Hegelian dialectic slave how to#

Later philosophers would need to fight back against this story, and they used various methods: telling a contradictory narrative, undermining its racist conclusion by showing Hegel’s indebtedness to Black minds and bodies, and imagining a new interpretation for Hegel’s own story. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Lord-Bondsman allegory is one such story, a powerful philosophical narrative that provided a moral justification of slavery.

Hegelian dialectic slave how to#

As Nesiret struggles with how to communicate such atrocities, she tells her daughter, “‘Greed and ambition rarely coexist with reason, child.’”

Philosophers, scientists, and theologians would build rationales, philosophical systems, and stories to justify this moral evil. While the growing transatlantic slave trade bothered a few Europeans, popular opinion condoned and even celebrated the trade in human beings. Perhaps Nesiret remembers back to the mid-fifteenth century when Portuguese ships began raiding West Africa’s shores for slaves? Millions of Africans would die and tens of millions would be enslaved and sent to the Americas, providing labor for colonial European powers and later the American republic. The three ships “sailed upon a sea of blood and left fire and terror in their wake.” The main protector of the homestead, the vampire Nesiret, is reminded of a similar episode in the distant past.

Librarians of a Vampire: Fighting Against Hegel’s Dialectic Narrative of Colonialism and SlaveryĬhinelo Onwualu’s dystopian flash fiction, “When We Call a Place Home,” opens with a vision of ominous ships coming towards a utopian homestead in West Africa.