Female Slaves Research Articles

The Philosophy of Black Lives Matter

The Philosophy of Black Lives Matter

The Regulation of “Sodomy” in the Latin East and West

The Regulation of “Sodomy” in the Latin East and West

Urban Slavery in West and West Central Africa during the Transatlantic Slave Trade

ABSTRACT The trade in enslaved captives across the Atlantic Ocean shaped West and West Central Africa’s urban shoreline. Towns adjusted to or were created for service to that trade. In turn, these towns shaped the socioeconomic realities of their hinterlands. Between the seventeenth and nineteenth centuries, this impact was felt nowhere more than among the enslaved and freed-slave migrants who made their way to perceived opportunities on the coast. This article examines these migrants’ experiences through a comparative regional approach. We look first at Saint Louis du Senegal and then compare the Gold Coast, Whydah, Lagos, the Bight of Biafra, Luanda, and Benguela. Each of these cities had its own particular qualities, often shaped by geography, but there were also common features. They all depended heavily on slave labor and, in several, female slave ownership was important. Most significantly, slavery in these cities was marked by considerable autonomy for the enslaved.

Difference and Accountability: Framing the Black Female Voice

ABSTRACT The History of Mary Prince (1831) not only recounts Prince’s experience of the brutalities of life under plantation slavery, it frames that story with an extraordinary array of authenticating paratextual material (preface, supplement, footnotes and appendices) that take up more space than the core narrative itself. For this reason, scholarly attention to the narrative has been critical of Pringle’s framing of Prince’s story, claiming that the paratexts suppress, undermine or efface her black voice, even as they aim to validate that voice. Yet these readings fail to consider the ways in which the paratexts create spaces of discursive transaction that effectively foreground a process of demand and response, in which the contestations over her claims not only attest to the precarity of the black, female slave. They foreground her claims as sites of disturbance within an English public sphere anxious over its morality, thus creating a radically new kind of abolitionist text – one that remains inherently relational, foregrounding the structures of address upon which moral demands are made as those that are, in this instance, generated from a confrontation with difference and the shock of the elsewhere.

블레이크의 『올비언의 딸들의 비전들』에 나타난 본질과 성장의 문제

The purpose of this essay is to seek the real meaning of Oothoon’s strenuous and holy voice of resistance and growth against tyranny contrasting Oothoon’s essence and Oothoon’s identity. It also shows that the deepest and most pervasive systems of tyranny Oothoon resists are the appropriative, possessive, and proprietary consciousness of the Lockean self and those aspects of British empiricism that valorize the external and accidental over the internal and essential. Oothoon gradually develops an enduring essence or identity and therefore possesses a mind or self of resistance capable of resisting such constraints as slavery and cultural, social, and political ideology derived from Lockean system. Oothoon’s suffering as a female slave and the way she negotiates it help manifest and enhance her identity and set a worthy example for the oppressed everywhere. Although she is a badly abused and broken-hearted woman, she never submits suffering. Rather, admitting suffering actively or resisting powerfully, she preserves her essence and identity and grows into prophetic being.

Being a Woman in the American Slavery System: A Study of the Slave Woman’s Ordeal in America, from 1776 to 1865

Women have long been negatively stereotyped in every society, usually portrayed as submissive and passive. In the case of the black women in the slavery context, the conception of them by their male compatriots as well as the white master is dual: a working animal to do every chore in the household in the one hand, and an object for the master’s sexual appetite in the other hand. Scholars in American slavery have grappled with the question of gender differences among slaves in the Americas in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Whereas some scholars hold that both male and female slaves were assigned different roles, feminist scholars hold that enslaved women labored no less than enslaved men. They observed that unlike white women, female slaves performed the same roles as men slaves. The present research work reveals and analyses the experiences and contributions of slave women in the global American slavery system. As such, the focus is on themes that especially concern female slaves; these include: motherhood, companionship, marriage, work on plantations, and punishment. Central in this study is how those female Blacks experienced slavery in America and how they help build the American economy in that period.

Uncovering The Hidden Lives of Last Clotilda Survivor Matilda McCrear and Her Family

ABSTRACT This article uncovers for the first time the life story of Matilda McCrear (1857 or 1858–1940), the last survivor of the Clotilda, the last U.S. slave ship. Drawing on a newspaper interview with McCrear alongside genealogical data, this study charts her experiences from slavery to the Great Depression, and sheds light not only on McCrear’s life but also the lives of her mother Gracie, stepfather Guy, sister Sallie and two other unnamed sisters, who were all survivors of the slave ship Clotilda. The article has two key aims: to construct one of the most complete biographical accounts yet available of a female transatlantic slave trade survivor and, equally significantly, to create the first composite portrait of a family’s experience of the Middle Passage and its aftermath. The article highlights the lifelong injustices that McCrear and her family endured, but it also uncovers the sometimes surprising ways in which McCrear resisted the social and economic limitations of her place, as an African-born woman, in the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century U.S. South.

Remembering the tatas: an oral history of the Tetouan elite about their female domestic slaves

Affluent families in Tetouan (Morocco) had female domestic servants from slave origins until well into the twentieth century. I present here a reconstruction of the trajectories and living conditions of those women, based on the recent memory of the slave-owning families themselves. This exercise raises different methodological challenges about the use of memory, while allowing us to present the transformations that the slavery system underwent in colonial Morocco. The position of female domestic servants was diverse and paradoxical, since in many cases they achieved a degree of closeness with the families, while at the same time finding themselves under a system of class and gender domination.

The application of a translational performance method using archival material, personal narrative, mythology and somatic practices: the making of Womb of Fire

The article offers a pragmatic investigation that addresses translation both as an embodied activity of recalling erased memory and as a recuperation of the dis-membered post-slave/post-colonial female body. Through reflecting on an example of personal performance practice, the study employs the performer and playwright's own post-slave/post-colonial body as the locus of intersection between the private and the political, the biological and archival/historical. The article focuses on Womb of Fire, a production that weaves the stories of three women: Draupadi from the Indian Epic, The Mahabarata, Catrijn (1631–1682), the first recorded female convict slave banished to the Dutch-occupied Cape of Good Hope, and Zara (1648–1671), a Khoikhoi woman, born in the Cape and employed as a servant from a young age. In Womb of Fire, the performer interrogates her own slave ancestry as well as her first indigenous peoples or Khoekhoen ancestry to examine the founding violence of Colonialism and it's continuing impact on the female body. The article weaves the reflections of Rehane Abrahams, co-conceptualiser, playwright and performer of Womb of Fire, and Sara Matchett, co-conceptualiser and director of the production. The study draws from Abrahams and Matchett's respective areas of research. Abrahams employs the archive, a syncretic spirituality and objects of cultural memory to translate and re-member an erased diasporic and Khoekhoen narrative continuity and recuperate embodied feminine agency. Matchett interrogates translation as an embodied process that explores the body as a site for generating images for purposes of performance-making. Her method of performance-making, in this context, addresses how the post-slave body practically translates the archival narratives, and in particular how these intersect with the biological/personal. Matchett interrogates the potential of breath to act as a catalyst for activating and translating memories, stories, and experiences held in the body of the performer.

Desire, Dispossession, and Dreams of Social Data: Black Clubwomen’s Intellectual Thought and Aesthetics During the Progressive Era in Public Writing and Print Culture

Desire, Dispossession, and Dreams of Social Data: Black Clubwomen’s Intellectual Thought and Aesthetics During the Progressive Era in Public Writing and Print Culture Erica Richardson (bio) Carefully and conscientiously we shall study the questions, which affect the race most deeply and directly. Against the convict lease system, the Jim Crow car laws, lynchings and all other barbarities which degrade us, we shall protest with such force of logic and intensity of the soul that those who oppress us will either cease to disavow the inalienability and equality of human rights, or be ashamed to openly violate the very principles upon which this government was founded. —Mary Church Terrell, “What Role is the Educated Negro Woman to Play” (1902)1 The immorality of colored women is a theme upon which those who know little about them or those who maliciously misrepresent them love to descant. Foul aspersions upon the character of colored women are assiduously circulated by the press of certain sections and especially by the direct descendants of those who in years past were responsible for the moral degradation of their female slaves […] Dotted all over the country are charitable institutions for the aged, orphaned, and poor which have been established by colored women, just how many it is [End Page 33] difficult to state, owing to the lack of statistics bearing on the progress, possessions, and prowess of colored women. —Mary Church Terrell, “The Progress of Colored Women” (1904)2 In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, black middle-class women around the United States formed a series of clubs to mobilize a racial uplift reform movement. They created kindergartens and reading groups.3 They encouraged and guided the cultivation of black homes. And above all else, black clubwomen, as they came to be known, worked tirelessly to address the myriad challenges the black race faced with the rollback of civil rights following the end of Reconstruction and the steady rise of racial prejudice and antiblack violence.4 By way of introduction into this essay’s focus on the archive of black clubwomen’s public writing and print culture, I offer a reading of the two passages above by Mary Church Terrell. Terrell was one of the most influential and powerful black women’s club leaders and the first president of the national network of black clubwomen, the National Association of Colored Women (NACW). In the first selection above, taken from a speech delivered to a meeting of black clubwomen, “What Role is the Educated Negro Woman to Play,” Terrell draws on a series of issues related to the social realities for black Americans. The convict lease system practically undermined the Thirteenth Amendment abolishing slavery, the Jim Crow train cars vacated the Fourteenth Amendment ensuring equal rights to blacks as citizens, and lynchings negated perhaps all of the Reconstruction amendments, threatening black death in response to any semblance of black life and equality, from voting rights to the sheer attempt at black dignity. Terrell illustrates the social and political awareness of black clubwomen, but it is her carefully crafted sentimental tone that captures my attention for it indicates an ability to refashion epistemological tools to assert black women’s authority and agency. For example, when Terrell proclaims black clubwomen’s potential to intervene “with such force of logic and intensity of the soul,” she aligns reason with spirituality, effectively combining two categories of thought and knowledge production typically regarded as mutually exclusive during the period.5 Victorian middle-class women were given province over the home, emotions, and care of the family, but rarely were they perceived as mobilizing a set of politics based on their intellectual abilities. Black women were often excluded from this cultural standard due to race. Terrell combines logic and the soul to assert black women’s ability to meet a middle-class standard and to give them greater authority to perceive, think, and reimagine black social and political life not only for the benefit of blacks but also for the substantiation of “the inalienability and equality of human rights.” And yet, as the second selection suggests, that was not enough to persuade American society to recognize what black clubwomen knew of their...

The "Slave" as Cultural Artifact: The Case of Mary Prince

The "Slave" as Cultural Artifact:The Case of Mary Prince Kerry Sinanan (bio) The History of Mary Prince was first published in 1831 in London and Edinburgh and ran to three editions that year as its popularity proved integral to the success of the Emancipation Bill. It remains a much discussed text that frequently appears on courses that deal with transatlantic slavery and abolition. So much rests on this slim volume because it is the only text that recounts, in a first-person narrative, the experiences of an enslaved woman female slave in the British Caribbean. Despite its importance to the moment of Emancipation, in the Preface to the first edition, Thomas Pringle, then secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society, goes to lengths to emphasize that Prince's narrative is her own story, published at her request: "[T]he Anti Slavery Society have no concern whatever with this publication, nor are they in any degree responsible for the statements it contains. I have published the tract, not as their Secretary, but in my private capacity; and any profits that may arise from the sale will be exclusively appropriated to the benefit of Mary Prince herself."1 From the beginning, then, there has been an explicit tension between Mary Prince "herself" and her own motivations to tell her story, and the needs of the broader antislavery movement and its history. This tension between Prince and her contexts is ongoing as she continues to serve as a representative figure for the history of British abolition. In this essay I want to examine some of the ways in which Mary Prince and her text have been commemorated in Britain, the Caribbean, and the United [End Page 69] States, especially since Abolition 200 which commemorated the passing of the Abolition Bill in British Parliament in 1807, banning the trade in slaves.2 These public and digital commemorations of Prince interact with the archives of slavery in ways that highlight significant problems with remembering slavery in the multimedia age on both sides of the Atlantic. Moreover, as I shall show, both the public and digital commemorations of Prince create new archives of slavery that rewrite not only historical fact but Prince's History itself. Not much attention was given to Prince outside of academic arenas prior to 2007. Since then, however, the politics of commemoration in the context of present-day abolitionism have worked to recreate and represent Prince as a much more popular and public figure in ways that pander to our current concerns. Her brief text, that was already the product of complex historical forces through which Prince attempted to speak, becomes, once again, subjected to the demands of cultural politics that threaten to overwhelm what The History might have to tell us. As in the 1830s, post–2007, Prince has been reconstituted as a cultural artifact for the present but is presented to us in ways that obscure her presentation in the present as an artifact. The cultural desire to access the "real" Mary Prince as a historical subject occludes the forces at work to fulfill this mode of consumption within antislavery commemoration to the neglect of what we really do or can know about Prince. Before looking at these commemorations it is worth recounting the context of the production of The History and some of the key critical debates that it generates in scholarship today. Prince's narrative was transcribed by Susanna Strickland, later Susanna Moodie, who was to write Roughing it in the Bush (1852), while she was a servant in the household of Thomas Pringle, secretary of the Anti-Slavery Society. Prince was technically still enslaved but had left her owners, the Woods, in order to test Lord Mansfield's decision of 1772 on the James Somerset case which had fudged the issue of slave status in England by stating that "The state of slavery is of such a nature, that it is incapable of being now introduced by justice upon mere reasoning … it must take its rise from positive law."3 This had left uncertain the issue of the rights of slave owners in a post-revolutionary culture. In 1829, under the direction of the Anti-Slavery society...

Sociology and Sisyphus: postcolonialism, anti-positivism, and modernist narrative in Patterson’s oeuvre

This article argues that Orlando Patterson is a key contributor to postcolonial fiction and postcolonial theory as well as historical sociology and social theory, whose work contains crucial lessons for sociology in general. Patterson has coined striking concepts such as social death and human parasitism and made original historical interpretations such as the origins of freedom in the experiences of female slaves. Patterson has contributed to historical knowledge, social theory, and an alternative epistemology of interpretive social science. And through his fiction, he exemplifies an alternative understanding of the metier of the social scientist, in which literary-aesthetic sensuousness and lyrical pleasure are combined with analytic rigor. The first part of the article suggests that Patterson’s work represents an overlooked foundation for postcolonial sociology. Demonstrating this involves reconstructing Patterson’s early intellectual context and then tracing the interplay between fiction and social analysis in his work. The article then analyses Patterson’s fictional writing, arguing that it is a crucial part of his overall production of social knowledge. The article’s final section argues that Patterson’s work lays out a non-positivist foundation for historical sociology and sociology as a whole.

Defining Models of Chronotope in the Creation of Female Characters in Pavlo Zagrebelnyi’s Historical Novel “Roksolana”

The article is devoted to the comparison of the chronotope models, characteristic of the female characters of the historical novel “Roksolana” by Pavlo Zagrebelnyi as ideostylistic means of creating systemic-structural, genre and ideological specificity of the author’s texts. Achieving the goal involves solving the following tasks: identifying and characterizing the specific dominant models of chronotope that structure the female characters in the novel. The interpretation of the chronotope through the category of event made it possible for us to introduce the concept of “chronotope model”, which means a typical event that is depicted in the plane of one work several times in relation to different heroes or the same hero. To represent this event, the author may choose different topographic and chronic parameters, while maintaining the invariant nature of the event. The historical novel “Roksolana” clearly shows the tendency of the writer to use typical chronotopes to create the image of a person in history. We have singled out such central models of chronotopes as the chronotope of struggle, redemption, victory, defeat, escape, insight in the novel. Among the dominant models of chronotope that structure the images of Valid Hafsa, Mahidevran, Roksolana-Hurrem, there are some prevailing common models: fights, victories, ascension, trials, changes (transition), defeat (fall), revenge, loss. All the female characters in Pavlo Zagrebelnyi’s historical novel, “Roksolana” are united by the chronotope of struggle for power over Suleiman. To achieve their goal, the female slaves of the harem go through the chronotopes of trial, change (transition), loss. The models of victory and ascension are accompanied by the chronotopes of defeat, loss, revenge. Thanks to the used models of chronotope, Pavlo Zagrebelnyi manages to create the prominent psychological images of people of the sixteenth century.

From Persecution to (Potential) Emancipation

Abstract This article deals with offences and crimes against female slaves, and those committed by female slaves, in Ottoman Istanbul (sixteenth-seventeeth centuries). Its main sources are imperial legislation and court records of the imperial capital, Istanbul, and its suburbs. Judicial archives remain the chief sources of early modern Ottoman historiography on gender. This contribution tackles slavery’s specificities regarding women, without ignoring the parallels with their male counterparts in the Ottoman Empire. By considering women as both objects and agents of legal violations and acts of violence, I simultaneously deal with the rights of slaveholders and slaves. Violations of these rights varied depending on the identity and juridical status of their authors, and were handled accordingly by the justice system. Thus, I consider violations committed by owners against their slaves, by slaves against their owners, and by third parties against the slaves of others. The rights and mutual obligations of masters and slaves were strictly defined in Ottoman law, although the judicial authorities upheld the preservation of private property above all. They dedicated themselves to fighting against the slightest doubt over masters’ quasi-absolute authority over their human possessions, whose unconditional obedience was required. Female slaves, in order to affirm their rights, had to provide irrefutable written proof or trustworthy verbal testimonies at the kadi courts.

From Melling’s Harem to Eviner’s Harem

Antoine-Ignace Melling's engraving Inside the Harem of the Sultan (c 1810) depicts women's everyday life and their relationships, rituals and spatial practices in the Ottoman harem. Two centuries later, İnci Eviner, one of the leading contemporary artists internationally acclaimed for her solo and group exhibitions as well as for her contribution to numerous biennials, animates the same anonymous women in her video Harem (2009) by displacing the spatio-temporal nexus of Melling's work and exposes, in the manner of a visual parrhesia, the desires, the revolting gestures and the violence inherent in the harem. To discuss the nature of this displacement, we open with a few initial remarks on Melling's Harem. Then we focus on Eviner's Harem, elaborating on the forms of subjectivity and spatiality it evokes. In this discussion we pay special attention to the role of becoming, sacrifice, resurrection and the virtual in Eviner's work. The power relation specific to the harem, that of between the despot and the female slave, plays a pivotal role in this context. To end with, we turn to another significant work by Eviner, The Parliament, which, rather unexpectedly, relates the subjective and spatial nexus of the Oriental harem to Western politics.

The forgotten women of gynaecology

The inhumane use of female slaves in the development of gynaecological techniques has not been fully acknowledged. It is time to formally recognise these formidable women, says Heidi Downes

Du Baptême à la Tombe: Afro-Catholicisme et Réseaux Familiaux dans les Communautés Esclaves Louisianaises (From baptism to the grave: Afro-Catholicism and family network in Louisiana slave communities)

In Du Baptême à la Tombe Geneviève Piché explores Louisiana, unique in its French, Spanish, and American heritages, and the challenging subject of African Catholicism in slave communities in the early American period (1803–1845). She uses church documents, comparing the urban New Orleans Parish with the rural Saint John the Baptist Parish, but also published sources, travel literature, directories, and registers, in English but mostly in French. Her theoretical stand includes slave agency and cultural negotiation, macrohistory and microhistory, history from below, and the search for the excluded. It also includes female protagonists, and discussions of creolization, hybridity, transculturation, and multicultural processes. She views religiosity as a key socializing practice, including for the subaltern, and considers plurality important in society and in historical interpretation. In local and global approaches, she stresses how slavery in Louisiana has an Atlantic context (American, Iberian, Caribbean, African, and Latin American). Piché deals first with the life of urban slaves in the New Orleans parish, including demographics and stressing a heterogeneous servile population, with the preponderance of female slaves as domestics and merchants. Leisure and amusement play important roles in slave urban life, most of it in tandem with religiosity, officially Catholic yet mixed with African mores. She then turns to the countryside of the Saint John the Baptist Parish, emphasizing the prevalence of males, the growing U.S.-born slave population's use of English, and Protestant features opposed by French Catholic missionary zeal. As most slaves were Catholics, she deals at length with the Church and the slaves in Louisiana. Slaves were active agents in Catholic practice; women, in particular, and some within the clergy opposed slavery. The Church was split and the clergy itself owned slaves. Catholic slave owners often opposed conversion. In any case, most slaves were Catholics, and Sunday was a resting day; priests opposed family split, as the thorny issue of marriage led to common slave church unions. Free black women volunteered to spread the Catholic faith. Piché concludes that voluntary adherence to Catholicism comforted the material and spiritual lives of slaves and free blacks. Even if that is impossible to prove, her arguments are convincing and contribute to understanding the past as inspiring, as even the most destitute can forge their own destinies.

Morrer de pé para não viver de joelhos: o suicídio de Bertoleza em <i>O cortiço</i>, de Aluísio Azevedo

O presente artigo pretende analisar o suicídio de Bertoleza, constante no livro O cortiço (1890), de Aluísio Azevedo. Nosso objetivo é mostrar que a autoimolação da personagem em questão, longe de ser um ato extravagante e puramente ficcional dentro da narrativa tradicional brasileira, conjuga-se com as formas de resistência e insubmissão encontradas pelos negros e negras na sociedade brasileira antes da Abolição. Nossa metodologia consistirá, portanto, em utilizar a pesquisa histórica sobre as situações, motivações e crenças que levavam amiúde escravos e escravas em nossas terras a porem fim às próprias vidas para situar com maior clareza a configuração literária que essa prática adquire no livro O cortiço em relação à morte de Bertoleza. Para tanto, utilizamos como referencial teórico as pesquisas históricas de Ferreira (2009) e Mott (1991) sobre o suicídio de escravos e a mulher na luta contra a escravidão, respectivamente, análises psicológicas de Fanon (2008) sobre o racismo e as reflexões contidas no clássico O deus selvagem, de Alvarez (1999), sobre as relações entre a literatura e o suicídio; junto às observações pertinentes de Antonio Candido sobre João Romão e Bertoleza em seu ensaio “De cortiço a cortiço”, presentes no livro O discurso e a cidade (2015).

Cultural Memory and Ethnic Identity Construction in Toni Morrison’sA Mercy

Through the lens of cultural memory, this article explores the relationships between the representation of cultural memory and the construction of ethnic cultural identity in Toni Morrison’s A Mercy. I argue that in the novel, Morrison highlights and manipulates three media of cultural memory: the architecture, the inscription, and the body, to interrogate and challenge the validity of numerous historical monuments and museums in America that are eviscerated of their complicity and function as tools in the atrocity of instituting slavery. To externalize his values, White colonizer Jacob builds a superfluous mansion, which, with the slave trade involved, actually serves as a profane monument to the slavery culture. To highlight the invalidity of the White cultural memory, Morrison crafts Florens who inscribes in the mansion the collective traumatic memory of the African female slaves, deforming the secular memorial from within. In the same fashion, culturally traumatized, Native American Lina adulterates the White culture by insinuating into it the Indigenous Indian cultural fragments and by performing the remolded Indigenous Indian culture, she sediments it into her body. By historicizing the issue of cultural memory in A Mercy, Morrison invites the reader to reconsider what makes a true American cultural memory.

Slaves for Pleasure in Arabic Sex and Slave Purchase Manuals from the Tenth to the Twelfth Centuries

Abstract Women probably made up the majority of the slave population in the medieval Islamic world, most of them used for domestic service. As men were legally permitted to have sexual relations with their female slaves, enslaved women could be used for sexual service. Erotic compendia and sex manuals were popular literature in the premodern Islamic world, and are potentially rich sources for the history of sex slavery, especially when juxtaposed with legal writings. This article uses Arabic sex manuals and slave purchase manuals from the tenth to the twelfth century to investigate the attitudes toward sexual slavery during this period, as well as the changing ethnicities and origins of slaves, and the use of legal manipulations.