Atlantic Trade Research Articles

Early Publication History of Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave (1838)

Previous articleNext article No AccessBibliographical NoteEarly Publication History of Narrative of James Williams, an American Slave (1838)Michael WinshipMichael Winship Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Papers of the Bibliographical Society of America Volume 116, Number 2June 2022Black Bibliography: Traditions and Futures Published for the Bibliographical Society of America Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/719986 Views: 82Total views on this site © 2022 Bibliographical Society of America. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Love and Resistance in a Time of COVID: American Studies and Utopic Critique

Love and Resistance in a Time of COVID: American Studies and Utopic Critique Cathy J. Schlund-Vials (bio) Black Lives Matter is really an affirmation for our people. It’s a love note for our people, but it’s also a demand. Even if we are going to get an indictment or a guilty verdict, that actually would not provide us with the larger vision of liberation that our communities actually deserve. . . . we deserve to live in a world where we are not murdered. We deserve to live in a world where there’s no impunity, but beyond this question of impunity there are all these structures that are actually doing a disservice to our people. —Opal Tometi, cofounder of #BlackLivesMatter (2015) Indicative of noncompliance, suggestive of opposition, and connotative of defiance, “resistance” is a seemingly aspirational, out-of-reach idea in the face of contemporary pandemic polemics, present-day white supremacist politics, and ongoing rights violations. Congruently, these dystopic actualities, dishearteningly experienced and rendered overwhelmingly visible in daily reports of “COVID-related deaths,” “big lie” recounts, “January 6th arrests,” “election integrity” disenfranchisement, and border-enforced catastrophe, render ostensibly impossible an affective turn to love. This current state of US affairs makes decidedly more relevant and correspondingly more accessible less optimistic emotions associated with grief and grievance. As further context and now-familiar recapitulation, in February 2022, an estimated 990,000 Americans have died from SARS-CoV-2. In the months following President Donald Trump’s baseless claim that the 2020 election was stolen, four states (Arizona, Georgia, New Hampshire, and Pennsylvania) engaged ballot recounts that—despite costly expenditure and considerable labor—consistently reconfirmed a Biden presidential victory. Trump’s “big lie” allegation was by no means limited to challenges at the ballot box, as evidenced by the insurrectionist storming of the US Capitol on January 6, 2021; almost one year after those attacks, 725 individuals have been arrested and investigations concerning other participants is ongoing. And, as 2021 came to a close, nineteen states passed laws limiting access to the ballot. To pessimistically surmise and depressingly summarize, the start of the second decade in the second millennium uncannily corresponds to what [End Page 225] the sixteenth-century social philosopher Sir Thomas More characterized in his fictional satire, Utopia. Published in 1516, Utopia is not surprisingly a “product of its times” via genre, form, and thematic preoccupations. As parodic commentary and learned treatise, Utopia begins in a present marked by multiple civil wars abroad (in Europe), increased monarchical tyranny at home (as emblematized by King Henry VIII’s “divine right” rule of England), and border-crossing religious movement (specifically the Protestant Reformation). Such dystopic imaginaries function as evocative backdrop for the more hopeful visions that dominate More’s most famous work. Consonant with the imperial logics and “New World” vistas of the so-termed Age of Exploration, Utopia repeatedly accesses US namesake Amerigo Vespucci’s travel accounts as the basis for its fictive figurations of an isolated, uncharted island west of Europe. In an exchange concerning the recently encountered Americas, More writes, “We did not ask if he had seen any monsters, for monsters have ceased to be news. There is never any shortage of horrible creatures who prey on human beings, snatch away their food, or devour whole populations; but examples of wise planning are not so easy to find.” More’s allusion to “horrible creatures who prey on human beings” unintentionally yet pointedly encapsulates the contemporaneous institutionalization of the transatlantic slave trade and regimented settler colonialism in the Americas. Furthermore, despite the passage of almost five centuries and notwithstanding More’s non-US nationality, Utopia’s overt acknowledgment of presentist monstrosity and concomitant imagining of a nonmonstrous place encapsulates the vexed dimensions of twenty-first-century US nationhood while engendering alternative visions of love and resistance. On one level, such sanguine visions, dialogically connected to this year’s “Creativity within Revolt” conference theme, concomitantly serve as “past is prologue,” “present is epilogue,” and “future as afterword” foundations for this address’s confessedly ambitious consideration of American studies as previously imperial (and correspondingly imperiled) field, currently configured critical interdiscipline, and prospective site of utopic critique. On another level...

The Strangers’ Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders: Inaugurating a Hospitable World Order in Mid-Victorian Britain

This essay examines the Strangers’ Home for Asiatics, Africans and South Sea Islanders, in London, as a case study on nationalist mythmaking driven by anxieties over immigration. At this institution’s 1856 inaugural ceremony, Prince Albert encouraged Britons to behave like globally conscientious citizens vis-à-vis destitute migrants: the lascars or Asian seamen whose exploited labour fuelled east-west shipping from the seventeenth to mid-twentieth centuries. Discriminatory legislation barred them from permanent residency in Britain, forcing them into poverty despite their right to lawful settlement as British subjects. To expedite their repatriation, the Home’s missionary founders used pageantry and newsprint to promote patriotic narratives about Christian hospitality toward strangers. Their anti-immigrant philanthropy benefited an Indian Ocean recruitment system dependent on lascars’ redeployment, an indentured servitude that Evangelicals compared to transatlantic slavery. Consequently, global abolitionism functioned as a rhetorical device for distinguishing citizens from noncitizens in racialized terms before these categories were legally codified.

Staging Black Fugitivity by Stacie Selmon McCormick

Reviewed by: Staging Black Fugitivity by Stacie Selmon McCormick Patrick Maley Stacie Selmon McCormick. Staging Black Fugitivity. Columbus: Ohio State UP, 2019. 178 pp. $29.99. "We live in a present animated by slavery" (1). This is the first and most important sentence in Stacie Selmon McCormick's thoughtful and productive Staging Black Fugitivity, which examines how plays written by contemporary Black authors interrogate the resonance of American slavery. McCormick insists that playwrights like Tanya Barfield, August Wilson, Lydia Diamond, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins, Robert O'Hara, and Suzan-Lori Parks engage with slavery's lingering, domineering effects. McCormick shows persuasively how these playwrights complicate received orthodoxies, suggesting that their plays "engage in a counter-archival practice" (9). Staging Black Fugitivity argues that this process proves urgent in a contemporary world still violently disrupted by slavery's repercussions. The book's Introduction lays its theoretical groundwork and offers a short discussion of Barfield's Blue Door (2006), which McCormick shows to exemplify the existential quest at the center of her book's analysis. In order to comprehend his present struggles, Barfield's protagonist, Lewis, must engage with his ancestral past—both slavery and latter-day racial terror—as well as the nuances of his own Black experience. McCormick situates this and the book's subsequent discussions within the tradition of the neo-slave narrative, a concept that critics locate primarily in novels. By referencing plays like Amiri Baraka's Slave Ship (1967) and George C. Wolfe's The Colored Museum (1986), McCormick establishes the neo-slave narrative as a valuable heuristic for theater, arguing that "black drama brings to bear embodiment as well as sonic and visual modes of representing slavery not fully available to the written neo-slave narratives" (7). From the outset, the book demonstrates how Black drama contributes to the process of unpacking slavery and its aftereffects. [End Page 258] In chapter one, McCormick defines fugitivity and taxonomizes its operation in the work of Black playwrights. She asserts that fugitivity emerges in Black drama when we see "the centering of black subjectivity more prominently in the telling of slavery," "the assertion that emancipation remains an ongoing and unfinished process," and "the troubling of notions of home" (23). The chapter offers four "categories for understanding the fluid approaches to fugitivity and slavery that each drama takes on" (27). These are "Revolutionary Fugitivity," which seeks to dismantle white supremacy; "Fugitive Time," which troubles temporality by injecting fluidity; "Black Feminist Fugitivity," which seeks liberation from racial and sexual objectification for Black women; and "Black Queer Fugitivity," which focuses on "black queer subjects beyond institutions—particularly educational, medical, and domestic—since they are founded on heteronormative constructs and have been historically hostile to queer subjects" (26, 79). The second chapter focuses on August Wilson's Gem of the Ocean (2003), arguing that the play "stands as a counter-monument to slavery in its attention to the implications for the ways we remember, misremember, or fail to remember this history" (55). In order to do this, McCormick invokes the notion of marronage, "a term that conceptualizes the psychological and physical act of formerly enslaved individuals existing outside of the society in order to live autonomously" (59). Set in 1904, the community of Gem includes ex-slaves and people born ostensibly free, a confluence that McCormick demonstrates is operative in Wilson's treatment of emancipation as a troubled process, not a singular proclamation. Collapsing the distance between Gem's setting and contemporary America, she argues convincingly that the play is "a demonstration of the practices of survival enacted by black Americans and their efforts to attain a modicum of freedom in a hostile nation" (76). Chapter three, "Performing Escape," examines how Lydia Diamond in Harriet Jacobs: A Play (2008) and Branden Jacobs-Jenkins in An Octoroon (2014) signify on the minstrel tradition to "enable black subjects to challenge confining racial constructions and ironically forward more expansive representations of blackness" (78). Both plays feature Black performers playing slave-era white characters, allowing the writers "to reveal all the ways discourses of slavery misrepresent black subjectivity and advance problematic conceptions of blackness that resonate in the present" (79). The escape McCormick references in her title is...

Demographic trends in late‐slavery Jamaica, 1817–32

AbstractEarly nineteenth‐century demographic trends on sugar estates in Jamaica, the most important British Caribbean colony, are examined through the 1817–32 public slave registers. We seek evidence regarding the background to the island's 1831–2 popular insurrection, the immediate cause of the London parliament's vote in 1833 to abolish colonial slavery. Some historians argue that the revolt occurred as ‘political’ effect from a sudden upsurge of metropolitan anti‐slavery activism in 1830–1. They believe the uprising broke out despite improvement in enslaved people's material welfare, favoured by many slaveholders to secure population increase after the closure of the British transatlantic slave trade in 1808. Alternative ‘economic’ assessments judge that increasing workloads had been aggravating popular unrest before the revolt. Commercial pressures, and the imminent likelihood of emancipation, allegedly outweighed welfare concerns. The excess of slave deaths over births widened between 1817 and 1832. However, the registers show that demographic deficits resulted mainly from the ageing of the last Africa‐born cohorts. Jamaica‐born enslaved people became self‐reproducing. There was no general pre‐1831 regime deterioration. Most slaveholders sought to maintain their Jamaican assets for the long term through pro‐natalist measures, and did not expect emancipation. The revolt's causes were thus more ‘political’ than ‘economic’.

The Shadow of American Slavery

The Shadow of American Slavery

Black Lives Matter and Mães de Maio: What Unites Us

The long history of slavery in the USA and Brazil is still evident when looking at the violence which takes place in each country today. In addition, the growing militarization of public management is due to the foreign policy of the USA and the military dictatorship of Brazil which lasted more than 30 years. Facing situations of violence, mainly state-owned, the 1970s were marked by women's resistance and struggle against violence, authoritarianism and lack of citizenship, particularly in Latin America. These social movements represented the distancing of ideology as an engine of social mobilizations, as well as the conversion of collective identity policies into generators of responses. The ability to form a collective identity around the common identification of oppression allowed the development of these new mass movements. From the construction of a collective female identity, intimate and personal aspects gained a central dimension in the identification of oppression, consequently, in the project of personal and social transformation. The agendas of this second wave of the feminist movement encompassed both the struggle for civil rights and the rights of blacks, pacifist, student and decolonization movements. Considering the influence of these new feminist movements on two current social movements, namely “Black Lives Matter” (United States) and “Mães de Maio” (Brazil), I want to understand, in this article, how the guiding meanings of gender, race, sexuality, class and generation, present in the third and fourth waves of feminists, appear in practice, in these two social movements that have the same generative facts as triggers for their constitution.

Garibaldi in the Land of Cotton

It can be difficult to take Confederate nationhood seriously. Born out of fear of Northern interference with their peculiar institution, the Confederacy was riven by divisions, had a deliberately weak central government, lasted less than five years, and failed to gain diplomatic recognition from a single country. Most importantly, because the North prevailed, so too did Abraham Lincoln’s claim that the states in rebellion never actually left the United States. Because states had neither the right nor the ability under the Constitution to secede, a southern nation was an impossibility. Had the South won the war, of course, this argument would have been irrelevant. But the South did not win, thus it was not, and could never have been, its own nation. Ann Tucker’s monograph, Newest Born of Nations, attempts to return contingency to the question of Confederate nationalism by reminding readers that revolution seemed far more likely in...

Victims or Victors? The Challenges of Launching a Black American Muslim Conference

ABSTRACT This study combines participant observation and textual analysis conducted over a multi-year period. It analyzes the Black American Muslim Conference’s (BAMC) establishment of an annual forum for addressing issues pertinent to the descendants of African slaves in the United States practicing normative Sunni Islam. When announced, it faced backlash for its delimitations of Black American Muslims as an imagined community inheriting an ethnographically distinct theological legacy. A flood of contestations appeared on social media claiming the conference was divisive, irreligious, and racist. Repeatedly challenged on what bound them as an imagined community, organisers were compelled into clarifying the conference’s scope in exchanges on social media while maintaining their expressed inclusivity. The successive conferences have repeatedly struggled to gain wide support from Muslim organisations. Recurring panels have navigated polarisation by balancing individualist and collectivist themes while maintaining weariness towards endorsing victimhood or Uncle Tom narratives.

South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War

The dominant narratives of slavery in the United States depict a runaway's route to freedom as a constant movement to the northern United States or Canada via the Underground Railroad. Alice Baumgartner details the importance of the less-explored phenomenon of enslaved people in the United States who opted to flee south to Mexico. In South to Freedom: Runaway Slaves to Mexico and the Road to the Civil War, Baumgartner goes beyond just offering a narrative of the alternate direction to freedom and argues that enslaved African Americans who took the southern route played a critical role in sectional conflicts over slavery in the United States. The book begins in the early nineteenth century and ends in 1867, after the United States abolished slavery. In this time frame Baumgartner illustrates how as slavery expanded across the southern United States, Mexican leaders began restricting and abolishing slavery in their territories, which had consequences for the United States.Baumgartner states that, based on her research, roughly 3,000 to 5,000 people fled to Mexico for freedom, which is a fraction of those estimated to have fled to the north (p. 4). The thorough analysis of consular records, correspondence, court cases, and newspapers paints a vivid picture of the complexities of this period. In 12 chapters the book seamlessly moves between slavery in Mexico and the United States and displays the overlaps that resulted in political, legal, military, and moral conflicts. The first three chapters provide a brief overview of the history of slavery in the United States and Mexico. These chapters narrate the central role that US settlement in the Mexican region of Téjas would play in the 1830s and detail reactions to Mexico's calls for slavery's abolition, ultimately accomplished by 1837. Baumgartner's work forces us to seriously consider the macro- and microlevel consequences of shifting borders. Chapters 4 and 5 engage the responses of officials in both Mexico and the United States to abolition and the complicated position of Téjas as US settlers moved to this Mexican region with the idea of expanding slavery there. Chapters 6 and 7 emphasize the central role of slavery in the Texas Revolution (1835–36) and in the United States' 1845 annexation of Texas. Chapter 8 explains the US-Mexican War (1846–48) and the increased hostilities regarding slavery after the United States took over more than half of Mexico's territory and newly incorporated western states like California and New Mexico drafted constitutions to prohibit slavery against Southern slaveholding state politicians' wishes.Throughout the book Baumgartner includes the actions that runaways took, yet the later chapters provide more thorough analyses of the broader consequences of these actions. Chapter 9 focuses on the agency and ingenuity of runaways who fled to Mexico for freedom as they joined military colonies, moved to cities, or hired themselves out as labor on haciendas. Enslaved people knew of the abolition of slavery in Mexico and took advantage of that knowledge to flee, whether on foot or hiding on ships as stowaways. Chapter 10 addresses US settlement of former Mexican territories after the US-Mexican War and the on-the-ground consequences of competing national and regional laws regarding slavery. Chapter 11 addresses African Americans in Mexico seeking US citizenship. Chapter 12 focuses on the American Civil War and ends with the role of Maximilian, installed by the French as emperor of Mexico, to demonstrate how slavery wove the national contexts of the United States and Mexico together.A boon for future researchers is how Baumgartner details a wide range of special collections and city, state, and national archives across Mexico and the United States that hold information on runaway African Americans fleeing to Mexico. This work also pushes us to ask further questions. What African-descended communities already existed in Mexico during the nineteenth century? What happened to people years after they arrived in Mexico? What happened to runaways' descendants in Mexico? These questions do not suggest oversights in the work under review. Instead, they highlight the significance of this work in getting us to ask more questions about this crucial topic and time.Through well-sourced accounts, Baumgartner demonstrates the similarities between the southern and northern routes to freedom in terms of the types of actors assisting in escapes, the potential exploitation of runaways, the possibility of capture, and limited employment opportunities once runaways arrived to free spaces. The individual circumstances collectively tied together the broader regional and national contexts of the United States and Mexico and played a crucial role in the sectional conflicts that would lead to the American Civil War. South to Freedom will be insightful for the general reader and informative for students of comparative slavery and freedom; it also adds intriguing angles of query for historians of the United States and Mexico.

Upon the Altar of Work: Child Labor and the Rise of a New American Sectionalism

Upon the Altar of Work: Child Labor and the Rise of a New American Sectionalism

No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice by Karen L. Cox

Reviewed by: No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice by Karen L. Cox Meghan H. Martinez No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice. By Karen L. Cox. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. xii, 206. $24.00, ISBN 978-1-4696-6267-1.) In his seminal work Black Reconstruction ([New York, 1935], p. 714), W. E. B. Du Bois confronts the consequences of the erasure of slavery in American history, stating, "Our histories tend to discuss American slavery so impartially, that in the end nobody seems to have done wrong and everybody was right. Slavery appears to have been thrust upon unwilling helpless America, while the South was blameless in becoming its center." In No Common Ground: Confederate Monuments and the Ongoing Fight for Racial Justice, Karen L. Cox explores the enduring truth of Du Bois's statement and provides insight into exactly how and why this false version of American history persists. In this slim volume, Cox offers an important and accessible history of white supremacist monuments and myths. Conversations about public spaces are becoming more commonplace, and this book parses the nuance. Cox challenges readers to take Lost Cause supporters at their word. Although such supporters are both defensive of the institution of slavery and insistent that the "peculiar institution" does not define them, she paints a portrait of a region that is as unwilling to surrender the battle over memory as it was to admit defeat in the war over slavery. She explains how white women were complicit in perpetuating racial inequality, carrying the banner of the Lost Cause almost immediately following the end of the Civil War, not only to absolve the men they loved but also to make sure those men retained social and political power. Regarding how we should contend with Confederate statues in the current era, Cox moves the conversation forward by discussing the shortcomings of "counter monuments" as an attempt to "balance" a landscape dedicated to Dixie, and by examining how political disenfranchisement has limited what action can be taken in opposition to Confederate monuments (pp. 134, 141). Perhaps most important, Cox effectively contextualizes the battle over public spaces as a microcosm of a fight for political power. If monuments could perpetuate myths about the alleged civility of the Civil War, then southern white communities were never forced to admit their true cause was white supremacy, no matter what Alexander H. Stephens may have said. As Cox points out, "for black southerners, the living and breathing Confederacy, with all of its related symbols, made it feel as though Dixie never fell" (p. 82). Confederate monuments both mythologized a false history of the Civil War and cast so-called southern heritage as exclusively white. Cox expertly employs [End Page 431] Black newspapers and personal interviews to explore the southern heritage often left out of Confederate memory—Black southern heritage. Cox's work centers Black opposition to Confederate memorials, telling a story of continued resistance to white supremacy. Black resistance was ever-present and inherently political. Some individuals defaced monuments, while others organized civil rights protests in the shadows of Confederate monuments. Cox argues that Black opposition has had an important impact on the narrative surrounding Confederate memorials. She documents how the protests that toppled Confederate statues in 2020 built on a century of Black protest and activism. Cox argues that after the gutting of the Voting Rights Act in 2013, southern states were empowered to pass legislation "protecting" Confederate monuments from removal, even in communities interested in reevaluating them. In gerrymandered districts, Confederate monuments were offered more protection than Black votes. These successful voter suppression efforts resulted in rendering Confederate monuments essentially untouchable. The author also takes care to document the amount of state money invested in Confederate monuments, highlighting the systemic nature of racial inequality. No Common Ground makes it clear why the contemporary battle over Confederate monuments and public spaces is so fraught. It is an important read for anyone seeking to deepen their understanding of the conversation. Meghan H. Martinez Florida State University Copyright © 2022 The Southern Historical Association

Novel Spaces

Novel Spaces

Sons of the Waves: The Common Seaman in the Heroic Age of Sail

Sons of the Waves: The Common Seaman in the Heroic Age of Sail

The Cumulative Costs of Racism and the Bill for Black Reparations

Two major procedures for establishing the monetary value of a plan for reparations for Black American descendants of US slavery are considered in this paper: 1) Enumeration of atrocities and assignment of a dollar value to each as a prelude to adding up the total, and 2) Identification of a summary measure that captures the dollar amount of the cumulative, intergenerational effects of anti-Black atrocities. Under the first approach, the itemization strategy, we assess wage costs to the enslaved of bondage; financial gains to the perpetrators of slavery; damages to Black victims of post-Civil War white massacres and lynchings; losses from discrimination in the provision of the home buying supports from the Federal Housing Administration and the G.I. Bill; and income penalties due to racial discrimination in employment. Under the second approach, the global indicator strategy, we calculate the present value of providing 40 acres of land to freed slaves in 1865 and the current wealth gap between Black and White Americans. We conclude that the latter standard, the racial wealth gap, provides the best gauge for the size of the bill for Black reparations.

Confederate Exodus: Social and Environmental Forces in the Migration of US Southerners to Brazil

Almost every other year a newspaper publishes an article about how the Confederate flag still flies in a hidden place in the Brazilian countryside. In the years after the American Civil War, thousands of Southern families migrated to other countries, with Brazil becoming one of their main destinations. Settlements were established in different parts of the country, but it is only in Santa Bárbara d'Oeste, in the state of São Paulo, that a community of descendants survives to this day. This group, the so-called Confederados, with their annual parties and reenactments of American Civil War battles, has fascinated many people over the decades. Still, this is a little-known story among the wider public in either the United States or Brazil, and only recently has it been the object of more substantial scholarship. Confederate Exodus by Alan P. Marcus adds to this literature.Divided into five chapters, the book presents various aspects of the Confederate migration, including the push and pull factors behind the movement and the migrants' contributions to and impact on their new setting. Building on Laura Jarnagin's A Confluence of Transatlantic Networks: Elites, Capitalism, and Confederate Migration to Brazil (2008), Marcus starts by outlining the trade relations that connected Baltimore to Rio de Janeiro in the first half of the nineteenth century, with the former supplying mainly wheat in exchange for coffee. These relations were important for the migration movement, as we learn in the following chapter, in which the author outlines connections between those merchants and specific immigration agents. The same chapter provides an overview of the various US settlements in Brazil and their main characters, highlighting the multiple reasons why settlements failed in places other than Santa Bárbara d'Oeste. A third chapter outlines key aspects of nineteenth-century Brazil, from landownership patterns to literacy levels. The following chapter explores issues of race and compares the United States and Brazil. It also explores the racist ideas of key figures such as Louis Agassiz, Matthew Fontaine Maury, and Aureliano Cândido Tavares Bastos in order to understand the ideological climate for much of the discussion and policies surrounding the Confederate migration. The last chapter focuses on the Santa Bárbara d'Oeste settlement, discussing its importance for the expansion of Protestantism and US schools in Brazil. The chapter also assesses Cemitério do Campo (the Confederate cemetery) as a key site for the reproduction of group identity over time.The book's most controversial aspects are those related to race and slavery. The author rejects explanations of the migration that focus on slavery and racism, such as those offered by Gerald Horne and Charles Willis Simmons, as too simplistic; Marcus offers instead a conjunction of factors that he considers to be more complex. But slavery then completely disappears from the explanation. In trying to understand the Confederados as any other immigrant group, Marcus neglects the fact that those individuals had been raised in one of the largest racially based slave societies of the Americas, sometimes as slaveholders themselves. They did not need to believe in the creation of a slave empire abroad, as Maury and a few others did, to hope to continue as slaveholders, at least for some time. And Brazil was one of the last places where this was possible. But Marcus argues instead that the Confederados “were well-aware that Brazil's population consisted of a sizeable number of black and miscegenated populations,” taking this as evidence that they were not “recalcitrant” or “Negrophobic” (p. 130). They escaped the “new kind of virulent racism” that pervaded the postbellum South and “ostensibly followed the Brazilian-based hybrid construction of race” (p. 132).To reinforce this point, the author argues that the Confederados were not significantly involved with slavery in their new setting. But the evidence to support this is too thin. Unfortunately, Marcus did not explore the many legal records involving Confederados that are stored at the Centro Cultural Martha Watts, in Piracicaba. A quick look at these records shows how slavery was important for the Southern immigrants to Brazil. There are references, for example, to slaveholders renting their captives to other families, which complicates the idea that slavery was restricted to a few individuals. Other records show Confederados asking for money to purchase slaves in Rio de Janeiro and individuals being arrested for torturing a slave. The founder of Cemitério do Campo was killed by his own slave. In sum, the Confederados indeed arrived in Brazil with limited resources and amid rising slave prices caused by the end of the transatlantic slave trade. But this makes it all the more impressive that an elite within the community could have purchased a nonnegligible number of captives in the interprovincial slave trade. We still await a full assessment of the relationship of the community with slavery.

New Materialisms, Familiar Challenges

New Materialisms, Familiar Challenges

Misuse of Psychiatry

Misuse of Psychiatry

Hauntology in Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Kim Sŏk-Pŏm’s The Curious Tale of Mandogi's Ghost

This study compares the ontology of ghosts in African American novelist Toni Morrison’s Beloved and Zainichi Korean writer Kim Sŏk-Pŏm’s The Curious Tale of Mandogi s Ghost and explores the possibility of healing for historical scars. While Morrison s novel shows the physical and psychological scars left by the institutional violence of American slavery and the Fugitive Slave Law, Kim s novel deals with the annihilation of humanity itself surrounding the Jeju 4.3 Uprising and Massacre, a tragedy of modern Korean history. In these two novels, these ghosts are portrayed as reincarnations of victims of a tragic history who met unjust and untimely deaths or were not mourned sufficiently after death. By comparing the ways these ghosts haunt the survivors, this study tries to inquire how we should mourn the untimely return of the ghosts from time out-of-joint, what is true mourning, and what is the ethical basis for the impossible mourning, using Jacques Derrida s “hauntology” and the theory of mourning as frames of reference. This study concludes that while Beloved the ghost reminds us of the impossible mourning as a complete other who has died but lives in ourselves, Mandogi’s ghost lives with us as a ghostly other who has never left us.

Amanda Brickell Bellows. American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination.

Amanda Brickell Bellows. <i>American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination</i>.