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Who Deluded Whom? Eugene Genovese and Planter Self-Deception

Fatal Self-Deception is Eugene Genovese’s last book. I was in the process of reading it when Genovese died, aged 82, in September 2012, five years after the death of his wife. She was co-collaborator in the many books that Genovese had written since 1979. She is also the ostensible co-author of this final work in two distinguished careers. Genovese’s death makes one reflect as much on the career that he had as on the book under review. Fatal Self-Deception is a good book, as are all of the Genoveses’ books, but it is not a great book. Genovese did not write a great book again after he completed two magnificent books on slave culture and on comparative slave resistance in the 1970s. As Steven Hahn writes in an acute obituary of his former teacher, Genovese had become by his death a self-marginalising figure within the historical profession. He was someone who by the mid-1990s ‘had all but evaporated, save for an occasional appearance before a conservative audience or organisation’. Such marginalisation within the history profession, self-imposed or not, seemed a highly improbable outcome in the 1970s, when Genovese was the most prominent Marxist historian in America. His masterpiece, Roll, Jordan, Roll, published in 1974, was the most exciting work published that year not just on slavery but in all areas of American history, It won the Bancroft Prize for American history, was debated and contended about in every graduate seminar, and set an agenda for evaluating the relationship between masters and slaves that has influenced scholarship for a generation. Genovese remained extraordinarily productive as a writer for the next 38 years, including writing the three books of which Fatal Self-Deception is the final instalment. Moreover, he remained true to the vision of slaveholding and slavery that he had established in his first books written in the mid-1960s. That vision was based around a sophisticated understanding of paternalism as the basis for master-slave Slavery & Abolition, 2013 Vol. 34, No. 3, 508–514, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2013.769731