Analysis Of Abina And The Important Men

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What the Meaning of the Word “Is” Is. Trevor Getz’s and Liz Clarke’s Abina and the Important Men takes place along the Gold Coast of Africa in the late 1870’s after the proscription of slavery in the British colonies. This graphic novel predominantly follows a court case in which the titular character Abina Mansah accuses Quamina Eddo of subjecting her to slavery. Through a misrepresentation of slavery and a misplaced sense of personhood, the court rules Eddo not guilty of the accusation of slavery. This decision not only exemplifies the era’s complacence with oppression, but also the ethically corrupted motivations underpinning British imperialism that would later influence racist policies in other Western countries and promote a false understanding genetics. For the duration of this paper, a “slave” is defined as one who is non-consensually subjected to work or to captivity with little to no pay, and “consensual agreement” is understood to not be coerced and to possess a reasonable degree of autonomy. By this standard, Abina is clearly distinguished as a slave, though it is not clear if she maintains this status for the entirety of her life. While she was bought and sold as property by her first husband Yaw Awoah, she describes a sort of dedication towards him in court, implying that her acceptance of his ownership is to some degree consensual. This form of consent, however, is not without qualification. Abina’s inability to distinguish “master” from “any important man” demonstrates the role of women in this society as being strictly subservient to men. This systemic subservience crafts a power dynamic in which agreement is not clearly consensual, given the considerable fettering of autonomy. Despite this qualified consent, Abina’s dedication to her first husband undermines her status of being enslaved during this period. Her time with Eddo, however, is much less uncertain. With respect to the initial definition of slavery, slavery is characterized more so by lack of consent rather than the intensity of work done. Though conditions may be more tolerable in a house than in a field, one is no less a slave in a house. While serving food to her lawyer James Davis after court, Abina conveys this sentiment, telling Davis that working—even being beaten—is tolerable, but that to be divorced from a sense of “control” marked the predominant distaste for life with Eddo. This interaction characterizes not only Abina’s lack of self-determination, but also Eddo’s direct disregard for even the (though perhaps merely nominal) legal autonomy she would enjoy. This, in combination with her meager to nonexistent pay, characterize the aforementioned definition of slavery—particularly the lack of consent. Retorts to these claims in defense of Eddo are largely categorized by either misrepresentation or fallacious reasoning. During the proceedings, James Hutton Brew, the defendant’s lawyer, seeks to undermine the court’s understanding of Abina’s story through intentional obfuscation of the definition of slavery. He argues that because the protectorate has outlawed slavery, Abina …show more content…
By introduction of the fallacious defense of Eddo’s slavery, the authors display the general complacency amongst the franchised towards the institution of de facto slavery that riddled imperialistic expansion. Moreover, the narration and asides expose the underpinnings of imperialism as being rationalized through the masturbatory corruption of Enlightenment ethics that later serve as the scaffold for the racist sentiments that underlie pseudoscientific claims of racial genetic

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