What to any of US is the fourth of July?

[as_alas_i_was]

I am going to try this again, this disembodied speaking to the world. It still feels like stepping out onto a stage, where I'm about to sing, solo, to a group of people whose vague presence behind the footlights I can sense, but whom I can't actually make out in the glare. There might be . . . one? two? people out there? ... Oh, as my eyes

Comments

[as_alas_i_was]

I love it, holzfallen! Try again! (And does this mean that new congrats are in order?! Woot!)

[spyinthehaus]

I was on the phone yesterday - the telephone, as I believe Americans have it - to a colleague in the OC, who asked if I was going to be doing anything nice on the fourth of July. I pointed out that from the point of view of Empire, it counted rather as a loss. She had the decency to laugh.

Which is... layers and layers. The fouth of July stands for a nation saying that, actually, this was not a good place for them to be. There's an element of freedom, of self-determination in that. And from there spin out endless possibilities and treaties, and manifest destiny. The whole thing frankly makes my head explode, situated in a small nation which through good luck and historical accident shares a language with the United States and with India. Phone and phonosWhen we closed our ports to slaves, and then emancipated the slaves of the Empire, the bicentennial of which is being celebrated over here, there was a complex system of cushioning - slaves were given a finite time of their own, in which their labour, if not voluntary, was

[spyinthehaus]

Sorry, that was incoherent - very, very tired. What I meant was not the the fourth of July was a bloody odd thing to be celebrating, nor indeed that the abolition of slavery was same, but that specifically that highlighting 1807 as the time to be celebrated, when so many people living as slaves were not freed, and such massive grants were given, not so much to those who had been living as slaves, but to those who had profited from their labour. The counterargument being of course that the collapse of the plantation economy, because the owners had not factored in ever having to pay their workers, would have benefitted nobody. Except - well, product grows, people collect it and sell it. If the model you have built around that can't survive paying your workers, the product or the model is wrong, and if it cannot be fixed then it has to be discarded. I realise that the case for ending slavery has already been made, though

[as_alas_i_was]

This doesn't feel tangential to me, haus. But then I'm pretty Faulknerian (i.e., as in: the past isn't dead. it isn't even past). Yeah, the case for ending slavery has already been made and "won," basically--in that there are very few people out there making the case that slavery is a good thing and should be brought back. (although the yes men did make a pretty funny (and probably searingly accurate, from the purest "free-market" economics p.o.v.) argument about the end of US slavery in Finland back in '01, saying that the real problem with it was that it was just so much less efficient than outsourcing to sweatshops as we do today

[slightlyfoxed]

Thanks for that. Fiery stream of biting ridicule! Fantastic. I'm Ex on Barbelith. I wave.

"What to the Slave is the Fourth of July" then reminded me of "What is Africa to Me?" and made me want to trace other black US writers starting work with "What?" because really, yes, what? Such a lovely expressive and challenging kick-off. And possibly, wtf?

As spyinthehaus notes above, there is an enormous emphasis on the End of Slavery in the UK at the moment, when in fact enforced labour (either violently enforced or through really exploitative economic means) is used to produce almost everything, still - as you noted, strawberries, shoes, clean floors. People (well, gits) have been saying the bicentenary of the 'end of slavery' is about national hand-wringing but to me it feels more like a smug-fest.

[as_alas_i_was]

I didn't realize there was a End of Slavery smug-fest going on in the UK, until you and haus wrote of it, so thanks. I have been surprised to become increasingly aware of how much the US abolitionist movement, especially the white side of it, was derived from and patterned on the British abolitionist movement. And I've had a couple of students working on the way Britain figures in slave narratives, which is often as an ironic counterpoint to the "free" united states. The pro-slavery side was always trying to paint the lives of UK factory workers as more alienated than slaves, but the ex-slaves typically found going to monarchical Britain to be a very freeing experience by comparison to their enslaved lives in "democratic" USA, and regularly said so in their autobiographies.

[gair]

Re: UK smug-fest: I was at a workshop with academics - I live in Bristol, which was one of the main ports in the triangular trade and whose wealth as a city comes entirely, I think, from slavery - a year or so ago, and one of the other white women there, who I hadn't met before (and have never seen since) and who was involved in organizing some of the bicentennial events, was bitching loudly to someone about how there were people (black people, I'd guess) who didn't want bicentennial celebrations because - Chuh! - slavery wasn't over! So that kind of turned me off the whole thing before it even began.

I didn't say anything to her, though.