Keywords

Fungibility

Fungibility refers to the exchange, typically of a commodity or good, for another thing of approximately the same value. As a keyword, it describes the treatment of enslaved people of African descent who are treated as products that can be purchased, sold, bartered and tradedThis quality of being a replaceable and inexhaustible commodity influenced ahistorical narrative that defended the practice of slavery in the United States and attempted to strip enslaved peoples of their personhood and autonomy. Writing on fungibility, the scholar Saidiya Hartman notes that “… the fungibility of the commodity makes the captive body an abstract and empty vessel vulnerable to the projection of others’ feelings, ideas, desires, and values; and, as property, the dispossessed body of the slave is the surrogate for the master’s body since it guarantees his disembodied universality and acts as the sign of his power and dominion.” Despite this, the archive contains stories that attest to the ability of enslaved people to reassert their humanity even in the midst of dehumanizing conditions.