Counterlife: Slavery after Resistance and Social Death by Christopher Freeburg (review)

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Reviewed by:

• Counterlife: Slavery after Resistance and Social Death by Christopher Freeburg
• Stephen Knadler

Christopher Freeburg. Counterlife: Slavery after Resistance and Social Death. Durham: Duke UP, 2021. 152 pp. $23.95.

Even amid unspeakable grief, there has always been Black joy. Black people just existing, loving, laughing, loafing, not doing anything but pursuing their own personal meaning or spiritual bliss. The persistence of this excessive, uncapturable Black aliveness testifies not only to survival. It prompts reflection as well on the structuring practices that shape African American literary criticism, and it is stirring a growing discomfort with the constraints on what African American studies critics do—what many would say have even an ethical and communal responsibility to do—and what questions they should ask. In his thought-provoking monograph assessing the current state of African American literary criticism, Counterlife: Slavery after Resistance and Social Death, Christopher Freeburg calls for not another [End Page 260] periodic turn in the field based on the latest critical theory but a foundational rethinking of the function of criticism. As scholars, Freeburg contends, we have so learned to impose correct political meanings on a text that we fail to read, or at least read with curiosity and openness, the “living”—the counterlife—that exists outside or alongside African Americans’ political struggles.

In part, this moment of field-reckoning within African American studies taps into a larger conversation within literary studies about whether we are “postcritique,” or about whether it is advisable to temper (or replace) a critical practice grounded in a hermeneutics of suspicion with something more reparative that values other forms of readerly and aesthetic engagement beyond a deep reading for ideological traps or resistance. For Freeburg, African American studies has fallen under the sway not just of a straight-jacketing hermeneutics of suspicion but equally of a hermeneutics of predictability, which is reductive and simplistic in its political agenda. For Black studies programs founded in the locked arms of art, critique, and activism, such a depoliticized move, however, has frequently been seen as naivety, elitism, or a race-betraying selling-out.

How did African American studies come to march lockstep within a preordained dialectic about damage/agency, oppression/resistance, or complicity/counternarratives? According to Freeburg, we can chart this genealogy of critical predictability in the wake of Stanley Elkins’s 1959 Slavery: An Intellectual History. It was not just Elkins’s controversial “Sambo thesis” about the plantation system fostering childlike subservient “Uncle Toms” that generated heated debate. Rather, as Freeburg notes both Angela Davis and Albert Murray recognized, the problem lay in Elkins’s limiting approach: Elkins centered the damage on the enslaved and thus routed African American studies of enslavement into a stifling course of debates about inescapable domination or agential resistance that flattened the interiority of the enslaved. Even those literary critics and historians who argue for the richness and vitality of family life, social relations, and artistry among the enslaved, Freeburg contends, find value and significance in mainly those thoughts and practices that afford political agency, thus leaving the study of enslavement always locked in an oppositionally defined battle against the plantation overseer or his white enslaver discourse.

If Elkins’s Slavery: An Intellectual History serves as an ur -text legislating the terms of a predictable African American hermeneutics of political utility, however, it is the current school of Afropessimist critics within Black studies who have ensured its afterlife guiding us to a critical “dead-end.” In Freeburg’s assessment of the state of criticism, it is theorists of “social death” such as Orlando Patterson and Saidiya Hartman who are Elkins’s heirs with their misguided, if well-intended obsession with an inescapable and historically recurring antiblackness that has kept African American literary criticism in a psychic hold. Not only have these Afropessimists spawned an automatism of critical reaction, but they, like Elkins, view the enslaved as locked within a closed structuring system that reduces their full unknowable individualized humanity to a two-dimensional politically antagonistic caricature.

In many ways, Freeburg uses the “Afro-pessimists” as straw women and men, and we might easily point out that the recent work of critics such as [End Page 261] Hartman has...