| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 89.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

The Punished Self: Surviving Slavery in the Colonial South. By Alex Bontemps. (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2001. x, 224 pp. $29.95, ISBN 0-8014-3521-8.)

What did it mean to be a slave in the colonial South? How did slaves endure the attack on the self that initiated and perpetuated their enslavement? These questions frame Alex Bontemps's The Punished Self, a nuanced, thoughtful, and thoroughly engaging study that among other things reminds us that deliberate and constant terror made slavery possible and that the reward for surviving its brutality was, paradoxically, the burden of having survived. 1

The book is divided into three parts. Part 1 considers the absence of black subjectivity in most of the surviving records of the colonial South, which Bontemps explains most notably as an integral part of the process of enslavement itself. White southerners essentially wrote blacks' subjective presence out of the historical record as part of their larger goal of turning people into slaves who had to be made sensible of their subservience in every way. . . .

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