Anthony Cucci Mock Annotated Bibliography

Anthony Cucci

Camielle Vilela

ENC 2135

2/22/18

1.     Trinehart, Nicholas. "The Man that was a Thing: Reconsidering Human Commodification in Slavery." .1 (2016): 28. Web.

Trinehart “aims to question historical claims according to which slaves were commodified” and “suggest new ways to theorize the history of enslavement” (Trinehart 2). His argument is centered around the human ability to treat another human truly as a possession and questioning historians explanation of that occurance. Trinehart believes that the portrayal of owner-slave relationship has been inconsistent, flawed, and has subsequently given modern people a false explanation of the slave-owner social complex. Treating a slave harshly indirectly implies the owner’s acknowledgement of humanity of slaves because they know what causes humans to suffer (Trinehart 8). On a similar note, scholars contradicted themselves claiming “humans were being treated as inanimate objects” yet they were able to be sorted by age and sex, making Trinehart beg the question “How can something be both biological and inanimate?” (Trinehart 9). Another example of contradiction used when concerning the claimed inhumanity of slaves is rape of slave-women. He theorizes that the sexual abuse was not done because the slaves were inanimate objects to be played with like a sex toy but rather because the slave-owners enjoyed the power over another “thing”, a backhanded way of slave-owners giving humanity to the slave-woman (Trinehart 10). The composition concludes with Reinhart’s explanation of why he “suggest[s] that historians of slavery adopt Igor Kopytoff’s theory of commodity-in-process” to more adequately explain the true slave-owners view of slaves as humans or objects, (Trinehart 11).