Genovese, Eugene D. Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World the Slaves Made. New York: Pantheon, 1974.

== Summary ==
This
book examines the “black nation” within American and argues that slaves, as a
social class, laid the foundations for a separate black culture while also
enriching American culture as a whole. Genovese describes the interaction
between slaves and slaveholders on the plantation, arguing that slavery was
always a negotiated space. American slavery was a pre-capitalist institution, Genovese asserts, and American
slaveholders saw themselves as benevolent paternalists (rather than acquisitive
capitalists) who held the best interests of their slaves at heart. The slaves
themselves seized upon this worldview of the planters as an opportunity to
ameliorate the harshness of slavery and build some security into their own
lives. By accommodating slaveholders' ideas of paternalism, enslaved people
were able to control the pace of work, forge a unique and empowering Christian
religion, receive recognition for their marriages, and place various other
limits on slaveholders' powers. Thus slaves used accommodation to resist the
power of their masters, cultivating a unique and autonomous African-American
culture within the plantation system. Genovese writes: “Accommodation and
resistance developed as two forms of a single process by which the slaves
accepted what could not be avoided and simultaneously fought… for moral and
well as physical survival.” (658). In
Genovese's interpretation the daily negotiations between accommodation and
resistance, between submission and self-determination, added up to a flexible
system whose longevity and vitality was the result. In conclusion, Genovese
summarizes the cultural web of the plantation class system, writing “The
slaveholders established their hegemony over the slaves primarily brought the
development of an elaborate web of paternalistic relationships, but the slaves’
place in that hegemonic system reflected deep contradictions, manifest in the
dialectic of accommodation and resistance.” (658) While they were unable to
mobilize politically and toward an explicit class-consciousness, slaves did
contribute to the formulation of a protonational consciousness expressed through
religious sensibility. Such a consciousness enabled them to cohere as a people.
Theoretical Framework: Gramsci/Marx: cultural
hegemony describes the domination of a culturally diverse society by the ruling
class, who manipulate the culture of that society — the beliefs, explanations,
perceptions, values, and mores — so that their ruling-class worldview becomes
the worldview that is imposed and accepted as the cultural norm. He examines
material culture, gender, religion and other elements to show the dialectic of
accommodation and resistance with the paternalistic culture of the plantation
class system. (Key pages: 146-148)
See also: Walter Johnson, Edward Baptist, Sven Beckert