Abolitionist Research Articles

Behn’s White Innocence: Language Politics in the Dutch-Surinamese Translations of Oroonoko (1688)

Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko (1688) has elicited myriad contradictory readings based on its central ideologies about race and slavery. The ambivalence within the novel has made it a popular text to adapt or translate to produce a certain politics. This essay examines two twentieth-century Dutch-Surinamese translations of the novel: H.D. Benjamins’s of 1919 and Albert Helman’s of 1983. I contextualize both translations within each author’s language politics and imperial projects, reading their work through the lens of Gloria Wekker’s notion of “white innocence.” I argue that Benjamins and Helman rely on Behn’s ethnographic authority and her white sentimentalized womanhood to produce an imperialist politics that perpetuates the long-standing myth of the Netherlands as a gentle and benevolent nation. By moving beyond the notorious politicization of Oroonoko during the nineteenth-century abolition movement, this essay sheds new light on how the novel’s ambivalent politics has been manipulated to political ends throughout history.

A Kingdom of Possibility

A Kingdom of Possibility

Toward the end of school counseling: visionary possibilities for counselors to build and practice abolition in education

ABSTRACT The abolitionist call to remove police from schools includes eliminating all forms of carcerality, such as school counseling, a field traditionally predicated on an alliance with the carceral state. We ask: How might counselors in schools build and practice abolition? How might we tease counseling as care work apart from its policing origins within the carceral containment of schools? How can we engage the contradictions and tensions? With an unwavering commitment to abolition, we transcend the carceral boundaries limiting our professional imaginations to vision an abolitionist approach to counseling in K-12 schools and school counselor education. In this article, we draw from the principles and practices of abolitionist organizing to vision radically life-affirming counseling processes in alignment with the movement for abolition, prioritizing those most intimately familiar with carcerality. Alongside each process, we offer experiments from our own abolitionist praxes to illustrate the tensions and possibilities of building and practicing abolition as counselors in education.

Prison Abolitionism and the Liberal Imagination

Abstract One of the most controversial political demands to emerge from the mass protests of the summer of 2020 was the abolition of police departments and prisons. This review article takes stock of the rationale behind prison abolitionism and of the philosopher Tommie Shelby's The Idea of Prison Abolition, a recent effort to initiate a dialogue between Angela Davis, the intellectual vanguard of contemporary abolitionists, and Shelby's own style of liberal political philosophy in the tradition of John Rawls. Although it shares a name with the successful nineteenth century movement to end slavery, today's abolitionists have much broader and far-reaching aims. The antislavery movement claimed to be bringing liberal society in line with liberalism's own values by abolishing chattel slavery, but Shelby's argument reaffirms that the prison, for its part, actually has a deep conceptual and historical compatibility with liberalism. Prison abolitionists, conscious of the connections between liberalism and incarceration, therefore, level their attacks not only at imprisonment but against liberal society as a whole. The close entwinement of liberalism and incarceration and deep disagreements about the meaning of basic terms like reform and criminality mean that long-term collaboration between liberals and abolitionists is probably unrealistic, both theoretically and politically.

The Freedom Petitions: Black Patriotism, Black Politics, and the Abolition of Slavery in Massachusetts, 1773–1783

abstract: Between 1773 and 1777, a group of Black men presented four petitions to the Massachusetts legislature for the abolition of slavery. Although they have been examined for over two centuries, the story of these "freedom petitioners" and their place in their colony's patriot politics has frequently been misconstrued by historians or sidelined in larger histories of American abolitionism. Tracing the political, social, and discursive career of what in fact became the first organized, interracial, and successful abolition campaign in American history, I argue that a reevaluation is needed. The freedom petitions were not used to embarrass the patriot cause. They helped to bring about the downfall of royal government in Massachusetts. The American Revolution's "language of liberty" did not infect these actors. It was a discourse that they contributed to and helped create. And the freedom petitioners did not fundamentally fail to achieve their objectives. Their campaign played a crucial role in the effective as well as legal demise of slavery in their state. Abstract: Between 1773 and 1777, a group of Black men presented four petitions to the Massachusetts legislature for the abolition of slavery. Despite having been examined extensively for nearly two centuries, the story of these "freedom petitioners" and their place in their colony's patriot politics has frequently been misconstrued by historians or sidelined in larger histories of American abolitionism. Tracing the political, social, and discursive career of what in fact became the first organized, interracial, and successful abolition campaign in American history, I argue a reevaluation is needed. The freedom petitions were not used to embarrass the patriot cause. They helped to bring about the downfall of royal government in Massachusetts. The American Revolution's "language of liberty" did not infect these actors. It was a discourse that they contributed to and helped create. And the freedom petitioners did not fundamentally fail to achieve their objectives. Their campaign played a crucial role in the effective as well as legal demise of slavery in their state.

Challenges in Commemorating the Abolition of the Slave Trade in the Académie d'Amiens Poetry Contest of 1819 and 1820

Abstract: This article considers the timing of the Académie d'Amiens poetry contest on "L'Abolition de la traite des Nègres" (1819–20), the little-known predecessor to the Académie française prix de poésie on "L'Abolition de la traite des Noirs" (1823). The Amiens concours attempted to offer a timely commemoration of the slave trade's abolition. Close readings of the competition's archival records, including twelve submitted poems and two reports, suggest reasons why a winner was never chosen. The persistence of the clandestine slave trade and pro-slavery arguments blaming abolitionism for the recent events of the Haitian Revolution challenged the possibility and value of the proposed commemoration. The Amiens contest ultimately bears witness to a shift in contemporary perceptions of the slave trade's abolition during the Bourbon Restoration: from the celebration of an event to the realization that its history was far from over.

Ephemeral Improvement: Interactive Print and the Material Texts of Early Abolitionism

AbstractThis article argues that a reliance on material texts tied to the concept of improvement—such as picturesque engravings, diagrams, and account books—pushed the early abolitionist movement toward a reforming, ameliorationist ethic that disavowed revolutionary action and immediate emancipation. Although the term improvement had broad social applicability by the late eighteenth century, its original connections to land management made it an especially important concept for the abolitionist debate. Integrating book history with studies of enslavement and abolition, I show how abolitionists’ use of visual-textual forms such as diagrams and account books created an emphasis on gradual improvement. In response, Black abolitionists both emphasized concepts other than improvement and presented their works in different material forms. Olaudah Equiano and Quobna Ottabah Cugoano adapted the genre of autobiography to demonstrate how their own ostensible improvements did not have the effects anticipated by the logic of white abolitionists, ultimately undercutting the usefulness of improvement as a guiding concept for abolitionism.

COLOR-LINE DIVISION OF SOCIAL MILIEU DURING THE EMANCIPATION ERA IN THE UNITED STATES: AN INTERDISCIPLINARY APPRAISAL

The present study is an attempt to explore the depiction of racism in the era of emancipation by reviewing two representative texts: Of Our Spiritual Strivings by W. E. B. Du Bois, and The Jim Crow Laws and Racism in United States written by David Fremon, and telefilm The Birth of a Nation directed by D. W. Griffith. After the official abolition of slavery by 13th Amendment of the Constitution, the problem of racism not only emerged but reached to its peak in that epoch in United States. It adversely affected both the black and white races for a period of almost one hundred years. Racism divided social milieu in US based on skin color. Dogmatically the darker in color would mean the cursed. The hatred against Blacks was institutionalized. Racially biased laws called Jim Crow Laws were enacted by many southern states. Private gangs such as Ku Klux Klan were formed who would find excuses for lynching and killing the blacks. The blacks were marginalized up to a limit which shook their souls and called ‘double consciousness’ by W.E.B. Du Bois. The essay tries to reconnoiter the traces of miseries of blacks from slavery towards racism through interdisciplinary critique of selected writings and a film.

The Third Earl Grey, Liberalism, and the British Empire

This article suggests that Henry, third Earl Grey, had a vision of a liberal British world, which he hoped to implement through a political career. It was based on strong executive governance, representative politics, and the abolition of protection and slavery. It relied on the free market and good race relations to bring progress. He rejected the idea that legislation could impose improvement on colonial peoples. His program was quickly derailed, because of turbulent representative politics in Britain and the colonies after 1848. Later political developments made any integrated liberal vision of empire even more impractical. Studying Grey's arguments, and their fate, can help the task of defining British imperial liberalism. It is best understood as an attempt to check (Tory) vested interests, rather than as an ideology of interventionist improvement. Its priorities and tensions make most sense in relation to the concepts, assumptions, and turning points that dominated British politics.

Making Marriages at the ‘End of Slavery’: Religion, Identity, and Law in the Early Colonial French Soudan

ABSTRACT This article examines how formerly enslaved people in the early colonial French Soudan (today Mali) negotiated and contested the meanings of marriage at the ‘end of slavery’. Because the abolition of slavery in this region was unexpected, no one knew what the legal rules for marriages between emancipated slaves should look like after it occurred. But formerly enslaved people made their opinions known. This piece examines how former slaves’ ideas about marriage clashed and converged, drawing primarily on one exceptionally detailed marriage annulment dispute from a nascent Catholic community called Patyana. Doing so, it illustrates how emancipated slaves went through inchoate processes of forging new identities in slavery’s wake by migrating, changing their names, and converting to new religions, including Christianity and Islam. Bringing these complex identities before legal adjudicators, former slaves determined the meanings of marriage in a time and place marked by great legal ambiguity.

Transformation of views on slavery in the Atlantic region: Aspects of economy, culture, and society

The relevance of the study is conditioned by the connection of the topic of slavery in the modern world with social rules, because it helps to understand the challenges and problems associated with racism, inequality, and social justice. In this regard, the purpose of the study was to explore the development of economic, cultural, and social life in the Atlantic region during the spread and after the abolition of slavery. The leading methods of investigating this problem are cultural and historical analysis, comparison, classification, synthesis, historical approach, deduction, and generalisation of results. The paper shows the content and functions of slavery; analyses the historical trends in the development of the slave trade, identifies its main factors; demonstrates the findings of modern historians and economists who considered aspects of changing views on slavery in different periods, dominant motives, features, nature and dynamics of the development of discriminatory attitudes in the Atlantic region; describes how slavery took root in America at the earliest stages of the European conquest; traces its characteristics, the origin of various systems, working conditions and exploitation; reveals changes in views on slavery as a negative way of building society; shows the interweaving of Atlantic slavery, the production of knowledge and colonisation, which influenced the development of the modern world; revealed a fair future through alternative anthropology solving complex issues and paying reparations; analysed in detail the development and changes in the economy, trade, social relations, and culture during the development of the slave trade; diagnosed that the cessation and eradication of slavery significantly affected the progress in the economic and cultural life of the United States and completed the period of expansion. The materials of the study are of scientific value for historians, economists, culturologists, and linguists who will be able to deepen research on the economic and cultural consequences of slavery, its impact on economic development, trade, literature, and art

Frederick Douglass in the British Isles (1845–1847): A Reassessment of Approach, Achievement, and Legacy

Frederick Douglass’s first tour of the British Isles (1845–1847) proved a pivotal episode in the life of the legendary campaigner and the broader fight against slavery. Douglass made over three-hundred speaking appearances during his nineteen-month stay—sparking public debate, generating hundreds of newspaper articles, and reinvigorating an antislavery movement that had largely stalled in Britain since the 1830s. Douglass’s campaigning revealed early glimpses of his rhetorical skills and political instincts, including his successful navigation of the “white slavery” controversy and an impressive publicity blitz on the nation’s newspapers. However, Douglass’s time in Britain was not an unmitigated success. This paper examines the limitations of his work—including the failure to successfully pressurize the Free Church of Scotland into returning donations linked to slavery, and the strategic decisions that limited Douglass’s ability to deliver tangible results. In so doing, the paper attempts a more nuanced and dispassionate assessment of Douglass’s tour—evaluating his visit as a political campaign (not an oratory showcase) with successes and failures that shaped the most influential Black American of the nineteenth century.

The Abolition of Slavery in Africa's Legal Histories

AbstractThis introduction contextualizes the special issue's articles in the broader continental dynamics. It discusses the Eurocentric bias of the historiography and suggests that the view that Europe was responsible for the legal abolition of slavery in Africa should be nuanced and qualified. Some independent African polities abolished slavery before Europe's colonial occupation. Nowhere did European abolitionists encounter a tabula rasa: African polities had complex jurisdictions, oral or written, which formed the normative background against which slavery's abolition should be studied. To do so, however, it is misleading to imagine abolitionism as a unitary movement spreading globally out of Europe. What happened differed from context to context. Normative systems varied, and so did abolition's legal processes. This introduction examines the dynamics that led to the introduction and implementation of anti-slavery laws in African legal systems. It recenters the analysis of the legal abolition of slavery in Africa around particular African actors, concepts, strategies, and procedures.

The Sultans of Zanzibar and the Abolition of Slavery in East Africa

AbstractIn 1890, Sultan Ali of Zanzibar declared in writing that “we wish by every means to stop the slave trade.” Statements like these, in addition to the actual passing of anti-slavery legislation, call into question the generally accepted scholarly understanding that the sultans of Zanzibar only agreed to pass and enforce anti-slavery legislation because they were under duress from European, mainly British, powers, who negotiated favorable political and economic benefits in return for (gradual) abolition. A close analysis of the sources tells a more complicated story of both collaboration and conflict between the Zanzibari sultans, their subjects, and the British agents. Moreover, each sultan had distinctive political and religious beliefs, as well as individual personal experiences and outlooks. This paper explores the anti-slavery legislation passed under three sultans of Zanzibar: Barghash bin Said (1870–1888) who prohibited the transport of slaves by sea in 1873, Ali bin Said (1890–1893) who passed the Slave Trade Prohibition Decree of 1890, and Hamoud bin Mohammed (1896–1902) who passed the Abolition Decree of 1897. By analyzing draft treaties and correspondence before and after the passing of legislation, this paper argues that the sultans and their advisors were not devoid of ideological interest in ending slavery; and that British agents and explorers in the region were too hastily hailed as abolitionists.

“Every Planter Has Become an Enlightened Politician”

Abstract Despite much scholarship on the plantation economy, little attention has been paid to planter political rhetoric in colonial Haiti. By analyzing planter petitions, several lawsuits, and the colonial doléances of 1788–89, this article shows how landed proprietors harnessed natural rights jurisprudence and, in particular, Lockian ideas regarding the sacred right of private property. They argued for a set of collective rights both for planters as a group and for the colony as a whole. This was done to undermine the notion that enslaved people, as human beings, constituted a special form of property and thus to assert planters' absolute sovereignty to manumit their slaves at will. This idea was transposed into a claim that only the colony, not the metropole, could determine the timing of slave emancipation. Planters articulated a concept of liberalism that stood at odds with the universalist claims of equality inspired by the French Revolution.

A Short Account of that Part of Africa Inhabited by the Negroes

Anthony Benezet scoured the available English literature of colonial exploitation for evidence of the humanity of the trafficked Africans and the inhumanity of the European traders in human beings. He compiled and published this Short Account in 1762 to present the case for termination of the trans-Atlantic transportation of kidnapped Africans, for abolition of slavery and the slave trade, and for emancipation of the enslaved persons held in bondage in North America and elsewhere. Drawing on Scottish moral philosophy, British Whig ideology, and, most importantly, on New Testament gospel teachings, Benezet presented both reasoned and impassioned appeals for the recognition that Africans had rights to life and liberty that were being abrogated on an industrial scale in violation of the most basic Christian beliefs. The mid-eighteenth century witnessed the height of the English and North American participation in the trans-Atlantic slave trade, and this early abolitionist tract raised an important and ultimately influential outcry in favor of its termination and the remediation of its manifold abuses.

In Pursuit of Freedom: Oaths, Slave Agency, and the Abolition of Slavery in Western Tanzania, 1905–1930

AbstractThis article examines ways in which slaves and missionaries used public declarations before witnesses to carve out a distinctive space of legal proceedings in pursuit of emancipation in western Tanzania. This way of pursuing emancipation shows slaves deploying their intellectual creativity and cultural knowledge to shape the German and British colonial legal systems. Interviews provide evidence that these public declarations drew on long-standing practices of oathing in western Tanzanian societies, while administrative sources indicate that oaths had been used in Islamic legal practice. Both mission and administrative sources show that these public declarations became a fairly routine means to facilitate slave emancipation between about 1907 and the 1920s. They were seen as legitimate by both (ex)owners and (ex)slaves, and were welcomed by officials as they mitigated tensions between owners and slaves, and between slave owners and missions. This legal practice was not codified in either the gradualist German-era laws on slavery or the more proactive abolitionist laws enacted by the British. It was a bottom-up innovation, developed in a context in which effective emancipation depended on drawn-out struggles and negotiations over personal autonomy and malleable social norms.

P.B. Umansky as a Scholar and Pedagogue: The Origins of American Studies in Kazan

Petr Borisovich Umansky (1930–1993), a distinguished scholar and Kazan University lecturer in the latter half of the 20th century, stands out as a key figure in the Kazan school of world history and American studies in Russia. After graduating from university in 1952, he was mentored by another famous Soviet historian, G.R. Levin. In 1962, he defended his Сandidate’s dissertation titled “F. Douglas and the abolitionist movement in the United States between the 1830s and 1850s” at the Leningrad State Pedagogical Institute. He later became widely recognized as the founder of the study of American historiography of the War of Independence. His works were featured in the publications of Kazan University and major central journals like “Novaya i Noveishaya Istoriya”, “Voprosy Istorii”, and “Istoriya i Istoriki”. He also actively participated in various scientific gatherings, such as the First All-Union Historiographical Conference and the First Symposium of Americanists in Moscow. At Kazan University, P.B. Umansky played a vital role in shaping the school of researchers specializing in American studies. Many of his former students now teach at his alma mater and continue to pass down their knowledge to new generations of historians. With a career spanning from the 1950s until his death, P.B. Umansky was widely hailed as one of the top international lecturers in Tatarstan. The article is supplemented with the memoirs of the historian’s son, E.P. Umansky.

A Feminist Abolitionist reads Plutarch, Euripides, and Plato: Periclean Athens and Nineteenth Century America in Lydia Maria Child’s Philothea (1836)

In writing her 1836 novel Philothea, the abolitionist Lydia Maria Child drew on careful reading of Plutarch’s Life of Pericles, Euripides’ Ion, and Plato’s Republic. The novel’s plot, organized around Pericles’ law that both parents must be Athenian citizens for their child to have citizenship, shares features with arguments for the abolition of slavery and for women’s rights that Child made in other writings throughout her lifetime. Child combined a sentimental romance narrative about an enslaved woman that encourages readers to become abolitionists with allusions to Plato’s Republic that affirm the abolitionist conviction that slavery is absolutely unjust. Previous scholarship has treated Child’s use of Greek material in a rather general way. This article demonstrates just how precisely she incorporated elements of Plutarch, Euripides and Plato into the abolitionist story she chose to tell. By expanding understanding of Child’s engagement with the classical past that her gender kept her from learning about in a university setting, this study also contributes to the growing body of knowledge about how women did get access to — and put to use — classical learning.

Exploring African Abolitionism: Fante Perspectives on Domestic Slavery in the Nineteenth-Century Gold Coast

AbstractThis article draws on a variety of primary sources to first illustrate the rise of African abolitionism in the Fante region in the mid-nineteenth century and then situate local abolitionists in the context of colonial legal abolition in the Gold Coast. When the British abolished slavery in 1874, various Fante groups had been developing local anti-slavery views and strategies closely connected to the evolution of a Fante ethnic identity fashioned against the “barbaric” Asante. Tensions arose between the Fante intelligentsia, which spearheaded local abolitionism, and British colonial elites. The article examines the rise of local abolitionism among the coastal Fante through specific ideas, individuals, and events, and discusses subsequent dynamics in the “first age” (1874–1900) of colonial abolitionism in the Gold Coast. It shows that the 1874 abolition was opposed by members of the Fante anti-slavery movement not—as has been argued—because Fante intellectuals were pro-slavery or opposed to the idea of abolition, but because they held different visions of emancipation and were critical of British abolition laws that, unlike in the West Indies, did not compensate slaveowners.