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1. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE MOTLEY CREW?

James, Oiticica, and the Aesthetic Sociality of Blackness
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Experiments in Exile
This chapter is in the book Experiments in Exile
1WHAT HAPPENED TO THE MOTLEY CREW?James, Oiticica, and the Aesthetic Sociality of BlacknessIn The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, the historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker uncover the lost history of the motley crew, an insur-gent social formation that emerged from the connections that developed between the disparate people, violently dispossessed and dispersed by the interlinked systems of enclosure, whom settler colonialism and slav-ery forced into brutal regimes of labor, who composed what they call the Atlantic proletariat of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. According to Linebaugh and Rediker, this Atlantic proletar-iat was marked by its difference. Its “coherence” as a social formation emerged in and through internal and external dissonance and dissidence. As they note, it “was not a unified cultural class, and it was not a race.” It was “motley, both dressed in rags and multi-ethnic in appearance.” It was “anonymous, nameless,” and, at the same time, “multitudinous, numer-ous, growing.” Though it was “female and male, of all ages,” it was figured, historically, by the self-styled Herculean heroes of the newly globalizing formal economy, as a feminized chthonic monster, a many-headed hydra that survives attempts to kill it with its “wayward reproductivity”: when-ever one of its heads is chopped off, a new one grows in its place.1 This Atlantic proletariat was, moreover, fundamentally “cooperative and labor-ing.” And while subject to terror and coercion (“its hide was calloused by indentured labor, galley slavery, plantation slavery, convict transportation, the workhouse, the house of correction”), it was always also, Linebaugh and Rediker insist, “self-active” (though we will have to explore what “self-active” means) and “creative.”2
© 2020 Fordham University Press, New York, USA

1WHAT HAPPENED TO THE MOTLEY CREW?James, Oiticica, and the Aesthetic Sociality of BlacknessIn The Many-Headed Hydra: Sailors, Slaves, Commoners, and the Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, the historians Peter Linebaugh and Marcus Rediker uncover the lost history of the motley crew, an insur-gent social formation that emerged from the connections that developed between the disparate people, violently dispossessed and dispersed by the interlinked systems of enclosure, whom settler colonialism and slav-ery forced into brutal regimes of labor, who composed what they call the Atlantic proletariat of the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries. According to Linebaugh and Rediker, this Atlantic proletar-iat was marked by its difference. Its “coherence” as a social formation emerged in and through internal and external dissonance and dissidence. As they note, it “was not a unified cultural class, and it was not a race.” It was “motley, both dressed in rags and multi-ethnic in appearance.” It was “anonymous, nameless,” and, at the same time, “multitudinous, numer-ous, growing.” Though it was “female and male, of all ages,” it was figured, historically, by the self-styled Herculean heroes of the newly globalizing formal economy, as a feminized chthonic monster, a many-headed hydra that survives attempts to kill it with its “wayward reproductivity”: when-ever one of its heads is chopped off, a new one grows in its place.1 This Atlantic proletariat was, moreover, fundamentally “cooperative and labor-ing.” And while subject to terror and coercion (“its hide was calloused by indentured labor, galley slavery, plantation slavery, convict transportation, the workhouse, the house of correction”), it was always also, Linebaugh and Rediker insist, “self-active” (though we will have to explore what “self-active” means) and “creative.”2
© 2020 Fordham University Press, New York, USA

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. contents v
  3. INTRODUCTION 1
  4. 1. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE MOTLEY CREW? 17
  5. 2. DIALECTIC OF CONTACT 61
  6. 3. UNDOCUMENTS 118
  7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 171
  8. NOTES 175
  9. BIBLIOGRAPHY 205
  10. Index 217
Readers are also interested in:
https://doi.org/10.1515/9780823279814-002

Chapters in this book

  1. Frontmatter i
  2. contents v
  3. INTRODUCTION 1
  4. 1. WHAT HAPPENED TO THE MOTLEY CREW? 17
  5. 2. DIALECTIC OF CONTACT 61
  6. 3. UNDOCUMENTS 118
  7. ACKNOWLEDGMENTS 171
  8. NOTES 175
  9. BIBLIOGRAPHY 205
  10. Index 217
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