Chapter 1

Mock Annotated Bibliography

Arielle Powell

Camille Vilela

ENC 2135

February 22, 2018

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

Nicholas Trinehart strives to "question the historical claims and normative assumptions according to which enslaved people were “commodified” as such and then to suggest new ways to theorize the history of enslavement that does not make recourse to this, particularly unproductive cliché. " (Trinehart 2). The arguments that he give revolve around the idea of humans selling and one another as products and things and inquiring with historians about their interpretation of slavery. Trinehart states that the slave trade did not operate by treating slaves simply asthings—objects, commodities, goods—it operated by treating them as persons who could suffer", which worked and it heightened suffering without causing death (Trinehart 35). Trienhart found the contradiction in the historians part when they say that "regarding the slave sale or auction, and the rape of enslaved women, they were told to pose, flex, dance and play instruments to show their supposed emotional insensibility and physical vitality (Trienhart 37) But they were treated as if they were trash. Trinehart ends the paper with tells the reader that, "It is by embracing a contingent and processual framework like that proposed by Kopytoff that we might avoid this deplorable result and approach history of modern enslavement that is yet more heinous and less unthinkable." (Trinehart 42)