Slaves’ subsistence needs created a fragmenting djob economy on the system’s margins

Evidence

Finally, the reality of slavery. It was decisive, of course, in the stagnation of production techniques. An insurmountable tendency toward technical irresponsibility resulted from it, especially among slaveholders. And when technical innovations, mechanization, and industrialization occurred, as they did, for example, in the southern United States, it was already too late. Social dynamics had taken other routes than cane traces, sugarcane alleys, or avenues of magnolias. As for the slaves or their close descendants, who had absolutely no interest in the Plantation’s yield, they would be an exception to this technical irresponsibility because of their own need to guarantee daily survival on the edges of the system. This resulted in the widespread developrnent of small occupations, or what is referred to in the Antilles as djobs, a habituaI economy of bits and scraps. Technical irresponsibility on the one hand and a breakdown into individual operations on the other: immobility and fragmentation lay at the heart of the system eating away at it. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 377

Categorization

• DEFINE: Defines ‘djobs’ as the Antillean term for the habitual small-occupation economy that slaves built on the edges of the Plantation.
• STORYSTEM: The slave-run djob economy as an autonomous counter-economy running on bits and scraps is a vivid setting detail for fiction about colonial margins.
• XREF: connects to: Slaves resisted plantation tech-stagnation by developing an informal scrap economy. — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 377

Broader Connections

• Slaves resisted plantation tech-stagnation by developing an informal scrap economy. #corroborates (0.85) — Édouard Glissant, Poetics of Relation, 377