Slave Body Research Articles

Torture, Truth, and the Witnessing Body: Reading Christian Martyrdom with Page duBois

Taking its departure from Page duBois’ monograph Torture and Truth, this essay points toward a gap in the history conveyed by duBois, yet hinted at by the painting reproduced on the book’s cover – Nicolas Poussin’s “Martyrdom of Saint Erasmus” (1629). DuBois relates classical Greek juridical practices, in which the tortured slave body is the site of the production of truth, to the subsequent history of Western philosophy, of which Heidegger is a privileged exemplum. This essay in turn inserts a history of Christian martyrdom (both early modern and ancient) into that narrative. The tight linking of truth with torture persists in martyrdom texts (including the Gospels), and the juridical context highlighted by duBois remains decisive for their interpretation. So too does the context of Roman imperial rule, together with the public spectacles of violence through which imperial power was performed. However, whereas classical Greek practice frames the slave as the passive container of a truth that another can claim, the ideology of Christian martyrdom assigns truth to the tortured subject herself. The legacy of martyrdom may explain the ease with which some today all too easily disavow complicity with torture to the point of denying that it continues, while also all too easily laying claim to the authority of suffering truth. It may illumine, as well, the limits of torture’s power and the potential sources of its subversion and critique.

New World Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649–1849 by Elizabeth Maddock Dillon

Elizabeth Maddock Dillon. New Drama: Tire Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849. Durham: Duke UP, 2014. Pp. x, 354. US$94.95. In New Drama: The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649-1849, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon reframes the study of theatre in Atlantic rather than national terms. New Drama aims to remedy the gap in the study of eighteenth-century Atlantic theatre by highlighting the emergence of early American theatre as an independent cultural form. Throughout, Dillon calls for a broader consideration of representation as she examines how the theatre serves as a space for reinforcing and contesting social belonging. In each chapter, Dillon draws on archival evidence to illustrate that Atlantic world theatres functioned as representational and inherently political spaces. New Drama begins by positioning the 1649 beheading of King Charles I and the 1849 Astor Place Riot as turning points in theatrical performance in the Atlantic world. Dillon introduces the commons as a collective that often challenged political, economic, and religious boundaries. She argues that this new performative commons emerged in the eighteenth and functioned as a means of individual and collective representation. Central to Dillon's analysis is the concept of the colonial relation, which she defines as the between the colony and the metropole in the Anglo-Atlantic world of the eighteenth century (31). She explores this connection in works such as The West Indian and Oroonoko. Expanding upon Giorgio Agamben's concept of homo sacer, or bare life, Dillion contends that slaves exist as figures of 'bare labor'--labor stripped of the resources of social life and the capacity for social reproduction (35). As Dillon suggests, the colonial relation was rendered visible through displays of belonging and non-belonging that reflected the racialized division inherent in colonial appropriation. Chapter Two returns to King Charles I's execution as a moment of emerging popular sovereignty. Dillon views the theatre as a mobilizing force and asserts that the staging of tortured bodies in Tears of the Indians enabled the English public to witness the genocidal acts of the Spanish. She suggests that the performance of Spanish cruelty generate[d] the identity of the Englishman as rightful occupant of the New World (81). By establishing the staging of tortured bodies as symbols of sovereign power, Dillon calls attention to the links between theatre, nationalism, and empire. The third chapter continues the text's discussion of tortured native bodies in works such as The Tempest and The Enchanted Island. Dillon distinguishes between the seventeenth-century figure of the tortured Indian and the eighteenth-century image of the royal slave. I found this chapter illuminating, in part because it touches on the disruptive function of women's bodies. Since Dillon's text surveys eighteenth-century Atlantic theatre, the subject of women performing as men is outside the book's scope. Nevertheless, the reference to cross-gendered casting is a compelling addition to a chapter that addresses the erasure of indigenous bodies. Dillon's fourth chapter investigates how slave bodies in Charleston were required to be both present (in terms of labor) and absent (in terms of political agency). …

Pensions and Protest: Former Slaves and the Reconstructed American State

Pensions and ProtestFormer Slaves and the Reconstructed American State Dale Kretz (bio) A chilling wind tore through central Georgia in the winter of 1865. Huddled in tents near Atlanta was the 138th U.S. Colored Troops, organized nearby just months before. One of the last black regiments formed in the Civil War, it drew its numbers from the formerly enslaved populations fleeing plantations in the wake of Sherman's March. One unhappy night, the icy current ripped a tent away from its stakes, leaving exposed a man who would endure the consequences for sixty-five years. As a slave, he had been known as Anderson Odom. Now he was Anderson Freeman. After escaping Jack Odom's plantation at age twenty, Freeman had made the one-hundred-mile journey northward through Georgia from Columbus to Atlanta, where he enlisted in the 138th USCT in July 1865. Following the winter storm, he could not walk for nearly a month. He spent that time in his quarters, treated by the regimental surgeon. He would walk again but would always be left with rheumatism, a broad nineteenth-century term for a range of arthritic symptoms. When Freeman was forty-four, he applied for a pension from the U.S. government, alleging he was "still suffering from the effects" and "cannot perform the labor of an able bodied man caused by my exposure in the service of the U.S. Army." A board of federally deputized physicians measured every part of the former slave's body, concluding rheumatism had disabled him 4/18ths for the performance of manual labor and therefore merited a pension.1 Anderson Freeman was one of hundreds of thousands of freedpeople who came into contact with the federal government in the four decades after the Civil War.2 They did so by actively pursuing military pensions through the U.S. Pension Bureau. In the past two decades, historians have used USCT pension files as an invaluable window into African American experiences of slavery, war, and freedom. Most notably, they have used them to explore social and work relations in slavery; the experiences of soldiers and veterans; and the politics of sex, family, and citizenship.3 This article attempts to situate the pension struggles of former slaves within [End Page 425] the larger project of state building embodied by the U.S. Pension Bureau.4 Indeed, the pension files of former slaves allow us to reconceptualize fundamental assumptions about the federal government and the aftermath of emancipation in America. The post-Reconstruction era is conventionally narrated in terms of exclusion. The federal government, betraying the revolutionary promise of wartime abolition, soon abandoned the cause of freedpeople, essentially leaving them to their own devices in the sharecropping South without meaningful access to or support from the federal state. Widespread disenfranchisement, Black Codes, and the rise of Jim Crow all negated the constitutional rights of African Americans. And so, though not without good reason, even as scholars uncover extraordinary grassroots movements in the rural South, African Americans are still largely painted as outsiders to the state building projects of postwar America. This article challenges the conventional narrative by detailing the extensive interactions that formerly enslaved veterans had with federal officials of the Pension Bureau.5 Freeborn veterans of black state regiments and the USCT, as well as their widows, had always been officially included in the application process for federal pensions. For a decade, however, formerly enslaved veterans of the USCT faced legal prohibition. Yet on March 3, 1873, Congress passed a vitally important act consolidating procedures and increasing pension rates. One provision of that bill stipulated that every pensioner listed as a slave on his regiment's rolls "shall be on the same footing as to bounty and pension as though they had not been slaves at the date of their enlistment."6 On the surface, the Consolidation Act of 1873 was one of great generosity, finally securing the extension of justly earned benefits to the most dispossessed of veterans and widows. In the words of the bill's spokesman in Congress, "if any one class of our soldiers deserve more at our hands than any other, it is that class which...

On freedom, kinship, and the market. Rethinking property and law in the ottoman slave system

This article focuses on domestic slavery, kinship, and the early modern market in 17th -century Ottoman Istanbul. By drawing on the notarial registers (sicils) kept by the legal courts of Istanbul as well as on jurisprudential (fiqh) works, this article dismantles the interplay amongst notions of freedom, kinship, and the economic value not only of slave bodies but also of their labour, which could be de tachable from the body as an object of commercial contract. While grappling with these questions, the article also unravels the fictional capacity of Islamic jurisprudencie in fabricating kinship ties between the master and the slave. Hence, this article aims at exploring the servile component of the market and the social in 17th -century Istanbul.

The punishment of slaves in early Christianity: the views of some selected church fathers

With few exceptions, many of the Church Fathers approved, in principle, of the punishment of slaves. However, there were very specific guidelines on why, how, and when to punish slaves. The purpose of this article is to analyse more closely how some of the early Church Fathers conceptualised the punishment of slaves. The study begins, first, by examining the theological justifications for the punishment of slaves. Secondly, it assesses the reasons for punishment – for what reasons did these Church Fathers admonish their slaveholding audiences to punish their slaves? Thirdly, the author investigates some selected Church Fathers’ advice on how to punish, in terms of both the psychological disposition of the owner and the various methods for punishment directed towards the slave body. Finally, the article more specifically explores how these Church Fathers understood some of the main elements that were present in, during, and after punishment, namely fear and pain.

Bodily Subjects: Essays on Gender and Health, 1800–2000, edited by Tracy Penny Light, Barbara Brookes, and Wendy Mitchinson

Bodily Subjects: Essays on Gender and Health, 1800-2000, edited by Tracy Penny Light, Barbara Brookes, and Wendy Mitchinson. Montreal & Kingston, McGill-Queen's University Press, 2014. x, 395 pp. $110.00 Cdn (cloth) $34.95 Cdn (paper). Where should we look for the meaning of health? The cover illustration of Bodily Subjects: Essays on Gender and Health, 1800-2000 provocatively suggests a site and method for just such an exploration: a circa 1940s wooden examination table that looks like standard office backroom furniture, but when all its pulls and drawers are opened, it reveals a hidden collection of specialized features many of which (like stirrups and a hidden drop pan) are designed for gynecological check-ups. The gendering of health, the editors of this collection posit, is not merely ideological and discursive: it is material. It has embodied (3) for men and for women that are culturally and historically specific. From the nineteenth to the twentieth centuries, Western became not only increasingly subject to the gaze, but also the primary sites through which gendered identity was reinforced over time by meanings of (5). The co-construction of Western and cultural knowledge, along with its disciplinary tools, is not a new idea to historians of science, medicine, and technology--but the strength of this vibrant collection lies in its comparative approach to this topic, as well as its insistent focus on the political and social consequences of such developments. In this way. Bodily Subjects itself embodies a productive intersectionality of scholarship in social history and material culture (from history, anthropology, and geography) plus gender studies (in sociology, rhetoric, and literature). Taken together, these essays (masterfully curated and edited by Tracy Penny Light, Barbara Brookes, and Wendy Mitchinson) make the case that are at once agents for and reflections of how gender shapes the complex and varied experiences of health and illness. The chapters' authors come from a range of perspectives and approaches, but the editors impose coherence on the collection by arranging their case studies into three thematic sections. The advantage of this strategy is that each section provides a rich body of material through which to explore one focused aspect of the gendering of and health. The first section, Embodied Citizenship, considers how health concepts, framed by gender, race, and class, have consequences for defining political rights and responsibilities in different places and times. Patricia Reeve finds--in corporate archives, industrial laws, and trade union publications--evidence that the requirements for American antebellum citizenship, including bodily agency and good hygiene, were shaped by ideals of manliness and masculinity that de facto excluded the laboring bodies (37) of slaves, women, and the disabled. Similarly, Marjorie Levine-Clark examines the successes and failures of applications for relief to one English Poor Law Union, and shows how ill health provided both a respectable source of need for assistance and a means through which social expectations for men (public work) and women (private domesticity) were enforced. Labour needs, Meg Parsons suggests, also framed the construction of the Cherbourg Aboriginal Settlement as a hygienic, if not healthy, space in which the medical surveillance of Aboriginal bodies (82)--specifically, their reproduction and cleanliness--became a means to deny them civil rights and protect white society from uncivilized natives. By contrast, Catherine Gidney shows that, while Canadian university students had access to one of the most comprehensive and holistic health care systems in the world, in the 1940s and 1950s its increasing attention to individual self-realization enabled a reorientation of women's place on campus--even while this system also allowed sexism to remain in obvious, but more insidious, forms (113). …

Introduction: Back and Beyond—The Context

WHILE CARIBBEAN FILMMAKING HAS BEGUN TO FLOURISH, there is little published research. Ex-Isles: Essays in Caribbean Cinema, published in 1992,1 remains the seminal text. Nonetheless, Caribbean filmmakers have been insistent about the need to theorise their filmmaking and to depict the lived spaces and specific experiences of the Caribbean. Films such as Pim de la Parra's Wan Pipel (1976), and Hugh A. Robinson's Bim (1974) which fictionalises political developments of independence politics in Trinidad and Tobago, as well as Euzhan Palcy's Rue Cases-Negres (1983), suggest that initially filmmakers focused on issues of race and identity in their attempts to create counterdiscourses and to localise filmmaking.The development of an indigenous industry in the Francophone Caribbean is usually attributed to Christian Lara because his film Lorque l'herbe (1968) provided the impetus for a wave of filmmaking by native-born filmmakers. These include Jean-Paul Cesaire, Gabriel Glissant and Willy Rambeau. This movement is marked in the first instance by Cesaire's negritude movement. At the Caribbean Tales Festival in Toronto in 2009, Euzhan Palcy spoke movingly about the influence of Cesaire and called him her father.Francophone filmmakers reflect on historic ills in different ways. Raoul Peck's Lumumba: La mort du prophete (1992) is about memory and the ghosting of the past and uses a ghost (Lumumba, voiced by the director himself ) to reconstruct a history of the assassination of the politician whose ascension to power lasted two months. Peck's revolutionary use of archival and home movie footage and the shooting of the film in Brussels give a peculiar quality to the work that Laura Marks has analysed in depth in her book, The Skin of the Film.2 Peck's analyses of power and terrorism in Moloch Tropical (2009) suggest the importance of the haunting of the past in the Caribbean. Hauntology, for example, is evident in Rue Cases-Negres in the shadowy shapes that hover at the back of Medouze's hut and the retained sounds and movements from an African ancestral presence. In her essay in this issue, focusing especially on Peck's 1994 L'homme sur les quais, Meredith Robinson dissects the ways in which Peck revolutionises traditional film techniques to interrogate memory's function in addressing historic trauma.The work of Guy Deslauriers from Martinique is also about the effect of a past in need of exorcism and uses a ghost to narrate the journey through the Middle Passage. Deslauriers, in the making of the film Passage du milieu (1999) and the filming of the political documentary based on the murder of the journalist Andre Aliker (Andre Aliker, 2008), uses filmic devices to probe the residues of history in specific ways. His use of montage techniques, for example, creates a profound sense of the presence of the past in Martiniquan and Caribbean history as a whole. Some of the most evocative scenes image the bodies of slaves as subhuman in their positioning within the cramped space of the ship's hull and juxtapose such atrocities with idyllic scenes of Africa. The narrator insists on the need for remembrance, thereby invoking the persistence of the effects of these traumas. Montage sequences also create conflictual lines that serve to refute imposed authority as in the frenzy of feet dancing to an inner spiritual music from Orisha rituals.Rachel Moseley-Wood also suggests that music and dance are integral to the representation of place and the experiences of the region. Her essay examines and problematises the ways in which Jamaican cinema has shaped reception to cultural products. For her, the exploitation of ghetto-based culture both constructs an often-stereotyped idea and image of Jamaican reality and, paradoxically perhaps, provides for a critique of class-based systems within the city space. Her enquiry plunges her into cultural debates about the ways in which films such as Dancehall Queen (Rick Elgood and Don Letts, 1997) engage with the female body and ideas of 'slackness'. …

“THE GHOST OF SLAVERY” INOUR MUTUAL FRIEND

On his last trip to Americain 1868, Charles Dickens would write a letter to his friend and biographer John Forster, which paints a sobering picture of postbellum Baltimore: “It is remarkable to see how the Ghost of Slavery haunts the town; and how the shambling, untidy, evasive, and postponing Irrepressible proceeds about his free work, going round and round it, instead of at it.” While Dickens's phrase “the Ghost of Slavery” indicts a slave system that persists despite abolition, his representation of the former slave body – “the shambling, untidy, evasive, and postponing Irrepressible” – suggests another kind of ghost, an identity that toggles between the spectral and the grossly embodied. Dickens reinforces this conjunction of the ghostly and the corporeal as he goes on to note that “[t]he melancholy absurdity of giving these people votes, at any rate at present, would glare at one out of every roll of their eyes, chuckle in their mouths, and bump in their heads, if one did not see . . . that their enfranchisement is a mere party trick to get votes” (Letters27). Resorting to the crudest racial stereotypes, Dickens portrays recently manumitted slaves as dolls devoid of speech and political agency. In depicting the “postponing Irrepressible” as stripped of personhood and civil capacities, Dickens conjures the legal fiction of “civil death” – a medieval English common law that divested a prisoner accused of treason any rights by proclaiming him dead in the eyes of the law. In stark contrast to Dickens's impassioned pleas for the abolition of slavery and prison reform inAmerican Notes(1842), his private remarks in this letter some twenty-five years later convert former slaves into the objects of satire – minstrelsy puppets in a larger political game in which they play no civil part – as it were, dead again. However, even as Dickens attempts to constrain the former slave body through a kind of stereotypical branding, his language – the “postponing Irrepressible” – registers an unease that this corporeal ghost won't die. It is precisely in this form of the living dead that the “ghost of slavery” surfaces inOur Mutual Friend(OMF).

African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800–1860 by Dea H. Boster (review)

Reviewed by: African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800–1860 by Dea H. Boster Emily Tafford (bio) African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, 1800–1860. By Dea H. Boster. (New York: Routledge, 2013. Pp. 184. $125.00 cloth) Disability studies scholars in recent years have called for a broader conversation between the history of disability and more conventional histories, arguing that, like race, disability should be understood as a social construct and therefore not be confined to specialist medical texts. Despite shifting trends in the history of slavery, the issue of slave disability has remained obscured. Studies of slave experience and resistance—often because of their desire to highlight capability and agency—overlook the presence of slaves with disabilities and their impact upon southern society. Fully aware of her predecessors and contemporaries from multiple disciplines, Boster seeks to reclaim the history of disability in African American slavery and to analyze the [End Page 668] intersections and negotiations of race, disability, and power, which she argues were central to the plantation economy. As part of the Routledge Studies in African American History and Culture series, African American Slavery and Disability strives to incorporate disability history into the well-established discipline of slavery studies, which will potentially expose readers to concepts, stories, and methods that have not yet fully taken hold within its canon. Whilst acknowledging the foundations laid by medical historians such as Sharla M. Fett, Boster aims to avoid the confines of a specialist study and instead attempts to uncover disability not just in its relation to the slave body, but within the institution’s labor expectations, economy, and power dynamics. Using problematic sources such as slave narratives and abolitionist tracts alongside more traditional texts including plantation records and correspondence, Boster is able to point to the complex network of institutions and individuals who negotiated what it meant to be a disabled slave. African American Slavery and Disability is most engaging when it tells the stories of disabled individuals, referring to both their difficult circumstances as challenges to white authority, as well as their ability to manipulate understandings of defective and dysfunctional bodies for their own gain. In chapter four, Boster points to the activities and jobs that disabled slaves did perform, therefore providing a compelling argument that these individuals contributed to the plantation economy, and that slave owners were influenced by a variety of aesthetic and emotional, as well as financial, concerns when determining the value of their disabled chattel. The structure of the book, although useful in demonstrating the significance of the disabled slave to all manner of financial, legal, medical, and cultural aspects of the plantation society, makes the discussion of slave resistance somewhat repetitive, as instances of negotiation and malingering follow the core argument of each chapter rather than being discussed in one chapter. Yet this broad scope ultimately works in Boster’s favor, as it allows the reader to grasp the wider imperative of inculcating all history with disability history. The [End Page 669] focus in the second chapter on the meanings ascribed to race and disability, and the function of disability as metaphor, allows the book to have relevance beyond slavery history and can offer something to researchers who concern themselves with the creation of prescriptive norms and the maintenance of social hierarchies. The conclusion of the book emphasizes the volume of evidence about slave disability, its constructions, contradictions, and the varied black and white perspectives that negotiated the contested concept. The potential to use disability as a category of analysis presents great opportunities in slavery studies and to those concerned with the intersections between other categories such as race, gender, and class. Emily Tafford EMILY TAFFORD studies the history of human displays in American world’s fairs at the University of Liverpool. Her PhD thesis will be titled “Race and Disability in the Human Display: World’s Fairs in Western America, 1894–1916.” Copyright © 2014 Kentucky Historical Society

The Sweet Tooth of Slavery

This past spring and summer, in an installation by artist Kara Walker, a sugarcoated sphinx gazed upon visitors with a blank and inscrutable stare in the defunct Domino Sugar Factory in Brooklyn. At the entrance to the installation, thirteen statues of brown children, made of resin and coated with molasses, toted the sugar to construct the giant statue. This display drew upon stereotype and caricature—the sphinx sporting a headkerchief and exaggerated lips and butt, the children’s swollen heads copied from racist figurines—but this grotesquerie did not mitigate, but rather heightened, the unease that the installation inspired. Through the contrast between these figures, one monumental and thirteen diminutive, one dusted with refined sugar and the baker’s dozen oozing molasses, Walker suggested that the empire that erected and displayed the sphinx also excreted wounded black bodies. Late nineteenth-century Northerners attempted to overlook the origins of their refined sugar by eschewing molasses (and, implicitly, the brown bodies that both produced and consumed it). Walker’s installation reminds us that it is still easy in hipster Williamsburg, for example, to ignore the global labor exploitation and racism that facilitates the circulation of sugar. On the website for the exhibition, Edwidge Danticat writes about the terrible conditions and child labor in contemporary sugar cane harvesting. This misery provides a stark counterpoint to the triumphalism of the sphinx. This figure, which Walker called the Marvelous Sugar Baby, crystallized the power of whiteness, much like the elaborate sugar sculptures in medieval banquets from which Walker drew the first part of the exhibition’s title, A Subtlety. The Sugar Baby’s prominent vulva signaled the sweetness of her sexual availability for white slave-holders, but Walker’s use of caricature undermined the grandiosity of their empire-building project. While both the awe-inducing architectural grandeur of the sphinx and her sugary veneer reflected the illusion of Both works insist upon the centrality of sweetness and sugar to the exploitation of black bodies in the pursuit of white pleasure. The slave body becomes a kind of candy.

“Turks” on Display during the Reign of Louis XIV

This article examines the display of subjugated “Turks” as an underexplored aspect of propaganda for Louis XIV. It argues that esclaves turcs painted on the ceilings of Versailles or circulated in medals and almanac prints were more than figurative, but referred to the actual bodies of Ottoman and Moroccan slaves toiling on Mediterranean galleys. Whether real or imagined, submissive “Turks” projected royal power. They advertised the Sun King's ability to vanquish religious enemies while deflecting attention from his willingness to maintain diplomatic and commercial relations with foreign ‘infidels.’ However, they were also unstable symbols deployed by Louis XIV's critics to condemn his rule.

Now You See Them: Slaves and Other Objects as Elements of the Roman Master

In the third book of his letters, Pliny the Younger, in response to a request from Baebius Macer, describes the famous industriousness of his uncle, the elder Pliny. (1) By detailing a day in the life of that Pliny, he explains just how it was that a man who lived only 56 years and was constantly busy with administrative duties was nonetheless able to produce more than seven works, totalling over 100 volumes, including the sprawling Historia naturalis: post cibum, aestate si quid otii iacebat in sole, liber legabatur, adnota-bat excerpebatque. nihil enim legit quod non excerperet. ... post solem lavabatur ... super hanc [cenam] legebatur, adnotabatur. ... in secessu solum balinei tempus studiis eximebatur--cum dico balinei, de interioribus loquor; nam dum destringitur tergiturque, audiebat aliquid aut dictabat. in itinere quasi solutus ceteris curis huic uni valeabat: ad latus notarius cum libro et pugillaribus, cuius manus hieme manicis muniebantur, ut ne caeli quidem asperitas ullum studii tempus erip-eret. qua ex causa Romae quoque sella vehebatur. omne tempus perire arbitrabatur quod studiis non impenderetur, (3.5.10-6) After eating, in the summer, when lying in the sun if he'd any leisure, a book was read and he would listen and take notes. He read nothing without taking notes. ... After sunning, he was bathed ... after dinner he was read to and dictation was taken ... only in the baths was his time free from work, and when I say the baths, I mean right in the bath; for while he was being scraped and towelled down, he was listening or dictating. When on the move, as if free from every other concern, he maintained this one: at his side was a stenographer with a book and notebooks, whose hands were protected in the winter by gloves, so that not even bad weather might steal any time away from work. For this reason he was carried around Rome in a chair. He considered all time lost which was not loaded up with work. Pliny the Elder is the model of the dedicated scholar, with each moment of his day allocated to some productive pursuit. Our hero is admirably abstemious, but he verges on extremism: (2) he measures time with marvellous, almost desperate precision and in the end resembles (if you will forgive the anachronism) the Energizer Bunny of popular culture, as he keeps going, and going, and going ... (3) In the nephew's gently comic portrait, the great scholar is superhuman. If we scrutinize the character of 'Pliny the Author,' however, it becomes clear that indeed there is more than one human at work. That is, as Pliny goes about his day--taking care of business, taking in the sun, eating, bathing, and moving around the city--he is constantly accompanied by attendant slaves who read to him and take down his notations, as well as fulfilling his other basic needs. Without these slaves to hand, would Pliny have been able to produce such a prodigious amount of prose? Decidedly not. 'Pliny the Productive Author' is not simply a man, but more a machine that includes many different parts: Pliny himself, multiple personal slaves, and their inanimate writing materials. (4) The question arises: What does it mean to say 'Pliny the Author'? The personage of 'Pliny the Productive Author' necessarily includes Pliny's slaves. There is always a pair of eyes reading, a mouth speaking, hands writing, or feet walking--all for and of Pliny the Author. Although Pliny himself may not physically be performing every action, nevertheless the epistolary portrait credits Pliny the Author with all of this productive activity. The actions that Pliny's anonymous slaves perform are indicated predominantly in the passive voice, which effectively transfers their actions back into Pliny's possession, blurring them with his own body's movements. (5) The slaves that attend Pliny's body might be best understood here as 'prosthetic limbs.' (6) Any actions performed under the auspices of 'Pliny the Author' can uniformly be considered Pliny's actions'; that is, the slave bodies act just as authentically for Pliny as his own body does. …

The Development of Medical Museums in the Antebellum American South: Slave Bodies in Networks of Anatomical Exchange

Prior to the American Civil War, museums were enthusiastically promoted in the annual circulars of southern medical colleges as valuable aids to medical education. Using case history narratives, medical college circulars, and announcements, this article examines the social origins of the region's collections of anatomical and pathological specimens and explores the professional agents and organizations responsible for their maintenance and development. The article is also concerned with exploring the racial framework in which these bodies and specimens were sourced and displayed. The social relations embodied in natural history and medical museum collections, and the emerging specialism of "negro medicine," were all elements of a context that subordinated and objectified blackness, as well as permitting and legitimizing the exploitation of black bodies. Medical museums function as a key case study for examining power relations among physicians, slaves, and slave owners, as well as underscoring southern medicine's dependence on slavery for its development.

Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body by Cassandra Jackson

Reviewed by: Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body by Cassandra Jackson Stacie McCormick (bio) Jackson, Cassandra . Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body. New York: Routledge, 2011. On June 26, 2011, (likely as copies of Cassandra Jackson's Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body were being distributed), the murder of James Craig Anderson, a middle-aged black man, was being caught on tape by surveillance cameras at a hotel parking lot in Jackson, Mississippi. Less than a week later, that video was presented in various media formats both on television and online. Scores of viewers watched as the video showed a group of young white men beat and then proceed to run over Anderson in a Ford F-250 pickup truck. The confluence of the public witnessing of this act and the publication of Cassandra Jackson's work illustrates the imprint of racial terror on American culture, which is the very foundation of Jackson's scholarly project. The imagery of the racially motivated killing of James Craig Anderson (which allows for public viewing in multiple contexts and at multiple times) calls up a gruesome chapter in American history where viewers engaged in the witnessing of public lynching and in some cases produced "commemorative" imagery of the events through photographs and other visual forms. Taken together, the range of these events signals the various entanglements of public participation in racial terror. Violence, Visual Culture, and the Black Male Body explores the impact that imagery of the wounded black male body has had on American culture. Jackson considers how these images represent a "locus of overlapping cultural desires, psychic needs, traumatic memories, and commercial interests" (3). She is also concerned with how an examination of these images of wounding and the act of witnessing these images offers insight into the "complex intersections between patriarchy and race" (8). Using theoretical frameworks from cultural, literary, and disability studies, Jackson looks at various kinds of historical and contemporary imagery as she examines how contemporary artists are re-presenting images of lynching and black male wounding in order to produce a different kind of "seeing," one that is cognizant of the historical and social implications of the image being viewed. The opening chapters of Jackson's work center around the 1863 photograph The Scourged Back. The image captures a former slave (referred to primarily as "Gordon") whose back has been severely scarred from a beating by his former master. In chapter 1, "Early Photography and the Cultural Work of Wounds," Jackson examines the nineteenth-century [End Page 207] cultural fields that collaborate with this image and how those fields participate in forwarding ideas relating to sentimentalism, the abolitionist cause, and the eroticizing of the black male body. Jackson includes responses from Union Army medical professionals who used the image to illustrate the abuses of slavery. By doing this, she suggests that the commentary on the image creates a kind of "sentimental wounding" which is designed to provoke a connection between the slave subject and the audience (15). Jackson then explores the multiple ways that the black male slave's body is used for purposes of projection arguing that the subject of the photograph is not depicted in terms of his personhood but rather the photograph is used as a medium through which "truth, sentiment, and erotic desire are invented" (28). In chapter 2, "Photography and the Disabled Black Subject in the Art of Carrie Mae Weems," Jackson includes an alternate lens through which to view The Scourged Back by analyzing how photographer and artist Carrie Mae Weems uses the image in order to prompt the audience toward critical explorations of the legacy of slavery. Carrie Mae Weems's 1995 Black and Tanned is the primary subject matter of this chapter. Jackson discusses how Weems's interpretation of The Scourged Back collapses time frames with its contemporary presentation in order to bear witness to the collective trauma of slavery (32). In doing so, Weems has to navigate the complexity of reproducing the photograph without reinscribing it. It is through Weems's work that Jackson integrates theoretical discussions on trauma and disability. Jackson argues that the representation of disability has been ideologically linked...

A computational contact formulation based on surface potentials

This work presents the theory and numerical implementation of a contact formulation based on surface potentials. The new theory formulates contact based on distance-dependent surface interaction potentials and distinguishes between three interaction classes: point interaction, short-range surface interaction and long-range surface interaction. Here the focus is placed on frictionless contact, although the first class readily admits frictional sticking contact as is also shown. The proposed contact theory provides a unified framework for various contact formulations, ranging from numerical constraint formulations, like penalty, barrier, cross-constrained and augmented Lagrange multiplier methods, to physical interaction formulations, like cohesive zone models, as well as electrostatic, gravitational and van-der-Waals interaction. Apart from recovering classical penalty and barrier formulations, the new theory also naturally leads to a modified penalty and barrier method. The formulation also recovers classical one-pass contact algorithms, however the real advantages lie in a novel two-pass contact algorithm, denoted the two-half-pass contact algorithm, since each pass only accounts for the contact forces acting on the slave body. This implies that traction continuity is only satisfied in theory, but not imposed a priori in the algorithm. Instead, it is obtained naturally to high accuracy as is demonstrated by several 2D and 3D numerical examples. These include sliding contact, peeling contact and electrostatic attraction between deformable solids. Among the examples is a detailed comparison between the new formulation and classical one-pass approaches. It is further shown that the new contact formulation passes the contact patch test.

<b>Burn! - the use of a historical film in health education, Haiti, 2012</b>

This paper conducts a critical analysis of the film Burn !, which was used in epidemiology training for health care system workers in Haiti. The film is old but is relevant to a recent initiative that, in a way, brings it into the present. The story takes place on a fictional island called Queimada located in the Lesser Antilles. The name of the film is explained by the fact that the Portuguese burned the island to overcome the Indian resistance during the process of colonization, during which nearly all of the natives were killed. Thereafter, the Portuguese begin to traffic slaves from Africa to work in the cane fields. According to island legend, which is recounted early in the film, there is a white flat stone on the beach called the "White Cemetery of the Negros". The bodies of slaves who died during the voyage were placed there.

<b>Queimada – o uso de um filme histórico na formação em saúde, Haiti, 2012</b>

This paper conducts a critical analysis of the film Burn !, which was used in epidemiology training for health care system workers in Haiti. The film is old but is relevant to a recent initiative that, in a way, brings it into the present. The story takes place on a fictional island called Queimada located in the Lesser Antilles. The name of the film is explained by the fact that the Portuguese burned the island to overcome the Indian resistance during the process of colonization, during which nearly all of the natives were killed. Thereafter, the Portuguese begin to traffic slaves from Africa to work in the cane fields. According to island legend, which is recounted early in the film, there is a white flat stone on the beach called the White Cemetery of the Negros. The bodies of slaves who died during the voyage were placed there.

A Traffic in Numbers: The Ethics, Effects, and Affect of Mortality Statistics in the British Abolition Debates

The number of deaths speaks for itself (18), announced William Wilberforce on May 13, 1789, as he introduced the resolutions that would precede his first attempt to pass a bill abolishing the slave trade. However, if the debates over the future of the British slave trade indicate anything on the matter, it is that neither numbers nor deaths speak for themselves. They are made to speak by others in complex and often contradictory ways.As one of the first large-scale humanitarian movements, the Society for Effecting the Abolition of the Slave Trade (SEAST) enshrined many of the techniques that have become keystones in the Western activist repertoire, utilizing petitions, rallies, and boycotts throughout the late eighteenth century and early nineteenth century (d'Anjou 69-70). The group's representational politics, meanwhile, have had a more ambiguous legacy: in framing Blacks as (implicitly inferior) objects of pity to generate an affective reaction, it frequently demonstrated the kind of paternalism still evident in the infantalizing portrayals of Africans by many aid organizations today.Historians and literary critics have long taken a nuanced view of this movement, which presented itself as a courageous crusade to activate the conscience of the British public by appealing to its Christian sympathies. Eric Williams's Capitalism and Slavery triggered complex debates about the manner in which abolitionists' actions reflected their class interests,1 while Christopher Brown's Moral Capital examines how key figures used the abolitionist cause to pursue other agendas, promoting religious revival and understandings of the British Empire as virtuous.2 Literary scholars, including Debbie Lee, Deirdre Coleman, and Brycchan Carey, frequently focus on the relationship between abolitionism and emerging discourses of Romanticism. Nevertheless, this has not precluded criticism of the voyeurism, racism, and support for moral colonial expansion often implicit in abolitionist documents, with cultural historian Marcus Wood going so far as to call abolitionist literature pornographic in its depictions of suffering that subsume slave subjectivity within the creator's fantasy. That said, while both historians and literary critics have paid ample attention to abolitionists' use of sentiment and manipulation of empathy, they have neglected one of their other key strategies that, on the surface, seems diametrically opposed to emotional appeals: the critical use of statistics.This essay tackles the co-existence in abolitionist publications of detailed, individual portraits of suffering and dying slaves with numbers, or numerical gestures, that seek to establish their pain as representative on a larger scale. These same numbers, meanwhile, take on a different valence in pro-slave trade literature-they remain abstract, surrounded by descriptions of death in collective terms, obscuring the slave body with a catalog of inevitable causes of mortality. The question then is: why did the number become a necessary accompaniment to the suffering slave for abolitionists, and how did both change by being placed side by side?As I demonstrate, in an era that predated the modern census and most common statistical methods, abolitionists nevertheless claimed rhetorical authority from their ability to interpret numbers plausibly-even when those numbers were fictive. Statistics, especially those related to death, were crucial to counteracting two main pro-slave trade arguments: that abolitionists were ignorant about the conditions of slaves in the Middle Passage and the West Indies, and that the horrific sufferings they described were unfortunate exceptions to the rule. Responding to these criticisms required, first, a very specific construction of the number as a transparent bearer of information, and second, a massive effort of data collection that tightened the link between estimates and documented accounts while depicting verifiable trading practices. …

The Paradox of the Female Slave Body in the Islamic Legal System: The Cases of Morocco and Sudan

AbstractThis chapter is concerned with the way in which Muslim jurisprudence dealt with the body of female slaves in two Muslim societies: Morocco and the Sudan. While the depiction and the representation of the slave body have generated a great deal of debate among scholars working on slavery in the New World, this subject has received little attention amongst both Islamicists and Africanists. The literature on slavery in the American South and in the Caribbean has shown that the depiction of the slave body reveals a great deal about the reality of slavery, the relations of power and control, and the cultural codes that existed within the slave societies. The slave physical appearance and gestures were used to distinguish between the slaves and free and to justify slavery. Throughout the Americas slaves were routinely branded as a form of identification right up to the eighteenth century. Although the body of the slaves from both sexes was subjected to the same depiction, the treatment of female slaves deserves further exploration. As many scholars have argued, slave women suffer the double jeopardy of being both a slave and a woman. Moreover, the body of the female slave in Muslim societies is of particular significance as many of them were used for sexual purposes, as mistresses and concubines. The chapter shows that the reproductive role of female slaves became a major justice issue, particularly in their struggle for freedom.

Striking Family Hierarchies: Luke 12:35–48, Gender and Slavery

In this article I use the parable in Luke 12:35-48 think with. The parable talks about a master who leaves his house, after which the trusted slave misuses his privileged position and starts beating his subordinates in the household. According to Luke, Jesus tells the disciples this parable in order to teach them to be prepared. The terminology opens up a variety of scenarios: either the trusted slave strikes his fellow slaves, both male and female, or he strikes boys and girls. Such physical punishment was probably common in ancient families, where slave bodies were part of their owner's property, and where children had to obey their parents. Luke constructs theology and ideal virtues by use of violence and abuse, according to power structures in which class, gender and age intersect. This article will address some of these intersections, highlighting issues of slavery, family and gender. I develop an intersectional critique of memory theory in order to reflect on how interpreters are confronted with several challenges when New Testament texts are used as models for family life.