Harris, Leslie J. The Rhetoric of White Slavery and the Making of National Identity

Leslie J. Harris’s The Rhetoric of White Slavery and the Making of National Identity is a brilliant and timely analysis of the white slavery controversy that dominated the turn of the twentieth-century United States, in which many citizens expressed fear that white women and girls were being deceived, trapped, and sold into prostitution. For Harris, “the controversy was not simply about protecting women and children; it was also about harnessing white womanhood to constitute national identity and belonging.” A scholar of rhetoric, Harris impressively argues this point through coining “the ‘mobile imagination,’” which “includes conceptions of who can move, how mobility occurs, and what meanings of mobility circulated.” The white slavery narrative’s valorization of white women’s reproduction, purity, and domesticity defined “moral” women as those who were passively in stasis—moved, but not mobile, “private, controlled, and protected.” Heavily racialized, white slavery rhetoric further illustrated mobile individuals in “wilderness settings,” such as “immigrants, Black Americans, and residents of colonized countries,” as barbaric, immoral threats to white women and “to the spatiotemporal status of the nation.” To elucidate this argument, Harris’s work then moves readers through space and time. It begins in the 1880s Northwoods of Wisconsin, where a sensational national controversy emerged: confounded by the presence of white women in the area, the Woman’s Christian Temperance Union (WCTU) and Wisconsin lawmakers erupted into debate as to whether they were “irredeemable whores or innocent victims” of prostitution. Chapter Two concentrates on the supposedly dangerous and depraved urban city—a rhetorical image which Harris asserts was rooted in nostalgia and fear “as the immigrant Other moved into the space.” White women in urban settings were warned to “avoid virtually all human connection,” solidifying the home as “the only safe place.” Chapter Five expands upon the white slavery narrative’s interaction with the immigrant Other through the lens of Yellow Peril, which vilified Chinatown as a threat to womanhood and nation and simultaneously magnified women’s suffrage efforts. Turning toward the national level, Chapters Three and Four reveal how efforts to combat white slavery manifested in public and discursive spaces. Wealthy reformers like John D. Rockefeller Jr., for instance, turned to “supposedly objective facts” to redeem both women and men engaged in the vice of prostitution, finding “a lack of proper domesticity” as a consistent cause. Yet these reformers consistently cast Black women as irredeemable counterparts and potential perpetrators of white slavery. Harris additionally analyzes the Mann Act, contending that it functioned to create a national community defined by its moral whiteness. The legislation, which secured funding for the founding of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI), also worked to constrain Black mobility and institutionalize a legal alternative to lynchings as a means of enforcing racialized and gendered fears surrounding Black men. The final chapter examines how white slavery narratives in Europe recast the controversy as a transnational problem. Similar to the Mann Act, the international 1910 white slave treaty reinforced nations’ identity through the protection of white women and concurrently constituted empire through the exploitation and regulation of colonized women. Harris’s invention of the mobile imagination brings fresh insights to scholarship on religious nationalism. The Rhetoric of White Slavery and the Making of National Identity uncovers how narratives of chosenness were infused into the white slavery controversy and amplified by mobility. The chosen—redeemable white women—could be moved against their will and victimized by white slavery; at the same time, they had access to the potential for mobility (a marker of citizenship) but instead morally and responsibly chose stasis within the confines of the home. On the contrary, the unchosen—irredeemable women, white and otherwise—moved with unregulated and threatening agency; they were mobile, but their mobility did not constitute citizenship and instead required freedoms denied to protect the national project. The white slavery narrative’s elevation of the chosen as worthy of salvation reveals moral white womanhood as sacred. American religious historians may then ask about the role that certain Protestant eschatologies held within the controversy. Harris’s brief transnational turn also invites scholars to consider how American religious nationalism is informed by empire and opens space for a comparative analysis of the white slavery controversy. The breadth of Harris’s work, steering readers through the local, national, and transnational domains, positions it as an indispensable read for American Religious historians of varying approaches. The work is well-suited for both undergraduate and graduate classrooms, especially benefiting those with an interest in religion, nationalism, and race in the Progressive Era.

The measure promoted as England's first law against sex trafficking, the Criminal Law Amendment Bill, journeyed through Parliament in 1912. Amid mounting extra-parliamentary protest over votes for women, workers' rights, and Home Rule for Ireland, the country's suffrage and socialist groups chose to engage with the somewhat ancillary Bill and the issue of trafficking (or ‘white slavery' as it was popularly known) through the powerful medium of their periodicals. They did so largely because they saw the value to their wider campaigns of using trafficking - a phenomenon often cast by reformers as involving the sexual exploitation of working-class women - to forge connections (or highlight disjunctures) between the suffragist and socialist movements. Ideas of race, national identity, and empire attached to configurations of ‘slavery' were central to their rhetoric, and to the links the groups made between trafficking and the political emancipation they sought. These ideas give a valuable insight into influential representations of trafficking in 1912 and the campaign against ‘white slavery' during what was a fundamental, transnational moment in the history of trafficking. They also illuminate suffragist and socialist rhetoric of the day, and the conflicting ideas of ‘Englishness’ therein. This article strives to unlock some of these insights.

POLISH STRUGGLE WITH WHITE SLAVE TRADE OF WOMEN AND CHILDREN AT THE TURN OF THE 19TH AND 20TH CENTURIES: SELECTED POLITICAL, LEGAL AND SOCIAL ISSUESThe women and children trade, at first called the white slave trade, constituted for both Poland and Polish people a hazard to not only public safety but also to each person’s safety. Poland after regaining independence fought against this phenomenon not only on its own territory but also in the international relations, aspiring to the protection of Polish people against this crime. It should be emphasized that in period of the partitions of Poland the crime was used on the Polish territory by the partitioners to deprive Polish people of their national identity, to oppress and enslave them. Therefore, it can be assumed that this crime with reference to Polish people at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries was used by the partitioner policy, especially on the territory of the Russian annexation and, because of that it gained a political nature — publications of Polish scientists, politicians and journalists of the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries demonstrate this.

This article examines the issue of international crime in Malta during the 1920s and 1930s. At the time, Malta was said to be at the centre of the international underworld, and in particular, a primary route for the white slave trade. Archival evidence in Malta and London reveals some concern over counterfeiting and smuggling, but little to support concerns about traffic in women or drugs. International crime did, however, represent a significant political issue. Owing to a rising national identity and interest in promoting tourism, politicians and the press in Malta resented allegations about the white slave trade. Accusations surrounding a bomb incident and assassination attempt invoked charges by pro-British and pro-independence voices. We conclude that the ‘myth of international crime’, raised in the context of multi-national police cooperation, extended to the edge of Europe and figured into wider issues involving governance within the British Empire.

In Picturing American Modernity , Kristen Whissel investigates the relationship between early American cinema and the experience of technological modernity. She demonstrates how between the late 1890s and the eve of the First World War moving pictures helped the U.S. public understand the possibilities and perils of new forms of “traffic” produced by industrialization and urbanization. As more efficient ways to move people, goods, and information transformed work and leisure at home and contributed to the expansion of the U.S. empire abroad, silent films presented compelling visual representations of the spaces, bodies, machines, and forms of mobility that increasingly defined modern life in the United States and its new territories. Whissel shows that by portraying key events, achievements, and anxieties, the cinema invited American audiences to participate in the rapidly changing world around them. Moving pictures provided astonishing visual dispatches from military camps prior to the outbreak of fighting in the Spanish-American War. They allowed audiences to delight in images of the Pan-American Exposition, and also to mourn the assassination of President McKinley there. One early film genre, the reenactment, presented spectators with renditions of bloody battles fought overseas during the Philippine-American War. Early features offered sensational dramatizations of the scandalous “white slave trade,” which was often linked to immigration and new forms of urban work and leisure. By bringing these frequently distant events and anxieties “near” to audiences in cities and towns across the country, the cinema helped construct an American national identity for the machine age.

Taney's Zombie: Chief Justice Roger B. Taney's Life in Maryland's Black Belt: Revelations About Dred Scott and the Still Undead Commitment to White Supremacy and Racial Hatred

Reviewed by: Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction by Diana Rebekkah Paulin Katharine Nicholson Ings Diana Rebekkah Paulin. Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2012. 315 pp. $75.00 cloth/ $25.00 paper. In Diana Rebekkah Paulin’s Imperfect Unions: Staging Miscegenation in U.S. Drama and Fiction, the author explores how the theatrical and literary production of miscegenation from the mid-nineteenth through the early twentieth centuries both dismantled and reinforced the black-white binary that bolstered individual and national identity during Reconstruction and the subsequent period of nation-building. Paulin analyzes race from a performative perspective—an approach she establishes as unfamiliar to a nineteenth-century American—and so she mines her texts for the complex and what she calls the “often unseen processes” (xii) by which interracial relationships become spectacular, or staged. But she also frames her topic of interracial unions as a methodology of its own: if her sources’ processes are “unseen,” Paulin consciously employs “miscegenated reading practices” (xii) by engaging with diverse fields of study, including American studies and transhemispheric studies alongside theatre and performance studies, comparative race and ethnic literary studies, and literary history. Part of this book’s appeal comes from how Paulin herself stages the narratives within. Selecting an eclectic variety of texts, Paulin organizes her chapters by pairing and comparing; she often juxtaposes a playwright with a novelist or short-story writer—Dion Boucicault with Louisa May Alcott, Bartley Campbell with William Dean Howells, Thomas Dixon with Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins with the trio Bob Cole, J. Rosamond Johnson, and James Weldon Johnson—to emphasize the intersecting performative aspects of their works. She introduces each chapter by situating the authors and texts within their respective biographical and cultural contexts, paying particular attention to the performance history and reception of each play. This strategy is particularly successful for chapter one, “Under the Covers of Forbidden Desire,” Paulin’s treatments of Dion Boucicault’s play The Octoroon (1859) and Louisa May Alcott’s stories “M. L.” and “My Contraband” (both 1863). She develops her analysis beyond a familiar argument of how black blood in each work functions as either a catalyst for “chaos” (14) or exotic “art” (36) to a consideration of same-sex miscegenation (including audience reception). In Boucicault, for instance, a quadroon slave and an Indian have a friendship that Paulin locates “somewhere on the spectrum between the homosocial and the homoerotic” (20); in Alcott, white women in an authoritative, read “masculine” role express their same-sex desire for former slaves via the men’s “feminized characterizations” (41). Chapter two, “Clear Definitions for an Anxious World: Late Nineteenth-Century Surrogacy,” begins with a discussion of the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair, which included a “White City” of anthropological displays from a variety of so-called “primitive” cultures, although representations of American slavery were excluded and the Native American genocide was overlooked. (A one-time “Colored People’s Day” was instituted, ostensibly in response to protests but also to sell more tickets.) In this context, the term “fair,” then, also seems to mean “stripped of pigment,” and indeed Paulin argues that the World’s Fair was a vehicle for the United States to write its own myth of “white supremacy and U.S. empire” (55). Such a national spectacle of whiteness as crucial to empire-building is reproduced on a more intimate scale in the works Paulin examines in this chapter—Bartley Campbell’s play The White Slave (1882) and William Dean Howells’s novel An Imperative Duty (1892). She demonstrates how, through the figures of two racially ambiguous women, one who is white by birth [End Page 222] but socially received as black, the other an “octoroon” woman perceived as white, Campbell and Howells “reemphasize Anglicized whiteness as a central component of U.S. identity and, by extension, world civilization” (67). The authors reveal each woman’s appeal to be her underlying “white” qualities, which in turn enables each heroine to marry a white husband, thus sidestepping the miscegenation taboo. But Paulin notes that Howells’s tragic mulatta “never feels at ease” (95) with her white identity; indeed...

The rhetoric of white slavery and the making of national identity

The Rhetoric of White Slavery and the Making of National Identity

In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries the States captured and held for ransom nearly five hundred American sailors. The attacks on Americans abroad-and the government's apparent inability to control the situation-deeply scarred the public. Captives and Countrymen examines the effect of these acts on early national culture and on the new republic's conception of itself and its position in the world. Lawrence A. Peskin uses newspaper and other contemporaneous accounts-including recently unearthed letters from some of the captive Americans-to show how information about the North African piracy traveled throughout the early republic. His dramatic account reveals early concepts of national identity, party politics, and the use of military power, including the lingering impact of the Wars on the national consciousness, the effects of white slavery in North Africa on the American abolitionist movement, and the debate over founding a national navy. This first systematic study of how the United States responded to Barbary Captivity shows how public reaction to international events shaped America domestically and its evolving place in the world during the early nineteenth century.

Conversations on Dutch colonial heritage and its continuing influence are finally gaining momentum. It is important to also include the Bible and Christianity in the analyses. In this chapter, the role of Christian Scripture in the development of the ideology of Dutch colonialism, slavery, and Dutch national identity is explored. After the Dutch declared their independence over their Catholic Spanish rulers, the Republic as a Calvinist nation positioned itself within the biblical narrative. The Republic soon became a colonial power and colonial experiences, too, were understood through the framework of biblical interpretation. Existing supersessionist appropriations of biblical texts served as a model for colonial Christianity. The Dutch identified with biblical Israel. Initial worries that colonial activities and slave trade were against Scripture led to the development of a specific Calvinist defense of enslavement and colonialism. A central concern in the theological discussions on slavery and colonialism was Baptism. It was argued that all children in a Reformed household, including the enslaved, had to be given access to baptism. In the eyes of protestant Dutch slaveholders, being enslaved and being Christian became increasingly less compatible. As church authorities increasingly began to doubt the practice of baptism of enslaved people, baptism became an exclusive sacrament. Later however, an ideology of Christian slavery developed. In spite of decolonization, “genuine” Dutchness continues to be associated with Christianity and whiteness.