Experience Of Slavery Research Articles

‘Time come’: Britain's black futures past

Abstract Drawing on the research for my book Thinking Black: Britain, 1964–85, this article, given as the 2019 Historical Research/Wiley lecture, unpacks the sense of impending change in black political cultures of the long nineteen-seventies, and analyses how black politics worked to carve out new historical subjects. I show how, for those who sought to build new black futures in this moment, imagining these futures meant bringing past experiences of slavery and colonialism into the present as unfinished histories that would be a driving force of change for Britain.

In the tracks of the impossible

Arising from experiences of slavery and exile, flamenco was strongly influenced, (re)created, and (re)imagined by black people who lived in southern Spanish cities for over 400 years. Despite consistent and intentional erasure, the fact is that between the fifteenth and nineteenth centuries, there was an important Black presence in the Iberian Peninsula. When I began research for Gurumbé: Canciones de tu Memoria Negra (2016) (Gurumbé: Afro-Andalucian Memories), I set out to reveal this history, to break this silence and expulsion that denies the history and legacy—and the humanity—of Afro-Andalusians. And under the many layers of silencing the memory of Spanish Afrodescendants, I found that Black memory had survived in the body. In flamenco, it created a discourse of resistance in the fact of the oppressors which has transcended time and history.

Classical Greek Ethnography and the Slave Trade

This paper draws upon analogy with better documented slave societies (the medieval Islamic world, and the 18th-century Caribbean) to argue, first, that the institution of slavery was a major factor in fostering a discourse on the differences among foreign peoples; and secondly, that Greek ethnographic writing was informed by the experience of slavery, containing implicit justifications of slavery as an institution. It then considers the implications of these conclusions for our understanding of Greek representations of the barbarian world and for Greek contact with non-Greeks.

The Household Workers of the East India Company Ports of Pre-Colonial Bengal

AbstractThis article examines the various experiences of slavery and freedom of female household workers in the Dutch and English East India Company (VOC and EIC, respectively) ports in Bengal in the early eighteenth century. Enslaved household workers in Bengal came from various Asian societies dotting the Indian Ocean littoral. Once manumitted, they entered the fold of the free Christian or Portuguese communities of the settlements. The most common, if not the only, occupation of the women of these communities was household or caregiving labour. The patriarchy of the settlements was defined by the labour and subjection of these women. Yet, domestic service to VOC/EIC officials only partially explains their subjectivity. This article identifies the agency of enslaved and women of free Christian or Portuguese communities in their efforts to resist or bypass the institution of the European household in the settlements. These efforts ranged from murdering their slave masters to creating independent businesses to the formation of sexual liaisons and parental/fraternal/sororal relationships disregarding the approval or needs of their settlement masters.

Performing Trauma: The Ghosts of Slavery in Yoruba Music and Ritual Dance

Abstract Drawing on popular songs and oral accounts, this article explores how the Yoruba people remember and memorialize their experiences of slavery and its impact on the people, as well as the community violence associated with slavery. The article highlights local recollection and dramatization of various modes of enslavement, anti-slavery tactics, the demographic impact of warfare and population dislocation, and the divergent experiences of slaves and slaveholders, as well as the linkages among slavery, religion, ethnicity, and gender.

Posttraumatic Slave Syndrome, the Patriarchal Nuclear Family Structure, and African American Male-Female Relationships.

African American marriages and relationships have strived to model the white patriarchal nuclear family model, but the experiences of slavery and contemporary structural racism have prevented the attainment of this model. Posttraumatic slave syndrome offers a framework that allows social workers to place African American experiences within a trauma-informed perspective and think about their implication for trauma-specific interventions. This article provides a brief overview of the traumatic experiences of African Americans as they relate to African American relationships, integrates the historical experiences of African Americans into a trauma-informed perspective to help social workers recognize the manifestations of trauma in African American relationships, and discusses implications for trauma-specific interventions to strengthen African American relationships.

Desensitized pasts and sensational futures in Mauritius and Zanzibar

ABSTRACTThis paper seeks to assert the relevance of ‘sensing’ identity in social analyses of the Southwest Indian Ocean islands. It is proposed that for some time, a broad concept of social change (specifically creolization) has been the reference point for understanding identity in the region. However, authors have tended to ignore the sensorial nature of human identity and the sensory experience of slavery and colonization. As a result, they have advanced a ‘sense’ less articulation of the islands and their inhabitants. Focusing on the senses in human identity and social experience, this article offers a sense-rich analysis of identity in the Southwest Indian Ocean region, revealing multidimensional senses of self in a diversity of social spaces. The author concludes that by fixating on historical dates, broad social processes and the interests of a largely patriarchal society, some scholars have desensitized the past, obfuscating the realities of and creativity emerging out of slavery and colonization. Sensorial analyses of identity in the Southwest Indian Ocean region open up new avenues for thinking about human/nature relations and politics, the nature of ‘culture’ and experiences of social change.

Currents in Transatlantic History: Encounters, Commodities, Identities ed. by Steven G. Reinhardt

Reviewed by: Currents in Transatlantic History: Encounters, Commodities, Identities ed. by Steven G. Reinhardt Joseph P. Ward Currents in Transatlantic History: Encounters, Commodities, Identities. Edited by Steven G. Reinhardt. Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2017. Pp. xx, 193. $45.00, ISBN 978-1-62349-542-8.) The University of Texas at Arlington organized its annual Walter Prescott Webb Memorial Lectures in 2014 to honor the contribution of Stanley H. Palmer to the creation of its doctoral program in transatlantic history, which was celebrating its fifteenth anniversary. This volume pulls together several of the papers that were presented at that event, and in their breadth and creative uses of sources they certainly demonstrate that the field remains at least as vibrant as it was when the doctoral program began. Above all, the individual chapters each elucidate aspects of the long process through which the various peoples around the Atlantic basin came to create societies and cultures shaped by extensive contacts with others. Many of the relationships that forged Atlantic societies and cultures were rooted in the experience of slavery and other forms of captivity. The volume begins with an essay by Marcus Rediker on the Amistad rebellion of enslaved Africans in 1839. Drawing on the research he conducted for his 2012 book on the same topic, Rediker emphasizes that the shared experiences of the rebels, "based in the West African cultures from which they came," were a crucial factor in their success, an aspect of this famous event that needs to be as well appreciated as is its legacy for the antislavery movement more generally (p. 9). The next chapter, Benjamin Mark Allen's study of the experiences of the children of the French colonial Talon family in captivity and freedom in Texas during the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, displays the fluidity of status and identity in the evolving relationships between Native American and European peoples. The remaining five chapters explore aspects of modern transatlantic social and cultural relations. Emmanuel M. Mbah's essay on the Cameroon diaspora in the United States focuses on the challenges faced by those who seek refuge from deteriorating social and political conditions in their home country. Their high expectations for a new life in America often leave them disappointed, as "Cameroonians and many other Africans in the United States are never fully comfortable" in their homes on either side of the Atlantic (p. 44). Julie L. Holcomb contributes an essay on the British Orientalist William Adam, who relocated to the United States in 1838 and played a leading role in the international efforts to abolish slavery in British India during the middle decades of the nineteenth century, a movement that increasingly called for boycotts of goods produced with slave labor. The international cotton trade was a focal point of global commerce, and, as the [End Page 144] chapter by Tom Aiello ably demonstrates, Dallas emerged as a focal point of that trade during the later decades of the nineteenth century, with Texas leading the United States in cotton production from around 1890. The economic connections between Dallas and the industrial heart of England were apparent to all observers, but the cultural ties between Texas and Great Britain were also evident in such developments as the establishment of a thriving branch of the English-Speaking Union in Dallas in the 1920s. One aspect of that cultural relationship involved upper-class British hunters testing their manhood in the wilds of the American West and, as Gregory Kosc explains in his essay, living to tell the tale through travel memoirs. For some of these hunter-writers, the American West was a sufficiently challenging environment to prove "the vindication of British manliness" (p. 148). The volume's final chapter, Pawel Goral's fascinating study of representations of the American West in the Cold War cinema and literature of Poland, takes as its starting point the role of Gary Cooper's image from High Noon (1952) in political advertisements from Poland's first democratic elections in 1989. In its highly ambitious sweep—covering three centuries and several continents—this volume makes a strong case for the relevance of transatlantic history to...

Black Agency and Aesthetic Innovation in Sergio Giral’s El otro Francisco

In 2013, Henry Louis Gates lamented the tradition of whitewashing and the passing over of slave stories which has become commonplace throughout cinematic history: “there have been all too few films that have captured, or even attempted to convey, the truth of the experience of slavery, from the slave’s point of view” and even fewer “worthy of recognition.” While it is true that there have been some high-profile films produced in the last decade – 12 Years a Slave, Django Unchained, and Birth of a Nation, among others – that have endeavored to represent slavery from the “slave’s point of view,” Gates’ assessment remains largely apposite within the contexts of Hollywood and English-language productions. However, Afro-Latinx cinema and the history of post-revolutionary Cuban cinema in particular tells a very different story. To evidence this difference, this article will explore El otro Francisco, which was originally released in 1975, and is the first in a searing trilogy of films focused on slavery in Cuba in which perspectives of the enslaved are foregrounded and the traditional representation of slavery – which has to a great extent elided the rich history of slave resistance – is rigorously undermined.

This War Ain't Over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America by Nina Silber

Reviewed by: This War Ain't Over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America by Nina Silber Gaines M. Foster (bio) This War Ain't Over: Fighting the Civil War in New Deal America. By Nina Silber. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2018. Pp. 248. Cloth, $32.95.) This War Ain't Over provides a fascinating exploration of "how Americans used a troubled past," not just the Civil War but also slavery and Reconstruction, "to navigate a complicated present," the Great Depression and World War II (1). In the midst of the suffering of the Depression, Nina Silber shows, Americans turned their attention to the Civil War, an earlier national trial that foretold ultimate survival and "shaped a history that often spoke directly to their present-day political concerns" (2). Silber has done extensive research in a wide variety of sources and wisely and carefully shows how various groups viewed that troubled past differently and employed its memory for differing purposes. She looks at "conservative southern Democrats; anticommunists; New Dealers; civil rights activists; and the communists and Popular Fronters" (3). If any group gets less attention than it deserves, it may be white northerners, particularly the more conservative of them. The book begins with a discussion of the state of Civil War memory on the eve of the Depression. The Lost Cause, with its utility in maintaining white supremacy, remained important in the South, Silber argues. A "more muted" and "diffused" vision of the war survived in the North, with African Americans doing the most to keep the memory of the war alive there, but even among them the importance of the war had declined (17). Nevertheless, "the story of the white family feud, now healed in defense of sectional reconciliation and white supremacy, had a strong presence in American culture" (21). With the Civil War generation having passed from the scene, however, Americans could and did reshape the war's meaning. They did so in "messages . . . less tethered to events and emotions of the 1860s and far more to the concerns, sensibilities, and structural imperatives of twentieth-century life" (36). Silber then discusses the role of New Deal arts programs in exploring slavery and the Civil War and the shift of responsibility for Civil War battlefields from the War Department to the National Park Service. The Park Service deemphasized the war's bloodshed and instead put the war into [End Page 669] a longer sweep of history, often with a southern bias. She also makes a convincing case for the role of movies in shaping the new messages, and throughout the book they serve as important sources for understanding memory. During the Depression, Silber shows, factory workers, sharecroppers, labor leaders, and many other Americans came to see themselves as slaves, most prominently whites. Some portrayed whites and blacks as united in slavery, but a "key argument of this book," and a compelling one, is that "slavery was increasingly portrayed, in speeches, novels, and films, as a problem with particular applicability to white suffering." White Americans, in other words, "appropriated the legacy of black enslavement" (5). At the same time, the federal arts programs tended to treat the African American experience of slavery as "either quaint, inconsequential, or a subject best left unexplored" (85). Along with its fascinating analysis of whites' appropriation of slavery, the book provides an equally insightful discussion of the changing image of Abraham Lincoln. Honest Abe "underwent," Silber convincingly demonstrates, "a series of remarkable transformations: no longer a bland symbol of reconciliation, he emerged as a figure more firmly associated with federal power and racial justice, although the racial message was often tempered by an appreciation of Lincoln's racially neutral 'humanitarianism'" (100). Silber then turns to the South and the role of the Lost Cause. The white South had always had a special tie to its Civil War past, she argues, but its interest in the war intensified and the Lost Cause became more conservative in response to the New Deal, particularly in the late 1930s after the Democrats and the federal government displayed a new interest in intervening in southern race relations. Even before that, the white South blamed its poverty...

Health inequalities and health equity challenges for victims of modern slavery.

Modern slavery is a serious organized crime, with severe consequences for the physical and mental health of victims, and so has public health implications. Anecdotally many victims of sex slavery experience difficulties accessing healthcare. Public Health England recently articulated the importance of health engagement to address modern slavery but little is known about the experiences of the survivors. We conducted in depth interviews with Albanian female survivors of sex slavery who all displayed significant and complex health needs. Interviews were conducted between July 2017 and January 2018. Thematic analysis identified four primary themes: (i) barriers to access, (ii) negotiating access, (iii) health needs and care received and (iv) overall experience of primary care. Survivors experienced repeated challenges accessing healthcare, for themselves and their children, and initially could not access GP services. When accompanied by an advocate they reported qualitatively and quantitatively improved experiences resulting in improved permeability. Confusion surrounding eligibility criteria and a lack of understanding of modern slavery emerged as the primary barriers, fueling biased adjudications. The importance of advocates, enabling rights-based approaches, improving understanding about access to health services for vulnerable groups, and a need for education across health service settings are discussed.

Fractional Freedoms: Slavery, Intimacy, and Legal Mobilization in Colonial Lima, 1600–1750, by Michelle A. McKinley

This is a rich and stimulating account of litigation by slaves in colonial Lima. Most cases revolved around questions of marriage and property rights, so the emphasis here is firmly on civil law procedures. Although entirely disenfranchised and utterly exploited, slaves are shown to have been strong and articulate defenders of their own rights, particularly to spousal unity. The resultant analysis is highly insightful, as well as moving. Michelle McKinley provides, with the precision of a lawyer’s eye, a guide to the lived experience of slavery in Lima. Central is the idea of fractional freedoms—that all states of being, free and unfree, were on a spectrum, and contingent upon a series of factors, gender-based, legal, religious, generational and so on. McKinley gives a detailed account of legal procedure, and considers where legal knowledge comes from. This is an important point. With little access to education, and scarce access to legal expertise with its attendant expenses, one might well wonder how slaves could possibly have been able to negotiate the labyrinthine legal procedures of colonial Lima. The slave litigants in the cases she examines were mostly owned by fairly high status families, where they would have had access to knowledge about the law: one wonders what happened to slaves in families where such knowledge was not readily available. Moreover, McKinley points out that legal knowledge is something which can be spread via gossip, local knowledge and community ties.

New Directions in Slavery Studies: Commodification, Community, and Comparison ed. by Jeff Forret and Christine E. Sears, and: Linking the Histories of Slavery: North America and Its Borderlands ed. by Bonnie Martin and James F. Brooks

Reviewed by: New Directions in Slavery Studies: Commodification, Community, and Comparison ed. by Jeff Forret and Christine E. Sears, and: Linking the Histories of Slavery: North America and Its Borderlands ed. by Bonnie Martin and James F. Brooks Kelly Houston Jones New Directions in Slavery Studies: Commodification, Community, and Comparison. Edited by Jeff Forret and Christine E. Sears. ( Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2015. Pp. x, 261. $47.00, ISBN 978-0-8071-6115-9.) Linking the Histories of Slavery: North America and Its Borderlands. Edited by Bonnie Martin and James F. Brooks. School for Advanced Research Advanced Seminar Series. ( Santa Fe, N.Mex.: School for Advanced Research Press, 2015. Pp. xxxiv, 382. $39.95, ISBN 978–1-938645–60-0.) The twenty-three essays on slavery gathered in these two volumes provide scholars and educators with fresh insights into various places and times, including the present. The stated organizing themes presented in Jeff Forret and Christine E. Sears's New Directions in Slavery Studies: Commodification, Community, and Comparison also appear in Bonnie Martin and James F. Brooks's Linking the Histories of Slavery: North America and Its Borderlands. Both compilations encourage the reader to contemplate how people were made into goods and how this process was crafted by enslavers, resisted by the enslaved, and remembered by communities. New Directions in Slavery Studies focuses on commodification in its first section and reflects scholars' lately revived interest in slavery's capitalism. Calvin Schermerhorn reveals how American consumers of manufactured cotton fabrics enjoyed cheap prices and convenience because of enslaved labor, while Bonnie Martin's essay in New Directions in Slavery Studies shows how free white Virginians tweaked credit systems and employed lending practices that increasingly commodified the enslaved from the seventeenth through nineteenth centuries. These and other essays tease out valuable connections between the commodification of enslaved people and the growth of American capitalism. Scholars of the lived experiences of slavery will appreciate this volume's fresh treatment of the slave community. Forret's work on theft within the slave quarters—along with his recent book on slave violence, Slave Against Slave: Plantation Violence in the Old South (Baton Rouge, 2015)—models how historians can tell stories of conflicts within societies of enslaved people, a task that does justice to the full range of their humanity. Anthony E. Kaye provides a thoughtful critique of the way historians have emphasized autonomy when [End Page 155] writing about slave communities as a whole. Kaye insists that the persistent dichotomy of "agency and structure" has outlived its usefulness and should be replaced with something more nuanced (p. 170). Although slavery scholars will continue to wrestle with exactly how to move beyond autonomy, Kaye's point that we should do so is sure to be influential. Kaye suggests that historians must get creative and draw fresh inspiration from fields such as poststructural feminism, human geography, and comparative studies to get out of the rut. Fulfilling Kaye's call for more comparative work, Forret and Sears's final section offers four essays that provide a good mix of top-down and bottom-up views of slavery. Mariana Dantas explores the work lives of urban enslaved women in the Atlantic world, revealing the extent to which these women created the wealth and supported the economic connections that upheld urban economies of Sabará, Minas Gerais, Brazil, and Baltimore, Maryland. The main difference between enslaved women's experiences in the two cities was that women in Sabará, compared with their counterparts in Maryland, were more often able to use their labor to secure their freedom. Enrico Dal Lago's essay on modernization and nation-building offers a panoptic view of how the slave-holding elites in the United States, Cuba, and Brazil attempted to nationalize the institution of slavery in the nineteenth century. The Confederacy in the United States, the Rio Grande do Sul slave power in Brazil, and the eastern Cuban secessionists in the Spanish empire all attempted and failed to separate and create societies that protected their interests in slavery. Indeed, each of their failures directly initiated emancipation. The Confederacy's attempt and failure to create a nation to protect the interests of "peripheral" slaveholders through...

Luanda in Santiago and Santiago in Luanda: Trans-Atlantic Dimensions in Cuban and Angolan Poetry

Luanda in Santiago and Santiago in Luanda:Trans-Atlantic Dimensions in Cuban and Angolan Poetry Lanie Millar What is lost when we ignore the poetic in political poetry? What insights arise when we read poetry with attention to the spaces in between the political and the literary? This article analyzes several groups of twentieth-century Cuban and Angolan poems with attention to two dimensions of transnational exchange. First, it considers American and African cultural geographies that are read as the source of different poetic languages and forms that reverberate across the Atlantic. Second, it posits that reading political poetry, even or especially that which appears simplistically political, can open up compelling questions about the role of art in the public sphere. While the Cuban intervention into Angola is one of the island nation's most significant post-revolutionary international events, critics have paid very limited attention to Cuban literature about the Angolan war; similarly, few studies have sought to place Angolan literature into larger trans-Atlantic conversations.1 However, intercultural exchange [End Page 1277] is a central component that thematically links a series of both Cuban and Angolan poems from the mid-to-late twentieth century, focusing on two moments of trans-Atlantic collaboration that forefront political engagement: the negritude movements of the mid-twentieth century and the Cuban-Angolan joint venture of the 1970s-1980s. Recent works of history examine a range of interests and motivations leading to Cuba's and Angola's public expressions of solidarity across the Global South, the rearticulation of Cuba as an "Afro-Latino nation" and a longstanding commitment to collaboration between the two nations that continues into the twenty-first century (Castro 1976). Cuba's support for Angola's independence war as it escalated into an international and civil conflict went beyond military collaboration to include joint film ventures, educational missions, journalism, and literature in support of the collaboration. On their end, Angola's writers and intellectuals, founders of the anti-colonial movements, saw their role as a mandate to create the new nation via politically engaged letters. Angolan revolutionary poetry, refracting Cuba's look toward the African continent, frequently vacillates between a nationalized and localized sense of the revolutionary struggle and a look out to the rest of the continent and the worldwide African diaspora in order to cast the intersections of artistic and political revolt in terms of an international collective of actors. Poems by Cubans Nicolás Guillén, Víctor Casaus, and Antonio Conte as well as Angolans Viriato da Cruz, Agostinho Neto, and Manuel Rui, and their paratextual material, evidence a focus on what I call historical analogy. The poems conceive of experiences of slavery and colonization, independence, and revolution in the Caribbean and Africa as analogous, portraying the Cuban revolution of 1959 and the Angolan revolution of 1975 as historical counterparts. Yet, careful examination of the works where this trans-Atlantic exchange is the explicit theme undermines two dominant framings of the mid-twentieth-century encounters: first, the Negritude trope of blackness as the common factor that links Africa to the diaspora, where Africa is posited as origin/original and the diaspora as copy; and second, how the over-determination of the political allegiance between the two nations after 1975 leads to notions of political iteration—the revolution repeated in two locales. Rather, reading poems about the encounter together reveals a system of dense poetic entanglements that relies upon prior moments of a primarily poetic exchange, rather than solely a racial or political one. These poems thus suggest an alternate territory of contemplation that is not adequately perceived when we reduce them to [End Page 1278] transparent political messaging. Both the Angolan poetry of the 1940s to the 1960s and the Cuban and Angolan poems written during the 1970s and 1980s explicitly show the poets as readers of the Négritude/negritude/negrista movements of the 1930s to 1950s in French, Portuguese, and Spanish. Earlier poetic figures and movements continue to frame the later poetry's engagement with their present, especially for white Cuban poets who call upon the foundational Afro-Cuban figure of Guillén to engage with Africa. This article will proceed in three parts...

Contraindre le chaos à devenir forme: le motif de la descente aux enfers dans Et les chiens se taisaient d’Aimé Césaire

In this paper, I argue that the persistent historical trauma of colonialism leads to a crisis akin to the descent to the underworld (or katabasis) in Aime Cesaire’s Et les chiens se taisaient, in which we may discern the deep patterns shaping the poetics of the author. Offering a close reading of the play grounded in Edouard Glissant’s “poetics of Relation”, I argue that Cesaire’s hellish “abyss” functions productively as a poetic trope for the experience of slavery and its traumatic consequences. I also show that the “abyss” (which represents the spatio-temporal rupture engendered by the Atlantic slave trade and the experience of slavery itself) is conceived as a creative void out of which the author’s poetic aesthetic emerges. The article pays particular attention to Cesaire’s intertexts, especially Dante and the Divine Comedy. Glissant’s theory of “Relation” is used as a guiding framework to emphasise the dialectical thrust of Cesaire’s poetic project.

Interindividual differences in embodied marginalization: Osteological and stable isotope analyses of antebellum enslaved individuals.

Through pathological and stable isotope analyses, this study probes the stressors, disease ecology, and diets of enslaved individuals from an antebellum plantation cemetery. The study aims to highlight how interindividual isotopic differences reveal that marginalization is not uniformly experienced or embodied. The cemetery population consists of 16 individuals; dental and skeletal pathological indicators were collected for all individuals, and light stable isotope ratios (δ15 N, δ13 C) were generated from the collagen and hydroxyapatite of nine individuals. The analyzed individuals have high frequencies of enamel defects-similar to contemporaneous enslaved cemetery individuals-and particularly high frequencies of carious lesions. Skeletal analysis shows evidence of chronic conditions among several individuals, two of whom likely have tuberculosis. Although the sample size is small, stable isotope values display interesting trends: there is interindividual heterogeneity in δ13 C values, and most subadults from the cemetery have lower δ15 N and higher δ13 C values than the sampled adults. These relationships can be tested with larger datasets and have the potential to reveal important information about slave foodways and the broader experience of enslavement. The results of this study suggest that racial discrimination, enslavement, and age do not fully account for the heterogeneity in degree of embodied stressors. There are likely other factors at play, intersecting with the aforementioned, that influenced the lived experience of slavery and the degree of marginalization.

Intimate Bonds: Family and Slavery in the French Atlantic. By Jennifer L. Palmer

One wonders what the late Haitian anthropologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot, who wrote famously of the historical ‘silencing’ of the Haitian Revolution, would make of the great proliferation of works on Haiti and the Revolution that have appeared over the last decade or so — books, articles, and edited volumes by scholars such as Laurent Dubois, Deborah Jenson, Marlene Daut, Jeremy D. Popkin, Nick Nesbitt, Charles Forsdick, Kaiama L. Glover, and many others. Collectively, this body of recent work, building on previous landmark publications by, among others, C. L. R. James, David Geggus, Michael Dash, and Trouillot himself, has had the effect of promoting Haiti to the forefront of debates on race and revolution during and after the Enlightenment era, to the extent that it has become an unavoidable point of reference for any scholar working on those themes and periods. A primary concern has been to investigate what Nesbitt terms ‘The Idea of Haiti’ (see ‘The Idea of 1804’, in The Haiti Issue: 1804 and Nineteenth-Century French Studies (= special issue Yale French Studies, 107 (2005)), 6–38), the philosophical and political underpinnings and ramifications of the Revolution, and to assert the primary importance of Haiti to emerging ideas on race, human rights, slavery, and other contemporary concerns. Arguably, the drive to promote Haiti in this way has rather ignored some of the complexities and contradictions of the Revolution, and paid relatively little attention to the everyday, lived experience of slavery and colonialism in Saint-Domingue. Jennifer L. Palmer’s fine study of that very experience complements some of the other recent work on Haiti, and also subtly critiques its tendency to reach for the overarching political-philosophical meanings of the Revolution while ignoring, and indeed ‘silencing’, accounts of the quotidian reality of slavery. Tellingly — and in this regard she echoes Geggus — she argues that the Revolution, just as it challenged notions of white, European superiority, also had the effect of solidifying race as a political and social category, and of curtailing the fluidity that had previously characterized social relations — the ways in which bonds were formed across racial lines, in the ‘intimate’ settings that she writes about: in workplaces, homes, families, commercial relations, and other situations in which Africans, Europeans, and Creoles inevitably met and formed bonds. As the Revolution progressed, so the personal ties that had bound different groups together began to dissolve and to be replaced by more clearly oppositional, binary understandings of race. Palmer’s meticulous research uncovers a range of intimate connections that go beyond the usual interest in sexual intimacy to include bonds of, for example, common masculinity, shared work, kinship, and neighbourliness, and which, she says, characterized the lived experience of colonial rule. In ranging broadly from Saint-Domingue to La Rochelle, she suggests the ways in which such intimacies were transatlantic in nature and implication, and, again, how such bonds were curtailed as binary notions of race established themselves across the Atlantic world. Palmer’s arguments are persuasive, and should be incorporated into the broader debates on race and revolution, while we remain aware that the historical accounts of such ties remain inevitably one-sided, and that the silencing of the enslaved created one intimate reality that even the most sophisticated study is unable to enter.

Atzma’ut 69, Occupation 50

Atzma’ut 69, Occupation 50

The Politics of Identity: The History of African Americans Reconsidered through Narratives

The narratives are a means of sharing each other's experiences, linking people in time and event over the generations. As such are the narratives of African Americans who have the stories of slavery and freedom that helped them to form their identity as Americans. Thus, the present paper attempts to shed light on the definitions of identity politics and how African Americans come across the experience of slavery, reconstruct their shared history and ultimately attain their identity in the mainstream American life.Journal of Political Science. Vol. 17, 2017, Page: 52-62

Intermediality: A Paradigm for African Identity in the Twenty-First Century

SummaryOne notion of African identity is based on the credo that generally champions the view that so-called Africans should not only celebrate an identity that is predicated on racialised and essentialised blackness, but also seek out (and hopefully render assistance to) any black persons anywhere in the world. Crucially, it was the black experience of slavery, as well as colonialism, that helped to foster such essentialised notions of identity. It is a matter of tragic irony that the very people who were written out of history are architects of some of the continent’s worst excesses, notably ethnic wars, genocides and related manifestations of black-on-black hatred and violence. Rather than giving attention to ideological positions that privilege notions of predetermined “Africanness”, I situate the debate in the disciplinary positions of history, philosophy and literature, and posit the idea of intermediality, meaning a state of in-betweenness, as a model for articulations of identity that not only promote the reality of our “otherness”, but also teach us what it means to be human. I argue that the idea of an African identity that is grounded on an essentialised blackness flies in the face of the history of a continent that has always been defined by “otherness” or difference. In employing intermediality as a core concept of intersubjectivity on all articulations of identity that put the emphasis on respect for difference, I invoke selected post-structuralist and postmodern discourses to argue for an African identity in the twenty-first century that is more fluid and contested than any transcendent regimes of cultural certainty and legitimacy would have us believe. I insist on the primacy and the relevance of the idea of intermediality and, consequently, Africa’s interconnectedness with the rest of humankind.