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1 " Each person pulled onto the slave ship embodied a social history: one or more distinctive places that were called ‘home’ and an indelible web of relationships comprising ties with immediate family and the extended network of kin. A collective of people suddenly torn from participation in these and other domains of social life, the slave cargo was, necessarily, a novel and problematic social configuration.Atlantic commodification meant not only exclusion from that which was recognizable as community, but also immersion in a collective whose most distinguishing feature was its unnatural constitution: it brought strangers together in anomalous intimacy. A product of violence, the slave cargo constituted the antithesis of community. "
― Stephanie E. Smallwood