In this space, particularly on the slave ship, captives are first ungendered: made interchangeable with all other captive bodies on board. It was a process of stripping bodies down for the purpose of creating new bodies, conformed to the body politic of colonial sovereignty, and thus malleable to the domination of the master to which they would eventually be delivered. “The captivating party does not only earn the right to dispose of the captive body as it sees fit, but gains, consequently, the right to name….” This naming is part of the work of the “master” to deny past social and cultural meaning already present in the lives of these African peoples, including the denial of their identity and gender. Spillers emphasizes the significance of the power to name in the process of controlling and commodifying a “body.” Spillers lays open the architecture behind names by relating them to the procedures of capture employed in the theft of African bodies beginning in the 15th century with the conquests of the Portuguese and continuing in the Atlantic slave trade. In doing so, I find the article by Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe” illuminating for this task. In thinking through what this re-commodification means, I am drawn to reconsider first the production of “the slave” by which these tools first functioned. RARE Handmade Vintage 1800’s Slave Shackles
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