Tuesday, March 29, 2016

Creolization and Slavery

Creolization is something that I've never actually considered before. I always figured that it was something that existed naturally, not something that had to be developed or fostered in any way. The mixture of the European culture with the African culture is something that we see happening even today, so it's fascinating to look at some of where it originated, and I enjoyed, for the most part, the way that it was written.

As much as I did enjoy it, I'm not sure that I agree with Sparks on some of his points, especially the ones about slaves. From what I understand from Sparks' writing, he claims that  slaves were not technically slaves because they had never done anything to forfeit their liberty in the first place, which not only didn't really make sense to me, but seemed like a simplistic way of thinking about the nature of slavery, the same way that a seventh grader would rationalize slavery by saying that they knew what they were doing. Saying that they didn't forfeit their liberty in the first place - well, of course they didn't! Other people did it for them by capturing and enslaving them. I could hardly make sense of this point, because the entire point of slavery is that it's without the slave's consent. I'm aware that he was trying to make an argument within the larger spectrum of the book - to try to get us to see that there was a larger diversity in enslaved peoples than is usually thought, but I didn't enjoy how he put it.

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