A review by danamiranda
The Power to Die: Slavery and Suicide in British North America by Terri L. Snyder

3.0

Snyder relies too much on defining "suicide" as self-destruction even as her resources on Africana cosmology and legality complicate such a reading. On the one hand, this does not discredit the good historical scholarship that thoroughly depicts how slave suicide was disarticulated from the process of enslavement and the institution of slavery. On the other hand, Snyder completely forgoes sustaining an argument of why actions that led to their actual-death should be defined as suicide or self-destruction for enslaved Africans. In particular, her reticence to speak about resistance or freedom in terms of slave suicide was disappointing since suicide is never explored as "freedom" but simply just a justified alternative. In summation, if the politics of death is simply the power to die then Snyder's conception of politics is lacking.