African Captives Research Articles

“[M]anaged at First as if They Were Beasts”

Abstract How did British-American planters forcibly integrate newly purchased Africans into existing slave communities? This article answers that question by examining the “seasoning” of twenty-five enslaved people on Egypt, a mature sugar plantation in Jamaica’s Westmoreland parish, in the mid-eighteenth century. Drawing on the diaries of overseer Thomas Thistlewood, it reveals that Jamaican whites seasoned Africans through a violent program that sought to brutally “tame” Africans to plantation life. Enslaved people fiercely resisted this process, but colonists developed effective strategies to overcome opposition. This article concludes that seasoning strategies were a key component of plantation management because they successfully transformed captive Africans into American slaves.

The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage by John Harris

Reviewed by: The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage by John Harris Robert Colby (bio) Keywords Middle Passage, Slavery, Atlantic slave trade The Last Slave Ships: New York and the End of the Middle Passage. By John Harris. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2020. Pp. 300. Cloth, $30.00.) On September 21, 1859, the barque Pamphylia slipped out of New York harbor. Though purportedly bound for Honduras on a sugar-trading circuit, all evidence pointed to a diff erent, more sinister destination. A Cuban [End Page 704] firm with ties to the slave trade had recently acquired the vessel but obscured its ownership through a charter to another, New York-based Cuban company. This crucial fiction offered the ship an all-important talisman: the right to sail under the U.S. flag. Four months later, however, a British cruiser patrolling for slavers apprehended the Pamphylia near the mouth of the Congo River with six hundred captive Africans aboard. Normally, a ship running under American colors would have been virtually immune from British scrutiny. But after timely intelligence put the warship on the lookout for the Pamphylia, U.S. sovereignty did not shield the slave traders. The British navy took custody of the enslaved, who still endured a simulacrum of the Middle Passage, steered first to St. Helena and then to the British Caribbean to be placed as apprentices. Nevertheless, from the perspective of both the British government and the slave dealers involved, an illicit slave-trading voyage had been successfully suppressed (169–74). In The Last Slave Ships, John Harris demonstrates the outsized role Americans played in the nearly five hundred slaving ventures launched between 1852 and the trade’s final demise in 1867. Though only a handful ended on U.S. soil (including the famous Clotilda and Wanderer), 91 percent took place on U.S.-built ships (59). Others were helmed by American captains, crewed in U.S. ports, or funded by capital laundered through American financial institutions. The confluence of these elements, moreover, made lower Manhattan a particularly convenient hub from which slave traders from Cuba, Brazil, and Portuguese colonies in Africa could continue their operations. The greatest benefit American participation offered slave traders, however, was the protective aegis of the star-spangled banner. The nineteenth century saw a series of nations gradually, though often half-heartedly, endorse efforts to suppress the slave trade. Americans celebrated their early abandonment of the traffic and, through a series of laws and treaties, nominally committed to its cessation. In their case, however, not only was the flesh weak but the spirit also was less than willing. Unless (and, in many cases, even if) slave dealers were caught in the act, prosecution was difficult; U.S. law left considerable loopholes through which suspected slavers could slink, including a failure to ban the equipment required for the trade and a cumbersome definition of citizenship. Ironically, the surviving slave trade also provided moral cover for American slaveholders and their allies who desired to annex Cuba even as they ignored U.S. complicity in that traffic. It was little wonder, then, that three-quarters of [End Page 705] the hundreds of slave ships descending on Africa in the 1850s and 1860s sailed under U.S. colors (59). Only the Republican Party’s ascendancy in the 1860s undercut Americans’ participation in the slave trade. Having campaigned against Democratic hypocrisy on the matter, the Lincoln administration cracked down on slave trafficking, passing new laws, deploying intelligence gathering tactics of the sort favored by the more-successful British, and aggressively prosecuting slave traders like Nathaniel Gordon. Most importantly, Secretary of State William Seward signed a landmark treaty removing many of the protections offered by U.S. colors. With the national government’s authority deployed more enthusiastically than ever before against the trade, the American resources so crucial to its survival dried up, leading to its ultimate demise in the late 1860s. In showing the importance of laws, treaties, and their enforcement to the slave trade, Harris adds a crucial political component to our understanding of the second slavery. This economic phenomenon certainly rested on surging global demand for slave-produced commodities...

The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom by James A. Delle

Reviewed by: The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom by James A. Delle Christopher Blakley (bio) The Archaeology of Northern Slavery and Freedom james a. delle University Press of Florida, 2019 224 pp. African slavery shaped the society, economy, and culture of northeastern North America beginning as early as 1626, when Dutch settlers forcibly relocated Atlantic Africans to New Netherland. Twelve years later William Pierce sailed the Desire from the Caribbean to Boston, where he hoped to sell a cargo of captive Africans, possibly including Dorcas "ye blackmore," in exchange for enslaved Indigenous people seized by settlers during the Pequot War. James A. Delle's study of the archaeology of northern slavery and freedom explores the materiality of enslavement, fugitivity, and emancipation in the Northeast and New England from the early seventeenth century to the antebellum era and Reconstruction. He argues at the outset that "American slavery was not born in the tobacco fields of Virginia or the rice plantations of the Carolina Low Country but in the villages of Puritan New England and on the streets of Dutch New Amsterdam, the settlement that would eventually become New York City" (31). Drawing on previous scholarship—including archaeological field excavations led by colleagues and his own research conducted with field school teams on multiple sites in the Northeast—Delle makes use of an abundance of archival and archaeological materials to consider the lives of enslaved, self-emancipated, and free people of color over the longue durée. The book fuses analysis with historical documents to a range of material cultural evidence from architecture to ceramics, metal and glass artifacts, cultural landscapes, tools, musical instruments, conjure bundles, and children's toys to reconstruct the everyday lives of diverse communities. A central thesis of the book is that enslaved people experienced and survived violence from slaveholders in the North in much the same way as others did in the South, and Delle's efforts to challenge commonplace notions among the public of kind and benevolent northern slaveholders is worthwhile. The book is divided into eight chapters organized into five sections that examine the themes of the history of northern slavery, the materiality of enslavement in the North, the forms of resistance the enslaved practiced in opposition to their enslavers or slave-catching gangs, the kinds of freedoms [End Page 575] that formerly enslaved people pursued, and the commemoration of northern slavery. Delle begins by providing an overview of northern slavery and archaeological investigations, first with the form of critical community archaeology developed at the African Burial Ground in New York. This excavation conducted in Lower Manhattan raised the methodological question of how to "decolonize the field" of historical archaeology, and it is surprising that beyond this brief mention Delle does not explicitly return to this question throughout his book. Other sites of either enslaved or free African Americans discussed include Lucy Foster's Garden in Andover, Massachusetts; two communities of free people—Skunk Hollow, New Jersey, and Parting Ways, Massachusetts; and provisioning plantations in Rhode Island, principally at Newport, a center of Atlantic slaving throughout the eighteenth century. Following his survey of archaeological projects, Delle turns to reviewing the historiography of slavery in the Northeast and New England, and he discusses the scholarship of Wendy Warren and Christy Clark-Pujara. A third chapter takes up a number of archaeological sites in the North, including another African burial ground in Portsmouth, New Hampshire, the provisioning manors of Long Island, and plantations in Connecticut and Massachusetts. In addition to domestic objects like clay pipes and ceramics, Delle draws attention to artifacts associated with conjure and medicine, such as cowrie shells, glass beads, bundles of iron objects, and a stone pestle. Moving to a single case study, Delle presents his research of one plantation, Rose Hill, in the Finger Lakes region of New York State. Descendants of the well-known Carter family of Virginia purchased the estate in 1802 and relocated the enslaved families they possessed to the Genesee Country to produce and sell wheat flour for the Baltimore flour trade as food for provisioning captives on Caribbean plantations. Delle and colleagues investigated the remnant buildings at Rose Hill and its environs, including a home that...

Mobility control in ungovernable spaces: Cultivating the Mediterranean’s fatal materiality

Programmes of migration regulation in the Mediterranean Sea constantly evolve and adapt, changing in accordance to shifting migration patterns and EU policies. Despite the commitment to governing mobility in this sea, migrant death continues to be a significant and indeed growing problem in the Mediterranean. While scholars have examined how the geography of the US-Mexico border is incorporated into an architecture of exclusion ( Doty, 2011 ), this article considers how the sea conceals the violent political workings of a maritime geography that grows increasingly risky for migrants. By bringing the sea to the fore, the article interrogates how the space of the maritime has come to be understood as ungovernable and perilous and what the implications of such framings are in contemporary migration management. The article specifically examines how the maritime geography was framed in early maritime law as unruly and untameable, as well as the way the sea was used to justify the deaths of African captives in insurance law during the Middle Passage. These contexts demonstrate the longer standing logics in contemporary maritime migration management, whereby the assumed fatal materiality of the maritime is used to obscure political violence.

They Called Her Angela

Despite the arrival of African captives in other European settler communities at least 100 years before pirated Africans arrived in Virginia in 1619, it was in that colony that much of the roadmap for North America’s Black slave society was created. Virginia, after all, imported the largest numbers of Africans to North America, held resident the continent’s largest enslaved Black population in the colonial and antebellum eras, and had the first exportable cash crop, signaling that North American White wealth could be generated from Black bodies in the fields of seized Indigenous lands. One of the original captives was an Ndongo woman whom the Portuguese had named Angela. This essay attempts to move this woman from the referential margins to a more central locus as we consider the significance of 1619 in the founding of the nation’s history, the history of the Atlantic World, and the Black female diaspora. What, then, is Angela’s story? And how does it help to frame the broader context of Black women’s lives in British colonized North America?

ESCRAVIDÃO DE AFRICANOS E FABRICAÇÃO DE MADEIRAS NO GRÃO-PARÁ NA SEGUNDA METADE DO SÉCULO XVIII

What I intend to emphasize in this text is the presence of enslaved Africans in the manufacture of wood, in the Captaincy of Grao-Para, mainly at the end of the 18th century, when the effects of the intensification of trafficking in African captives to the region were already felt, through the activities of the General Trading Company of Grao-Para and Maranhao. Based on the documentation of the Overseas Historical Archive and the Public Archive of Para, a dialogue with the historiography pertinent to the theme, especially that which seeks to problematize the “human void”, which was sometimes intended to be demonstrated in narratives about the colonial Amazon, concealed in the view from: extractive region with the use of indigenous labor (Vergolino-Henry & Figueredo, 1990; Funes, 1995; Gomes, 1997; Bezerra Neto, 2012; Chambouleyron, 2004 and 2006; Barbosa, 2009; Silva, 2013).

(AUTO) INSCRIÇÃO COMO RESISTÊNCIA ONTOLÓGICA: MAHOMMAHGARDO BAQUAQUA E SUA NARRATIVA PARA A LIBERDADE

This article is the result of my underway research project in the Postgraduate Program in Ethnic and African Studies of the Faculty of Philosophy and Human Sciences (PÓSAfro) at the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA), which consists of the study of Mohamed Gardo Baquaqua’ autobiography (1854), understanding his trajectory and the strategies of survival and humanization in the African diaspora, considering his narrative, in the process of (self) registration, as an instrument to fight subordination for the emancipation of slavery, constituting itself , therefore, in collective representation of the memories of the captive Africans of the plantation, in a missionary project of freedom. This text is structured as follows: I. (Auto) biography of Baquaqua; II - Invisibility and the silencing of black subjectivities and III - (Self) inscription and ontological resistance. KEYWORDS: Baquaqua. Dehumanization. (Auto) registration. Ontological resistance. &nbsp

Genetic Consequences of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Americas

According to historical records of transatlantic slavery, traders forcibly deported an estimated 12.5 million people from ports along the Atlantic coastline of Africa between the 16th and 19th centuries, with global impacts reaching to the present day, more than a century and a half after slavery’s abolition. Such records have fueled a broad understanding of the forced migration from Africa to the Americas yet remain underexplored in concert with genetic data. Here, we analyzed genotype array data from 50,281 research participants, which—combined with historical shipping documents—illustrate that the current genetic landscape of the Americas is largely concordant with expectations derived from documentation of slave voyages. For instance, genetic connections between people in slave trading regions of Africa and disembarkation regions of the Americas generally mirror the proportion of individuals forcibly moved between those regions. While some discordances can be explained by additional records of deportations within the Americas, other discordances yield insights into variable survival rates and timing of arrival of enslaved people from specific regions of Africa. Furthermore, the greater contribution of African women to the gene pool compared to African men varies across the Americas, consistent with literature documenting regional differences in slavery practices. This investigation of the transatlantic slave trade, which is broad in scope in terms of both datasets and analyses, establishes genetic links between individuals in the Americas and populations across Atlantic Africa, yielding a more comprehensive understanding of the African roots of peoples of the Americas.

Migration Themes and Transnational Identities in Mohammed Ben-Abdallah's The Slaves, Haile Gerima's Sankofa, and Rachid Bouchareb's Little Senegal

86 CLA JOURNAL Migration Themes and Transnational Identities in Mohammed Ben-Abdallah’s The Slaves, Haile Gerima’s Sankofa, and Rachid Bouchareb’s Little Senegal Helena Woodard Since at least the 1980s, high-profile West African slave forts, also known as dungeons, have attracted visitors in the international community for the forts’ role in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Ghana’s Elmina and Cape Coast Castles, along with Senegal’s House of Slaves at Gorée Island, originally functioned as holding cells or prisons for slave captives awaiting sell to European traders before being transported across the Atlantic in the Middle Passage. In Trade Castles and Forts of West Africa,A.W. Lawrence writes,“Nowhere else have small and transitory communities of traders so changed the life of the alien peoples who surrounded them and indirectly of a vast region beyond” (29). Renovated and designated as world heritage sites by UNESCO to mark its historical role in the slavery past, the slave fort has also appealed to certain writers who--through tourism as prism--transformed it from mass cultural artifact to a geo-political, public memory space. Though I write about the slave fort in the context of Atlantic Slavery in my book, Slave Sites on Display: Reflections of Slavery Through Contemporary “Flash” Moments, I am primarily interested, here, in the symbolic slave fort’s mediative function in select contemporary literature between African “locals” and disproportionately slave-descendant African Americans who travel to those sites.In this article,I have chosen to focus on three works that expose complexities in that relationship through partial or full settings that begin at a slave fort in Africa before evolving, diachronically, through a failed Pan-Africanist motif (or the notion of an African diaspora unification) to immersion in debate about tourism, responsibility for the slavery past, and relations between Africans and diaspora slave descendants. By appropriating that motif in this article, I regard the slave fort’s function as a potent symbol for Atlantic slavery through complications regarding departure and return for African diaspora slave descendants who visit slave forts as tourists, and their relationship with African locals that they encounter. Haile Gerima’s classic film, Sankofa (1993), and Rachid Bouchareb’s independent film, Little Senegal (2000), for example, employ migrations themes and transnational identities through African and slave-descendant African American protagonists, but their relationships demonstrate deep fissures largely attributed to the Atlantic Slave Trade. Opening scenes in Sankofa and Little Senegal foreground the slave fort--or what Playwright Mohammed Ben-Abdallah refers to in The Slaves as the “stone CLA JOURNAL 87 Migration Themes and Transnational Identities in The Slaves, Sankofa, and Little Senegal monster” by the sea--where an African griot and slave-descendant African Americans briefly converge and communicate a need to mend their strained relationships. Both films intersect with Ben-Abdallah’s The Slaves through the dungeon as a geo-political, public memory space. The play formalizes the dungeon as a foundational setting for Atlantic slavery, a precursor to the Middle Passage journey, and a foreshadowing of tensions between Africans and slave-descendant African Americans in contemporary society. I therefore place Sankofa and Little Senegal in conversation with The Slaves as these works dramatize the fort or dungeon as a pivotal, originary site that communicates a need for slave-descendant African Americans in the U.S. to connect with their African ancestry and the slave past in an effort to heal its lingering wounds. But while Ben-Abdallah allegorizes Atlantic Slavery within the confines of that space for captive Africans, Gerima and Bouchareb reinscribe its lineage in a complex meditation on slavery and race across the Atlantic through migrations themes and transnational identities for Africans and slave-descendant African Americans in contemporary society. Appropriating the Dungeon as Public Memory Space in The Slaves In anAuthor’s note about The Slaves Revisited,in the publication,titled The Fall of Kumbi and Other Plays, Mohammed Ben-Abdallah stated that his first objective for the revised script was“to provide a confrontation, a dialogue as it were, between the pain and angst of Africa at large, and the Big, White, Stone Monster by the sea . . . the slave fort” (iii, 25 March 2011...

Exhibition: William Blake: Lost in Translation.

Tate Britain, London, 12 September 2019 to 2 February 2020 Tate Britain was built partly on the profits of slavery, from the toil on the sugar plantations of Alabama and the Caribbean.1 The Tate & Lyle business flourished with the blood, sweat, and tears of captive Africans forcibly transported or born captive in the British colonies. Perhaps it’s a form of atonement for this legacy for the Tate to embrace an artist who believed in emancipation and social justice. William Blake died almost 200 years ago in 1827, two decades …

Isotopic evidence for anthropogenic lead exposure on a 17th/18th century Barbadian plantation.

ObjectivesTo identify and characterize anthropogenic lead sources on a 17th/18th century Barbadian plantation and to test if lead isotope analyses can be used to identify the geographic origins of first‐generation African captives.Materials and MethodsWe carried out lead (Pb) isotope analyses on dental enamel samples from 24 individuals from the Newton Plantation Cemetery in Barbados, which had previously been analyzed for strontium (Sr) and oxygen (O) isotope composition (Schroeder et al., American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 2009, 139:547–557) and Pb concentrations (Schroeder et al., American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 2013, 150:203–209.ResultsWe are able to identify British Pb sources, and more specifically Bristol/Mendips Pb, as the most likely source of anthropogenic Pb on the plantation, highlighting the impact of the British Atlantic economy on the lives of enslaved peoples in Barbados during the period of plantation slavery. Furthermore, we find that there is only one clear outlier among seven individuals who had previously been identified as African‐born based on their enamel Sr isotope composition (Schroeder et al., American Journal of Physical Anthropology, 2009, 139:547–557). All other individuals present a very homogenous Pb isotope composition, which overlaps with that of British Pb sources.ConclusionOur results indicate that while Pb isotope analyses can help identify and further characterize the sources of anthropogenic Pb in plantation settings, they might not be suited for identifying the origins of African‐born individuals in diasporic contexts.

The Ruth in (T)ruth: Redactive Reading and Feminist Provocations to History in M. NourbeSe Philip’s Zong!

This essay coins the concept of redactive reading to describe a method for interpreting women’s absences in racialized and gendered histories of collective trauma through M. NourbeSe Philip’s 2008 poem, Zong! In 1781, the Zong crew murdered as many as 150 African captives following a water shortage and tried to claim insurance on victims. Gregson v. Gilbert denied plaintiffs the right to profit from murder without indicting anyone for the atrocity. This diasporic Caribbean poet revives mythological figures—notably, the biblical Ruth—to expose Western law and the English language as insidious tools of epistemic violence. In naming three archetypes that reincarnate “ruth”— the rebellious slave, the lady of society, and the raped whore—this article interrogates the white, patriarchal, imperialist imaginary behind the massacre. Redactive reading is a strategy for reading femininity as a structuring absence on which canons of exclusion—from legal rights to representational politics and the sympathetic imagination—are built.

Haven to the East, Haven to the North: Great Barrington and Pittsfield, Massachusetts

In the first decades of the 18th century, people of African descent accompanied Dutch and British settlers into the Berkshires. In 1783, Massachusetts abolished slavery by judicial decree. In the first federal census in 1790, Massachusetts and Vermont were the only states in the Union that recorded no captive Africans, at least officially. Therefore, these states were seen as havens for those fleeing captivity in slaveholding states. Although Whites transferred their “common sense” understanding of captive Africans to the free population, African Americans created “homeplaces,” as two archaeological assemblages in Massachusetts reveal. The boyhood home of W. E. B. Du Bois in Great Barrington and the Reverend Samuel Harrison Homestead in Pittsfield demonstrate how families were able to create domestic harbors within racialized space. Additionally, issues of identity formation, in a nation that was creating an American identity that was not inclusive of all, are addressed.

Illegal Under the Laws of All Nations? The Courts of Haiti and the Suppression of the Atlantic Trade in African Captives

In 1816, the mostly-American crew of a slaving brig bound from Cuba staged a mutiny before reaching West Africa, and then sailed on (without a captive cargo) to the antislavery republic of Haiti. Their voyage culminated in a remarkable prize case before the admiralty court at Port-au-Prince. The sailors claimed indignation at the “diabolical” slave trade, hoping to win profits from the condemnation of the vessel and to avoid future prosecution for enlisting in a slaving voyage that was illegal under U.S. federal law. Haitian prosecutors invoked the agreements of the Congress of Vienna, arguing that the trade had been prohibited by the laws of nations. It fell to the admiralty court to reconcile such aspirational claims with Haiti's ongoing struggle for political survival. The brig's journey between the United States, Cuba, Spanish Florida, Cape Verde, and finally Haiti reveals the ways in which slave traders calculated the relative risks of legal penalties against the possible gains from the trade. The records of the adjudication of the case show how Haitian officials developed their own legal strategies for the suppression of the trade, laying the foundations for an escalating campaign to police slaving traffic off of their shores.

Évelyne, Scenes, and Rosalie

Évelyne, Scenes, and Rosalie Renée Larrier In December 2004, on a break from the African American and Diasporic Research in Europe: Comparative and Interdisciplinary Approaches conference in Paris, I browsed through the Musée Dapper bookstore (which, unfortunately, closed in 2017). A brightly colored book cover featuring a regal black woman in profile and a red detachable band proclaiming the Prix Soroptimist de la romancière francophone award caught my eye. It was Évelyne Trouillot’s Rosalie l’Infâme, which I devoured that very night.1 What a powerful introduction to her work! It is significant that Philippe Davaine’s artistic rendering depicts narrator Lisette as a close-cropped, natural-hair wearing woman who completely dominates the sailing ship in the background, intimating that she and her ancestors survived the Middle Passage and Atlantic slavery. That a small portrait of Trouillot graces the upper left-hand corner of the back of the book articulates, complements, and reinforces that message, linking the two women to and through centuries of history in a similar way that the knotted cord bonds Brigitte to Lisette. Likewise, Trouillot’s oeuvre connects her to predecessor Marie Vieux Chauvet, contemporary Marie-Célie Agnant, and successor Edwidge Danticat, who wrote the foreword to M. A. Salvadon’s translation The Infamous Rosalie.2 While these Haitian-born writers have all spent years away from the island nation, Trouillot was the only one to return definitively, so that her literary identity has never been debated. Nevertheless, these writers are particularly mindful about representing Haitian women’s and girls’ experiences, and accordingly, creating women-centered texts. Trouillot’s novels, short stories, plays, and children’s and young people’s literature in French and Creole, most of which are published in Port-au-Prince and available abroad, privilege multigenerational relationships with political, social, historical, and gender resonances. [End Page 3] Fast forward to October 2017, to Scenes at 20: Inspirations, Riffs, and Reverberations, the two-day symposium at Rutgers University celebrating the twentieth anniversary of the publication of Saidiya V. Hartman’s Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self -Making in Nineteenth-Century America.3 Listening to the presenters, I began to reflect on the ways in which Rosalie and Scenes are in dialogue, noting that the similarities extended beyond the title of Hartman’s brilliant, pioneering scholarly study. Motivated to explore further, I revisited both texts, concluding that Rosalie l’Infâme, a novel set in mid-eighteenth century colonial Saint-Domingue, could be read in the context of Hartman’s historical analysis of the American South, where slavery also prevailed. Examining the various forms of domination in daily life, a phenomenon she calls the “terror of the mundane and quotidian,”4 Hartman focuses in particular on covert performances of power, those that involve sexuality, such as interactions between white men and enslaved women that range from coercive arrangements to rape; questions of subjectivity and agency; and resistance and freedom. In Rosalie, the enslaved women adopt various strategies to survive that involve exchanging their bodies for a semblance or measure of agency: Gracieuse with Fayot to avoid working in the fields; Clarisse and Louise to free their children. Brigitte’s is a special case. Although she finally succumbs to Montreuil’s pressure, after his repeated threats and having her niece Ayouba beaten twice, she does achieve agency by sparing others, some of whom are not related to her. In addition to later negotiating the escape of her sister Charlotte and Ayouba, Brigitte uses her medical knowledge not only to abort her three fetuses, but to kill sixty-nine newborns in order to save them from a life of enslavement, her declared mission. In addition, certain scenes reconstruct Hartman’s notion of the simultaneous performance of pleasure and pain. One such incident takes place on the slave ship Rosalie during the Middle Passage. While the white sailors are amused at a Hausa woman dancing to the beat of a drum, the African captives understand that hers is a dance of death, and, indeed, she jumps into the sea. Another example is the spectacle of Sarah parading her stylishly dressed female servants through the town market, masking the physical violence...

Lynnell L. Thomas, Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. 296. $83.57 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Lynnell L. Thomas, <i>Desire and Disaster in New Orleans: Tourism, Race, and Historical Memory</i>. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014. Pp. 296. $83.57 (cloth); $24.95 (paper).

Gold versus Life: Jobbing Gangs and British Caribbean Slavery

Jobbing gangs—large groups of enslaved people who were principally hired out to dig sugarcane holes—were a crucial component of the British Caribbean slave economy. Emerging first in the early eighteenth century, they comprised approximately 10 percent of enslaved people in the British Caribbean by the late eighteenth century before declining after the abolition of the slave trade. The growth in jobbing gangs stemmed from elite sugar planters’ desires to temporarily augment their permanent captive labor force, boost productivity, and simultaneously preserve the health of their own enslaved laborers. The enormous profits that middling whites could earn by buying captive Africans and hiring them out as a jobbing gang accelerated social mobility in the islands. The captives whom these whites enslaved were highly mobile, enabling them to escape the confines of a single plantation. But they also experienced some of the worst working and living conditions of any enslaved people in the Americas, exposing significant inequalities among British Caribbean slaves. Examining the origins, operation, and eventual decline of jobbing gangs thus reveals the British Caribbean sugar economy as an insidiously adaptable institution that combined the flexibility of wage labor with the unmitigated violence of racial slavery.

Distant Voices Then and Now: The Impact of Isolation on the Courtroom Narratives of Slave Ship Captives and Asylum Seekers

Part I compares the nineteenth century cases of the Antelope and the Amistad to identify why they resulted in different outcomes despite having similar fact patterns. The Antelope concerned the fate of approximately 280 African captives discovered on a slave trade ship upon its interception by a U.S. revenue cutter. Since the slave trade in the United States was illegal at the time, the captives were transported to Savannah for trial through which their status—free or slave—would be determined. After a lengthy trial and appeals process in which Spain and Portugal laid claim to the captives, the Supreme Court determined that those captives claimed by a non-U.S. nation were slaves. The Court reasons that however “abhorrent” the slave trade was, the United States was obligated to recognize the rights of other nations to participate in it. In comparison, the Amistad concerned the fate of captives aboard a slave trade ship in which the captives committed mutiny, attempted to sail to Africa, but were captured by a U.S. vessel. The Supreme Court ordered them free despite the Spanish government’s claim that the captives were its property. Part I explores these different outcomes and argues that the absence of Antelope captives’ stories in the litigation process was partly due to the decision to isolate captives in slavery before their status was determined. In particular, it argues that this isolation affected the outcome of the Antelope by preventing captives from sharing their anecdotes and translating them to a format that would resonate with their legal counsel, the public, and judges. In contrast, the Amistad captives, while also detained, were situated close to those who could help them. They were able to transform their truths into a winning narrative for the court by understanding and leveraging the talents and expertise of counsel, and the biases of judges and the public. Part II argues that 200 years later, a similar environment of isolation suppresses the stories of another group with undetermined legal status: asylum seekers. Although slave ship captives were forced into the country with chains, while asylum seekers are driven into the country by fear, the legal status of both groups in their respective time periods was undetermined upon their arrival. Both groups deserved, by legal and moral standards, the opportunity to present the truth behind their arrival and to prove their legal status. Part II argues that the detention of asylum seekers mirrors the isolation of the Antelope captives by removing detainees from those most able to help them develop a persuasive narrative truth. Detention silences important voices, aggravates ineffective representation, damages public perception, and ultimately harms case outcomes.

Speaking for Themselves? Understanding African Freed Slave Testimonies from the Western Indian Ocean, 1850s-1930s

In this article we mine an array of British anti-slavery materials seeking the voices of enslaved East Africans in the western Indian Ocean. We draw attention to the numerous problems of translation involved in this kind of basic research and to the critical role played by both indigenous and British interpreters in the process of enabling captive Africans to “speak for themselves.” The lesson here is that historians must exercise particular care in utilizing these precious sources.

Patterns in the intercolonial slave trade across the Americas before the nineteenth century

Abstract: The slave trade within the Americas, after the initial disembarkation of African captives in the New World, has received scant attention from historians, especially before the abolition of the transatlantic traffic. This article examines such intra-American trafficking as an introduction to the digital project Final Passages: The Intra-American Slave Trade Database, which aims to document evidence of slave voyages throughout the New World. This article does not provide statistics on this internal slave trade, as ongoing research will deliver new data. Instead, we consolidate qualitative knowledge about these intercolonial slave routes. As the article focuses on the era prior to British and U.S. abolition of the transatlantic trade (1807-1808), we leave out the nineteenth-century domestic slave trades in the United States and Brazil to focus on survivors of the Atlantic crossing who endured subsequent forced movement within the Americas.