“Property, and a Valuable Property”: A Study of Disposability, Slow Violence and the Environmentalism of the Slaves in Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer

Abstract

[Abstract] The social, political and racial tensions that have been questioning the actual social equity in the United States of America lately, epitomized by the Black Lives Matter movement, seem to require an interpretation that may be non-spectacular. To understand the current situation, probably one of the best manners would be to analyze an artistic manifestation which may be aligned with the objectives of social equality and whichalso covers the root of such inequityin the United States: black slavery. Ta-Nehisi Coates’ The Water Dancer, a neoslave narrative published in 2019, focuseson the situation of African Americans in the Southern United States, set in the period prior to the 19th-century American Civil War. The book, apparently little researched yet by literary critics, offers some possible interesting threads to explore, among them the role of slaves as disposable commodified propertyaswell as the ways in which they are relatedto their environment and subjected to what Rob Nixondefines as slow violence. From his ecocritical perspective of environmental justice, the intertwining of class, postcolonialism and the environment has consequencesbothfor the society and for nature. One of the objectives of this work is to argue that the traditional, long-termed and obscured naturalization of this slow violence exerted on the African American slaves may explain the hierarchical discriminatory distinction based on race that some sociologists assert continues to existin the United States. With this premise in mind, the methodologyof thisessaywill consist in textual close readings hand in hand with Nixon’s aforementioned theoretical background and somecontextual, extra-literary pieces related to the representations in the novel.