Black Slave Women Research Articles

EMANCIPATION IN THE AMERICAN ARTISTIC CONSCIOUSNESS OF THE XIX CENTURY

This article is devoted to the research of discourse of emancipation in American artistic consciousness on examples of abolitionist novel “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” (1852) by Harriet Beecher Stowe and painting images of XIX century. The topicality of the research is due to insufficient study in Ukrainian philosophy of the ideas of abolitionism and the emancipation of black Americans through the prism of literary images, especially painting images. Among the research tasks are: to analyze topics of slavery and emancipation, ways of representation of racist and abolitionist ideology in the novel’s plot and artistic images; to analyze types of images of “blacks” in literature and painting. Novelty of work is in the reconstruction of emancipation discourse, which confronts with discourse of racism and black Americans’ discrimination in the American literature (on the example of Beecher Stowe’s novel) and in painting images of XIX century. The novel of Harriet Beecher Stowe became a bestseller in Europe and America, the symbol of revolution, it stirred up people’s consciousness in many countries which used different forms of dependency and obligation during XIX – XX century, and later it entered the list of classics of children’s literature. Using the novel as an example, the author shows that the two opposite discourses – colonial (slavery) and anti-colonial (emancipation) are the basis of the controversy of the protagonists, which reflects the social and political controversy over the position and status of black Americans. Ideas of women’s emancipation from gender, social and labor oppression are reflected in the images of black slave women, and in the XX century they became the ideological basis of “black feminism”. Using examples of the novel and painting, the author examines racial and gender stereotypes, the problem of the relationship between “white” and “black”, the problem of preserving the family and women’s resistance to male domination in conditions of slavery, the problem of the formation of national identity in America after the abolition of slavery. The author analyzes the plots in European and American painting, which reflect not only “colonial” images where black Americans are represented as racial and cultural Others, but also “emancipation” images, which symbolically state the resistance to slavery or confirm the subject’s freedom. It is researched in the article that the active development of the emancipation topic in the artistic consciousness shows the change of social status of racial Others in the public consciousness of the XIX century, which was the result of abolitionist and women’s movements for minority rights in America.

Women in Texas History by Angela Boswell

Reviewed by: Women in Texas History by Angela Boswell Linda English Women in Texas History. By Angela Boswell. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2018. Pp. xx, 345. $37.00, ISBN 978-1-62349-707-1.) Angela Boswell’s Women in Texas History is a narrative account of Texas history told through the experiences of women, spanning from the prehistoric period to Senator Wendy Davis’s marathon filibuster for reproductive rights on the floor of the Texas legislature in 2013. Throughout the book, Boswell’s gendered focus intersects with racial, ethnic, and class categories of analysis, providing an ambitious and highly inclusive examination of the state’s history. [End Page 130] On this approach, Boswell notes that “this book pays special attention to the differences in the lived experiences of Native Americans, Tejanas, African Americans, Anglos, Germans, and Asians. Other categories that shape women’s identity, such as class, religion, political ideology, and sexuality are also explored” (pp. xii–xiii). Recasting a state’s narrative history through the lens of sex and gender is not entirely new (see Albert L. Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California [Albuquerque, 1999]); however, Boswell tackles the entirety of Texas history, shifting the focus away from overly familiar characters and events from the state’s past. Downsizing male-centered topics, like the Texas Revolution, the Texas Rangers, and the oilmen behind the Spindletop oil strike, to mere paragraphs or even sentences allows more room for Boswell to highlight less-covered historical terrain. For example, she details the intricacies of frontier farm life, from soddies to captivity threats, detailing the types of work women conducted inside and outside the household. She contrasts plantation elite women’s responsibilities with those of yeoman farmers’ wives and, further still, with the work of black slave women. In the early chapters, the rigors of the Texas landscape are ubiquitous. As the book progresses, Boswell spends a great deal of time tracing women’s activism in all its forms—from more muted church activities to marches and protests—beginning in the mid-nineteenth century and continuing to the present day. In developing her narrative, Boswell relies on existing scholarship, which, she acknowledges, leads to uneven coverage of some periods and persons. For example, there are ample studies of southern women’s experiences during the Civil War (especially plantation mistresses’), but there is much less scholarship on the frontier perspectives of Native American women, especially regarding life-jarring events like warfare and dislocation. In contrast, Boswell ably draws on the extensive publications on women’s activism during the Progressive era (focusing on clubwomen, suffragists, and heritage preservationists) to provide an in-depth examination of both well-known and unknown female activists. In terms of presentation, the author winnows broader discussions of women’s experiences, both regionally and nationally, to very specific Texas examples, seamlessly weaving her narrative from the macro to the micro level. In addressing family reunification during Reconstruction, for instance, Boswell includes the touching story of Lou Turner, a young black girl “who did not know her mother” and resisted being reunified by authorities with her (p. 100). In another example, Boswell narrows a general discussion of the post–World War II pressures put on women to leave their well-paying factory jobs to Anne L. Baker, a machinist from Waco, who remembered “men implicitly or explicitly asking her what she was doing there: ‘You are taking a man’s job’” (p. 208). The inclusion of these on-point quotations from Texas women transforms Boswell’s survey text into something very special. The last chapter, “Taking Charge: Women to the End of the Twentieth Century,” focuses on the impact of the feminist movement in Texas and its ensuing backlash; Boswell also examines new opportunities for women in the workplace and politics, including the groundbreaking campaigns of Barbara Jordan and Ann Richards. [End Page 131] Ultimately, Angela Boswell’s synthesis of women in Texas history is expansive, rich, and thoroughly refreshing. Linda English University of Texas Rio Grande Valley Copyright © 2020 The Southern Historical Association

Slice.

In his attempts to treat the condition vesicovaginal fistula, Dr. J. Marion Sims experimented on black slave women during the 1800s. Within 5 years, a 17 year old slave woman called Anarcha endured 30 operations under the medical supervision of Dr. Sims to repair a vesicovaginal fistula. She suffered these invasive surgeries without the aid of anesthesia. Debates on whether Sims was negligent in failing to administer this form of pain management to disenfranchised women abound. Still, the emotional and physical distress slave women like Anarcha lived through largely remain unexplored in Sims' biography and medical journal articles. My poem, "Slice," redresses the disassociated accounts of these women's lives by placing the emotion and physiological trauma they experienced at the center of a literary piece that seeks to honor their humanity and acknowledge their pain. The feelings embodied in "Slice" convey a poetic interpretation of Anarcha's experiences because she is the speaker in this poem. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2019 APA, all rights reserved).

The Representation of Trauma and Trauma Coping Strategies in Grace Nichols’s I is a Long Memoried Woman

ABSTRACTUsing the historical background of the Middle Passage and slavery and drawing on the tools provided by trauma studies, this study carries out a comprehensive analysis of Grace Nichols’s I is a Long Memoried Woman (1983). The starting hypothesis explored in this study is that I is a Long Memoried Woman represents traumatic experiences of the Middle Passage and slavery as well as trauma coping strategies adopted by Afro-Caribbean slaves, especially black slave women. Accordingly, this study first delves into four main trauma representation strategies in I is a Long Memoried Woman: repression, haunting, repetition and traumatic pastoral. It then explores the representation of trauma coping strategies adopted by Afro-Caribbean peoples: return to religion and spirituality, dissociation, escape through imagination and revenge fantasies. In doing so, this study demonstrates that there is a possibility for trauma victims such as Afro-Caribbean peoples to heal their wounds and move on as represented in I is a Long Memoried Woman.

As quitandadeiras de Minas Gerais: memórias brancas e memórias negras

In this article, we analyze narratives of memory about homemade pastries ( quitandas ) and the women who make them ( quitandeiras ) in the state of Minas Gerais, in three historical moments: as practices of African origin, which during the eighteenth and nineteenth century was reproduced in the colonies by black slave women selling food on the streets, carrying their trays; as practices of Portuguese origin, held within farms domestic black slaves under the supervision of white mistresses of Portuguese origin and, finally, as current policy of cultural heritage. We try to identify, based on secondary material and interviews, which social memory we have today on this feminine craft that pervaded different social and ethnic groups, and how local authorities started to intervene in its construction. Keywords: quitandeiras , social memory, cultural heritage.

Nanny’s Slave Narrative in Zora Neale Hurston’sTheir Eyes Were Watching God: A Black Feminist Reading

KEYWORDS History. Narrative. Slave. Racism. Sexism. Intersecting Racism-sexism. Feminism. Black Feminism ABSTRACT Black women's literature is of significance for Black feminist literary criticism for its focus on women's experiences of racism-sexism. The intersection of racism and sexism doubly victimizes the African- American women especially the slaves as they try to break out of this two-fold oppression. While racism decreed Black women would be enslaved, it was sexism that determined the lot of women harsher. Nanny living in the slavery era was oppressed as a worker on her white master's plantation, raped victim and then as a mammy working for a white family. These three images of Nanny stands for her racist-sexist oppression while purporting to her archetypal slave narrative. Indeed, her narrative is that of the many Black slave women in history and of their plight.

“What Looks Like a Revolution”: Enslaved Women and the Gendered Terrain of Slave Insurgencies in Cuba, 1843–1844

This article examines the women who became involved in Cuba’s slave resistance movements of 1843 and 1844, drawing attention to those who molded that resistance in visible and public ways and those whose involvement has often been obscured or unnoticed. The narratives created around Fermina and Carlota Lucumí, two leading figures in the 1843 insurgencies, both rupture and complicate the masculine discourse around slave-movement leadership that has been central to historiographies of slave rebellion. I analyze the ways that these women became hyper-visible in archival records organized around patriarchal sensibilities of punishment. I also investigate the gendered narratives of betrayal and silence that intersperse the trial records and render illegible—if not wholly erase—the ways that black slave women helped to produce insurgent possibilities. I argue that women who marked themselves as unaligned with the insurgent project reveal some of the intriguing ways that most enslaved people encountered these resistance movements.

BLACK OR WHITE?: RACIAL IDENTITY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AFRICAN-AMERICAN ART

Previous articleNext article No AccessBLACK OR WHITE?: RACIAL IDENTITY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AFRICAN-AMERICAN ARTLisa E. FarringtonLisa E. Farrington Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Source Volume 31, Number 3Spring 2012SPECIAL ISSUE: CROSS-CULTURAL ISSUES IN ART FROM THE NINETEENTH CENTURY TO THE PRESENT Sponsored by the Bard Graduate Center, New York Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/sou.31.3.23208589 Views: 237Total views on this site © 2012 Ars Brevis Foundation Inc.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Scandalous Scarcities: Black Slave Women, Plantation Domesticity, and Travel Writing in Nineteenth‐Century Cuba

AbstractThis article draws on the writing of North American and European travelers to illustrate the ways in which enslaved black women became central to Cuba's visions of colonial prosperity in the mid‐nineteenth century. Such literature highlights the anxieties that plagued Cuban colonial elites as the slave trade consistently brought fewer African women than men to the island. As mothers, wives, and caretakers of domestic space, black and African women became critical to planters' dreams of continued wealth and stability. To further encourage this idealized culture of respectable domesticity, white Cuban elites erected slave cabins and barracks whose physical arrangements could increase slaves' compulsion to marry, and enhance managers' ability to survey and oversee the enslaved populations. Thus white Cuban elites hoped that enslaved women – and the ideas about marriage, home, and family such women were thought to inspire – would help to produce plantation regimes as orderly and disciplined as they were prosperous.

BLACK AMERICAN SLAVE WOMAN IN THE 19TH CENTURY, THE GREAT OUTCAST

The objective of this work is to clearly and precisely describe the reality in which black slave women lived in the United States in the 19th century. To understand the historical and sociocultural context, we will focus on events that marked the lives of these women.

Nature, Nurture and Nation: Nísia Floresta's Engagement in the Breast-Feeding Debate in Brazil and France

This article looks at the way the Brazilian writer and educator Nísia Floresta addresses issues of race and class within her construction of nationhood. This is achieved through a consideration of the specific subject of maternal breast-feeding as discussed by Floresta in two texts, written in Brazil and France, respectively. A comparison of these works reveals a very different engagement with race and class factors in determining women's claim to citizenship. Floresta, in common with early 19th-century European feminism, believed this claim to lie within the domestic sphere, primarily in the role of mother and educator. The article considers how, as a vital aspect of that role, she portrays maternal breast-feeding as both natural and patriotic. It also highlights the extent to which Floresta was influenced by the prevailing concerns of her contemporaries regarding the risks of wet nursing and the threat posed by household slaves, before going on to consider how this discourse leads Floresta to exclude black slave women from her vision of patriotic motherhood, while acknowledging the maternity of women of all classes in a European context. Patriotic concerns, shaped by racial prejudices, overshadow Floresta's feminism, prohibiting the kind of unifying discourse of motherhood, which she claimed to profess.

Slave Women, Resistance and Criminality:

The system of slavery, a reflection of a patriarchal and racist social order, legitimatized and facilitated not only the economic and racist oppression but the sexual exploitation of black slave women. An extensive review of the literature on slavery was used to address how slave women accommodated and resisted these multiple forms of oppression. The findings presented here indicate that as blacks, both sexes experienced the harsh and inhumane consequences of racism and economic exploitation. In response to their exploitation, there was a significant convergence in male and female involvement in such forms of resistance, such as murder, assault, theft and arson. These actions were employed to improve the slaves' lot in life and to express opposition to the slave system. Criminal resistance therefore set the stage for black women's participation in the criminal activities characteristic of today. Findings also suggest that in response to sexual exploitation, gender specific forms of accommodat...