| Abstract |
"How should we describe the devastation brought about on the lives of the enslaved? How should we describe plantation slavery as an institutionalized and transgenerational structure of dominance? Irreparable Evil, by David Scott, is an intellectual engagement with the insufficiently acknowledged legacy of plantation slavery in the New World. He argues that while slavery involved unimaginable practices of violence, its destructive powers include that of an inherited form of life. The perniciousness of slavery was its legacy as an inheritance of future generations. Scott's locational focus is the Anglophone Caribbean with an emphasis on Jamaica. Written as a series of interconnected essays, Scott consider what he means by moral and reparatory history and the related concepts of incomparable evil and incommensurable evil. He explores the problems of fictional conceptions of slavery's evil and concludes with an interrogation of whether or not the evil of slavery is ever truly reparable"-- Provided by publisher. |
