Popular appeals to the humanity of slaves, the invocation of rights, contractarian notions of property, self-possessed individualism, will, agency, responsibility, protection, and so on did not ultimately serve the struggle for black liberation in the U.S. She contends that there is a tragic continuity in antebellum and postbellum constitutions of blackness, and that the range of liberal, anti-slavery, and reform discourses that were ostensibly used to promote progressive causes actually facilitated violent, symbolic forms of domination in nineteenth-century America. Her message overall is a profoundly pessimistic one. Book Review, Anita Patterson, African American Review, Winter 1999, vol.
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