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