Ordinary Violence

This paper uses the ordinary to wedge apart the relationship between violence and civility, that is, the way that violence against black women was a normal part of civil life in the US 19th century. I consider the relationship... [ view full abstract ]

This paper uses the ordinary to wedge apart the relationship between violence and civility, that is, the way that violence against black women was a normal part of civil life in the US 19^th century. I consider the relationship between slow, cumulative violence—such as the juridical commonsense that enslaved people were “both persons and property”—relative to what I am calling acute violence: violence that is momentary and deep. I suggest that acute violence, and especially acute sexual violence, is often attended to through the rubric of spectacularity (Hartman 1997, Brooks 2006, McKittrick 2010), and held in contrast to structural violence. I ask how we might understand acute violence that happens every day. How might historians understand and theorize the immediate and cumulative effects of routinized bodily violence? If violence is ordinary—if it was, as Christina Sharpe writes, “the weather” and “the total climate” (Sharpe 2016)—could it ever be normal for the people who endured it?

Reading the case of Delphine vs. Deveze (Louisiana State Supreme Court, 1824), in which an enslaved woman sued for her freedom in antebellum New Orleans, I suggest that understanding violence as ordinary may bring us closer to what Nell Painter has called a “fully loaded cost accounting” (Painter 1995) of US slavery, toward the ways that violence broke the possibility of a civil existence for black people, and toward the affective weight of endurance, survival, and capitulation.