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Assignment 4

In Morgan’s novel, chapter 1 discusses the concept of monstrosity because of how the Europeans used biblical references such as satan to describe the black women of their indigenous lands such as Jamaica or the West Indies. Several Englishmen have portrayed black women during this time as monsters by exploiting their labor on their own land and described the cultural differences between them in racial ways. An example of how they were portrayed at this time as monstrous would be the description of the black women’s bodies while naked during laborious work. They went into significant detail of how different they were from the Europeans to make them feel like they needed to be put into labor. Native Americans were also made to be seem monstrous because of their cannibalistic behavior and rituals which gathering dead human remains. Again the Englishmen went into detail of the Native Americans eating habits which were made to be seen as culturally inferior from that of Europeans.

The concept of monstrosity can also be seen in Federici’s chapter discussing the degradation of women and those who were forced into labor. When an open – field system failed and returned back to feudalism, this led people to scavenge for food and hunter/gather for crops. There was an increase in poor squatters and they were led to beg to their knees for a job. There was a deep hatred for this economic system and led to great instability between social classes after the collapse of these open fields. Even the elderly had to take care of themselves and had no on to watch over them, they’ve even started to loot. After the appropriation of a wage slave system, many workers defied this because this led them to have to defend their land from being taken away from them because of an inability to pay. The workers felt that they would rather work on the roads than to be offered a wage.