Abducting Black Bodies: Little B's of North America and Caribbean

Abstract

What would it mean to speak of the history of Blacks in the Americas as a determined struggle against a hegemonic process of abduction? What could it mean to speak of the abduction systems of Western civilization? In part, this is similar to a question posed by Saidiya Hartman, how does one tell the story of an elusive emancipation and a travestied freedom?, but with certain crucial differences. This idea of abduction immediately raises the spectre of that forced movement of Africans across the Atlantic, abduction on the grandest scale in human history, to be sure. It also reminds us of Gregory Batesons definition of abduction systems as the lateral extension of abstract components of description. Metaphor, dream, parable, allegory, the whole of art, the whole of science, the whole of religion, the whole of poetry, totemism the organization of facts in comparative anatomy all these are instances or aggregates of instances of abduction, within the human mental sphere.