obeah’ woman (possessor of evil magic powers) (Gotlieb 2000, xvi). Yet, despite these negative descriptors, Nanny presents an interesting image of an African woman in the time of slavery who cultivated an exceptional army and used psychological as well as military force against the English despite not owning sophisticated weapons (Gotlieb 2000). As an oral tale, her story speaks to post-slavery generations through its representation of a figure whose gender defying acts challenged the patriarchal fantasies of the Eurocentric imaginary and as such ‘the study of her experiences might change the lives of people living under paternalistic, racist, classist and gender based oppression’ (Gotlieb 2000, 84). The label of ‘social death’ is rejected here on the grounds that it is a narrative which is positioned from the vantage point of a European hegemonic ideology. Against the social symbolic and its gaze, black slaves were indeed regarded as non-humans since their lives were stunted, diminished and deemed less valuable in comparison to the Europeans. However, Fanon’s (1967) assertion that ‘not only must the black man be black; he must be black in relation to the white man’ (Fanon 1967, 110) helps us to understand that this classification can only have meaning relative to the symbolic which represents the alive ness of whiteness against the backdrop of the dead black slave (Dyer 1997). Butler (2005) makes it clear that the ‘death’ one suffers relative to the social symbolic is imbued with the fantasy that having constructed the Other and interpellated her into ‘life’, one now holds the sovereignty of determining the subject’s right to live or die: this death, if it is a death, is only the death of a certain kind of subject, one that was never possible to begin with, the death of the fantasy of impossible mastery, and so a loss of what one never had, in other words it is a necessary grief (Butler 2005, 65). The point to make here is that although the concept of social death has proved useful for theorists to describe the metaphysical experience of those who live antagonistically in relation to the social symbolic, it is nevertheless a colonial narrative within which the slaves are confined to a one dimensional story of terror. In keeping with Gilroy’s (1993b) argument that the memory of slavery must be constructed from the slaves’ point of view, we might instead concentrate, not on the way in which the slaves are figured within the European social imaginary, but on how they negotiated their own ideas about self and identity. We might therefore find some value in studying a group like the Maroons who not only managed to create an autonomous world outside of the hegemonic discourse which negated them, but also, due to their unique circumstances, were forced to create new modes of communication which would include a myriad of African cultures, languages and creeds (Gottlieb 2000). This creative and resistive energy of slave subjectivity not only disrupts the colonial paradigm of socially dead slaves, but also implies the ethical tropes of creation, renewal and mutual recognition. In contrast, the passive slave proved to feature heavily in the 2007 bicentenary commemorations causing journalist Toyin Agbetu to interrupt the official speeches and exclaim that it had turned into a discourse of freedom engineered mostly by whites with stories of black agency excluded8. Young’s argument that ‘one of the damaging side effects of the focus on white people’s role in abolition is that Africans are represented as being passive in the face of oppression’, appears to echo the behaviour in the UK today given that a recent research poll reveals that the black vote turnout is significantly lower than for the white majority electorate and that forty percent of second generation ‘immigrants’ believe that voting ‘doesn’t matter’.9 Yet, Gilroy (1993a) argues that this political passivity may not simply be a self fulfilling prophecy, but might allude to the ‘lived contradiction’ of being black and English which affects one’s confidence about whether opinions will be validated in a society that, at its core, still holds on to the fantasy of European superiority (Gilroy 1993a). Without considering the slaves’ capacity for survival and their fundamental role in overthrowing the European regime of slavery, we limit the use–value of the memory and risk becoming overly attached to singular slave subjectivities seeped in death and passivity. The Maroons story however, enables slave consciousness to rise above the mire of slavery’s abject victims and establishes an ethical relation with our ancestors who lived and survived in the time of slavery.