Experience Of Emancipation Research Articles

The wet frontier of slavery: plantation slavery and freedom on Texas’ Trinity River

ABSTRACT This article focuses on Texas’ Trinity River to show how the South’s smaller rivers enabled the spread of plantation slavery in the final decades of the antebellum era. Unlike other histories of slavery that argue that the domination of slaves linked with mastery over cotton crops or a hydraulic landscape, on the Trinity the plantation landscape reflected planters’ lack of control over the river. Planters’ disinterest in mastering the environment on the wet frontier of slavery undermined their own class’s justifications for slavery, the possibilities for enslaved people’s resistance, and freedpeople’s experience of emancipation along unleveed and untamed rivers. Planters’ ability to profit without controlling the river derived from owning land in both the bottomlands and uplands while exploiting a large enslaved labour force, a reality that increased the amount of work they expected of their slaves. After emancipation freedpeople incurred their former masters’ environmental debts in the bottomlands with floods worsened from a legacy of land clearance and cultivation that overloaded the South’s smaller rivers with sediment. Forced to battle the river during slavery, freedpeople encountered an even more destructive river in freedom at the very moment their world changed from plantation to a single plot within that landscape.

Marcuse: A Critic in Counterrevolutionary Times

As a critique of neoliberalism, this article considers Marcuse’s formulations on “paralysis of criticism” presented in his seminal text One-Dimensional Man. This is not a pessimistic perspective. Rather, the author promotes a social diagnosis on political struggles, considering the new challenges of advanced industrial societies to radical subjective experiences of emancipation. The article centers upon, it is important to note, a frequent question in Marcuse’s inquiries: How do we think critically in counterrevolutionary times? This is a question that mobilizes dialectics to revolutionary trends as it expresses an effort to re-think traditional categories of Critical Theory in their “obsolescence.” In a world of “no alternatives,” obsolescent categories are symptom of its diseases. Such obsolescence contrasts immediate relations of status quo with “radical” mediations of social forces. It mobilizes criticism in “catalytic” processes to emancipate “centrifugal social forces” from below, a qualitative leap to social changes able to face counterrevolutionary times.

Travels into Several Remote Nations of the World: An Experiment in Real Exploration, Actual Travel, Constructed Worlds, and Emancipation (in/from Japan)

AbstractThis paper experiments with the idea that travel writing could be a valid and useful mode through which to study certain videogames. By embracing the notions that space is a social construction and that the virtual worlds of some videogames constitute architectural spaces in a manner that is more than analogous to an urban space, it maintains that these constructed worlds are real places to visit, and hence that exploration within them is also real. Furthermore, the paper considers the ways in which travel in general, and travel in(to) videogames in particular, contributes to the experience of emancipation in technology-rich societies. Using the example of Japan (as one of the global powerhouses of videogame creation and consumption), the paper considers the interaction and intersection of the virtual and the actual, in mutually enriching and liberating ways, which are viewed in terms of their social and political function. It also cautions about the ethics and politics of knowledge involved in the deployment of travel writing as a method in the interrogation of videogames, concluding with a methodological sketch for a way ahead. It illustrates and demonstrates its argument with three original travelogues.

Unwanted Slaves: The Punishment of Transportation and the Making of Legal Subjects in Early Nineteenth-Century Martinique

Unwanted Slaves: The Punishment of Transportation and the Making of Legal Subjects in Early Nineteenth-Century Martinique

Jewish Solidarity in Nineteenth‐Century France: The Evolution of a Concept

Previous articleNext article No AccessJewish Solidarity in Nineteenth‐Century France: The Evolution of a Concept*Lisa Moses LeffLisa Moses LeffSouthwestern University Search for more articles by this author Southwestern UniversityPDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of Modern History Volume 74, Number 1March 2002 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/343367 Views: 91Total views on this site Citations: 3Citations are reported from Crossref ©2002 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports the following articles citing this article:NICK UNDERWOOD Aron Beckerman's City of Light: writing French history and defining immigrant Jewish space in interwar Paris, Urban History 43, no.44 (Oct 2015): 618–634.https://doi.org/10.1017/S096392681500084XPaola Ferruta Das Weiblich-Männliche in der saint-simonistischen Debatte um 1830, Trajectoires , no.11 (Nov 2007).https://doi.org/10.4000/trajectoires.101Charles Tilly Contention and Democracy in Europe, 1650–2000, 43 (May 2010).https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511756092