History Of Enslavement Research Articles

Engendering “Illegality”: Blackness, citizenship, and Dominico‐Haitian motherhood

AbstractIn 2013,the Dominican Republic's highest court ruled to retroactively apply the elimination of jus soli citizenship, commonly known as birthright citizenship. The ruling impacted more than 200,000 Dominicans of Haitian descent and culminated a decades‐long attack on territorially based citizenship in the country, which largely provided access to the children of Haitians, who make up more than 80% of the country's migrants. The intensification of anti‐birthright citizenship politics and the implementation of a host of restrictive measures since 2004 shifted focus from the male labor as the primary target of migrant control, to the “pregnant migrant.” This article examines how these policies shaped Dominico‐Haitian women's experiences of motherhood by drawing on interviews and participant observation undertaken from 2014 to 2018 in and around Santo Domingo. I argue that anti‐birthright citizenship politics target Black women's reproduction in a form of racialized violence that shares continuities with the nation's history of enslavement.

The Samarra Mutiny of 256/869

ABSTRACT In 256 AH/869 CE, the rank-and-file of the Turkic-Central Asian military in Samarra, the Abbasid imperial centre, rose against their commanders and the caliphal court. This is according to al-Ṭabarī's third/ ninth-century Taʾrīkh (History). The present article discusses two related elements of the mutiny: the rise to influence and authority of members of the Samarran military command, and the resentment of the rank-and-file troops. The main topic, however, is collective action on the part of the troops. The issue is social (re)formation and solidarity on the part of enslaved and freed persons brought together by the circumstances of enslavement in a particular time and place, in this case third/ninth-century Abbasid Iraq. In treating the rebellion, the article draws briefly, in a comparative manner, on the work of scholars of imperial Rome, early medieval Europe, and the antebellum U.S. South. Drawing on what al-Ṭabarī tells us of the mutiny, the article also considers the history of enslavement and unfreedom in early Islamic-era society more broadly. The mutiny serves in this sense as a case study in the history of slavery in early Islamic society.

A Nation of Guns

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reviews Bloodbath Nation, a poignant exploration of the painful, studiously ignored truths about gun culture in the U.S. To grapple with the epidemic of gun violence, she writes, requires confronting deeper truths about white supremacy, settler-colonialism, and the U.S. history of enslavement.

A Nation of Guns

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz reviews Bloodbath Nation, a poignant exploration of the painful, studiously ignored truths about gun culture in the U.S. To grapple with the epidemic of gun violence, she writes, requires confronting deeper truths about white supremacy, settler-colonialism, and the U.S. history of enslavement.

Black Ecologies (Humanity, Animality, Property)

Black Ecologies (Humanity, Animality, Property)

Slavery and Empire-Making: Vincent Brown's Tacky's Revolt

Slavery and Empire-Making:Vincent Brown's Tacky's Revolt Antoinette Burton, Kathleen Wilson, Matthew J. Smith, Daniel Domingues da Silva, James Sidbury, and Vincent Brown Introduction to the Book Forum Antoinette Burton University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Histories of slavery tend to be unevenly distributed in studies of anglophone empire. Imperialism is typically an explanatory force in histories of enslavement: acknowledged as a conditional context in accounts about its reach and significance and typically interwoven in and through its foundational narratives. Conversely, histories of empire, especially those that operate at scale, rarely take slavery fully into account, if at all—as the most recent blockbuster in the field, Caroline Elkins' 2022 Legacies of Violence, powerfully testifies.1 That is to say, it's relatively uncommon for scholars of modern empire to start with slavery and track its longitudinal effects on British imperial histories beyond abolition—save perhaps where the afterlives of antislavery movements and ideology or the material reality of indenture is concerned. With few exceptions, work that actively narrates either the episodic or recurrent connections between enslavement as a violent, extractive practice of racializing capitalism and the emergence of British imperial power as a globalizing project is not the norm in contemporary scholarship.2 The same is true for studies which center the role that enslaved peoples have had in shaping what British "slave-empire" configurations looked like by going beyond the confines of the established archive. With the publication of Vincent Brown's Tacky's Revolt, the impossibility of segmenting slavery from empire-making in imperial history is directly challenged. As is the notion that the archive places insurmountable limits on imagining the consequential part enslaved men and women played in directing how the interdependence of these histories and their contribution to colonial world-making on a global stage should be told. The book lays down a set of interpretive gauntlets that historians of empire eager for a re-mix of historiographies of slavery and imperialism will welcome. Key to the recalibration the book calls for, is an argument about the urgency of making the frame of war and rebellion—indeed, of historicizing rebellion as war—constitutive of our apprehension of the eighteenth century Atlantic world. Brown calls this "the martial geography of Atlantic slavery" (2), a description that reminds us that rebellions against enslavement were militant responses to its atrocities, and that such militance compels us to re-suture the Caribbean and West Africa anew. This, in order to fully appreciate "the hemispheric reach" of slave revolts. It is well-known that by the middle of the eighteenth century, the Caribbean was the focus of a deliberate British imperial strategy. But through a vigorous rereading of a wide variety of historiographical work in both slavery and empire history and studies (and beyond) Brown materially links, for example, the Jamaican slave uprising of 1760-61 to histories of war and conflict on the African continent—conflicts between and among indigenous communities (as well as in opposition to slavers) which had a bearing on the way that rebellion unfolded in the recesses of St Mary Parish. Seeing slave rebellion as a species of military campaign underscores how "war and slavery nourished each other as the histories of Europe, Africa, and America became increasingly intertwined," thereby revealing Tacky's revolt and others to be protagonists in the making of the transoceanic history of slavery, to be sure, but of empire as well. Readers will not want to miss the "animated thematic map" of slave revolt that accompanies Brown's book, not least because it dramatizes in visual terms the combination of geographical re-integration and spatial re-orientation that his study offers to those who may be familiar with Caribbean rebellions or Atlantic world slavery but may not fully grasp their interconnectivity.3 Meanwhile, critical to his project as a whole is Brown's investment in reconstructing histories of key rebels—rebels whose specific identities are elusive but whose composite profiles Brown is especially skillful in building out. The book opens with the story of Wager, whose African name was Apongo and who was a major player in Jamaica in 1760-61. There is a lot we can know...

The Resurrection of a Ghost City

In 1993, a glimpse into Newark’s history of enslavement was accidentally resurrected when New Jersey Performing Arts Center (NJPAC) construction workers uncovered a nineteenth-century interracial burial ground. Despite public protests to halt construction and conduct an in-depth archaeological study, NJPAC officials continued construction, arguing that the site was not a “real” African burial ground. Highlighting the relationship between urban renewal, historic preservation, and Black land dispossession, this paper argues that Black Newarkers’ activism to define the Trinity Church Cemetery as an African burial ground served as a radical political act in legitimizing their place within an evolving Newark.

Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past by Ana Lucia Araujo

Reviewed by: Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past by Ana Lucia Araujo Rebecca Toy (bio) Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past. By Ana Lucia Araujo. (New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020. Pp. 243. Cloth, $95.00; paper, $29.95.) Ana Lucia Araujo argues that modern struggles over memories of slavery are not just about coming to terms with societies' past histories with enslavement. Rather, they are defined by their present association with persistent issues of racism that remain ingrained in the fabric of countries and societies where slavery existed. Racism, in this case, is defined as "a belief naturalizing individuals racialized as nonwhite to be inferior" that further "engenders actions and practices that systematically discriminate against nonwhite individuals in various societal spheres" (6). Slavery in the Age of Memory speaks to scholarship on memory and how memory is created and sustained within broader society. As Araujo explains, history and memory are "two modalities of discourse" about "people, things, situations, and events that actually occurred or allegedly happened in the past" (3). Slavery in the Age of Memory, as the title suggests, is concerned with various forms of memory, and Araujo defines memory as accounts of human experience, in contrast with history, which is defined in this framework as an attempt to establish and interpret facts. However, Araujo also incorporates such multivalent spaces as state-sponsored museums and historic homes. Araujo's investigation takes a transatlantic comparative perspective rather than focusing on a single site of memory or a single society's efforts to interpret its slave past. This broad focus allows her to convincingly demonstrate the durability of racism as created and sustained during slavery across social and geographic boundaries. For example, Araujo investigates issues of collective memory and the methods through which individuals transmit the history of their association with slavery. Despite the fact that descendants of both enslavers and enslaved people live in many of the same societies today, their present social positions "determine how they collectively represent the slave past for themselves and to others" (38). In the case of the DeWolf family of Rhode Island, the family's participation with the Atlantic slave trade is well documented. Today, however, members of the DeWolf family avoid "publicly emphasizing this controversial dimension of the economic activities [End Page 422] of their ancestors" (33). Araujo notes similar tendencies in elite families descended from enslavers beyond the United States, such as in West Africa. Araujo's own diverse research background enables Slavery in the Age of Memory to take a broad-ranging approach, as the author is already well versed in the specific histories of memorialization in many of the places that the book explores. As Araujo notes, the book draws on a variety of case studies from the United States, France, and England, as well as from Brazil and the Republic of Benin. Araujo chooses which examples to place in conversation with one another in each chapter based on the extent to which they relate to one another and how visible they are nationally and internationally. This broad accounting allows her to reveal how racism, as created and sustained in slave societies, manifests in predictable ways when societies choose to represent their history of enslavement. Enduring and persistent racism not only defines how societies and individuals remember and represent their histories of slavery, but it also restricts it. Even attempts to acknowledge enslavement or humanize enslaved people tend to reflect racist attitudes. For example, Araujo explores the popular use of a "wall of names" in slavery exhibits that list the names of every known enslaved person at a particular site. At places such as Thomas Jefferson's Monticello and even the National Museum of African American History and Culture in the United States, representations of Jefferson are centered while the names of enslaved people remain a supporting background to an exhibit. Rather than affirming the individual identities of the people listed, the exhibitions reaffirm "the slaveholder's centrality" and maintain "the invisibility of enslaved men, women, and children" (62). Araujo also shows how many modern attempts to publicly acknowledge a slavery past originate with present struggles against inequalities that endure from slavery. When marginalized...

Commemoration, Pedagogy, and Action

Commemoration, Pedagogy, and Action Charlene A. Carruthers (bio) On April 2, 2022, nearly four hundred people gathered to commemorate the life of Black feminist scholar, activist, and educator bell hooks (née Gloria Jean Watkins) in her hometown of Hopkinsville, Kentucky. hooks died at the age of sixty-nine of renal failure in her home on December 15, 2021. She was a prolific writer and incisive cultural critic. The commemoration generated a space for collective mourning and celebration of a poet who published more than forty books. Commemorators shared memories about their experiences and remarked on her cultural and intellectual legacy. Images of hooks alongside quotes from her works, interviews, and speeches spread widely across social media channels. I joined the chorus as a mourner whose own thinking is shaped by her calls for love, communion, and radicalism in education. The duality of celebration and mourning is characteristic of feminist pedagogy that draws from archives of struggles for liberation throughout the modern era. Archives are geographies of the past, the ongoing, and the future. They exist withing many places, including formal academic and government institutions, community centers, churches, civic organizations, and our homes. Scholars, artists, and movement workers pull from archives to make sense of their own experiences and ideas. Drawing from these archives as a feminist Black studies scholar and educator means that I traverse various histories of enslavement, genocide, and war. It also means that I cross through insurrection, mass mobilization, and institution-building amid white supremacist and patriarchal terror. This crossing back and forth, in between, and through is not linear. One song, class session, or text can cover the events and emotional toll of several hours or several hundreds of years. [End Page 19] The impetus for WSQ’s creation, the journal’s contributions to intellectual thought and political action and future, is undeniably dependent on its contributors and editorial team’s commitment to transgressive education. hooks makes this charge clear in Teaching to Transgress: Education as the Practice of Freedom. For hooks, transgressive education calls educators to do even more than what is often considered critical or feminist pedagogy. Unlike critical and feminist pedagogies, well-being matters in transgressive pedagogy. This approach to education can and should be pleasurable. hooks explains that “the pleasure of teaching is an act of resistance” (1994, 10). This resistance counters “the overwhelming boredom, uninterest, and apathy that so often characterize the way professors and students feel about teaching” (10). What becomes possible if everyone who is committed to feminist education organizes collectively to change how education is shaped and experienced? There is much to be learned from many sites of education, be it inside of an academic institution or in a community organizing setting. hooks urges us to connect the ideas learned in the academy with those learned outside of the academy. Doing so inevitably leaves educators who are also committed to anticolonial, feminist, and anticapitalist praxis vulnerable. Consequently, committing to transgressive education is a choice one has to make repeatedly, all the while weighing the risks and rewards of doing so. The emotional journey as an educator can contribute to our collective freedom. hooks writes that “to educate as a practice of freedom is a way of teaching that anyone can learn” (1994, 13). It is not limited to people who are primarily trained and located in the academy. However, the opportunity to learn how to educate as a practice of freedom is not readily available to everyone. As laws are introduced and passed in state legislatures to restrict the use of materials and ideas that examine racism, white supremacy, and the mere presence of LGBTQIA+ people in the United States, access to the archives or content needed to engage students is increasingly threatened and restricted. Still, as Black educators have consistently engaged, under the threat of criminalization and violence, in what education historian Jarvis Givens (2021) calls fugitive pedagogies, I am confident that transgressive pedagogy will survive this current historical conjuncture. It will survive through storytelling, shared experiences, and curious researchers who ask questions and consult archives. Commemoration does not require a special journal issue—it can happen in our everyday lives. Commemoration allows us to connect...

Fictions of Race: Racecraft, Reproduction, and Whiteness in Titus Andronicus

Fictions of Race: Racecraft, Reproduction, and Whiteness in <i>Titus Andronicus</i>

Notes on Contributors

Notes on Contributors

An Emerging History of Enslavement

An Emerging History of Enslavement

Speaking of Rivers: Spirituals, Poetry, and Relationality

Abstract Rivers and other bodies of water evoke freedom. In Black music the theme of the river continuously returns: from Nile by Beyoncé and Kendrick, which connects the river to liberation, to Sam Cooke's proclamation “I was born by the river.” Gospel tunes such as “Jordan River” and “Down by the Riverside,” together with Negro spirituals such as “Deep River,” “Roll Jordan Roll,” “Wade in the Water,” and “Swing Low Sweet Chariot” all make clear that the journey of freedom is through the river. “The Negro Speaks of Rivers” by Langston Hughes riffs on Negro spirituals in terms of subject matter and mood, enabling a sensuous way of knowing freedom and liberation. Repetition and variations on key phrases are used to transform the mood throughout the poem, bringing the past, present, and future into conversation. Drawing on the spirituals, Hughes constructs mood, scene, and feeling that recognize the historical importance of the river while transcending the catastrophe of that history of enslavement, redefining the river and rendering a foretelling of liberation. Arguing for the relational and futuristic character of this poem, this article analyses how music allows Hughes to transgress and reexist beyond coloniality and to express a continuous reach for liberation.

Following through: Interventions to improve long-term outcomes of preterm infants

The inequalities in income, wealth, and opportunity so deeply ingrained in our society's history of enslavement, genocide, racism, and discrimination are root causes of health disparities. Follow through is a comprehensive approach that begins before birth and continues into childhood, where health professionals, families, and communities partner to meet the social as well as medical needs of infants and families to achieve health equity. This article discusses potentially better practices for follow through, offering neonatal care providers tangible ways to address social determinants of health, the conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age and the systems that creates these conditions.

Constructing the Spanish Empire in Havana: State Slavery in Defense and Development, 1762–1835 by Evelyn P. Jennings

Reviewed by: Constructing the Spanish Empire in Havana: State Slavery in Defense and Development, 1762–1835 by Evelyn P. Jennings Jonah Rowen Evelyn P. Jennings. Constructing the Spanish Empire in Havana: State Slavery in Defense and Development, 1762–1835. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020. ISBN: 9780807173947 Hardcover: 280 pages Historians who study construction have to confront the fact that built artifacts obscure the people whose labor produced them. Finding archival traces of those builders can be particularly difficult in cases in which they were enslaved. In the superbly researched Constructing the Spanish Empire in Havana: State Slavery in Defense and Development, 1762–1835, Evelyn P. Jennings describes her task as revealing “the tremendous labor of thousands of enslaved people that is embedded in the massive structures of Havana’s defensive colonial infrastructure but today is largely invisible.”1 Historians of the material culture of slavery may choose to treat manufactured artifacts as sufficient evidence for making meaningful assertions about the enslaved people who created them. A converse, if not mutually exclusive, approach focuses on the evidence of labor management, using textual sources that document enslavers’ actions to illuminate the work of coerced construction. Jennings leans in the latter direction. Constructing the Spanish Empire in Havana lays out an engrossing story detailing the fabrication of the fortifications and material for defending colonial Havana. Beginning in the sixteenth century, this history follows the secular devolution of state power to private agents into the nineteenth century. Jennings’s chronological narrative lends coherency to complicated stories of decrees, interpersonal tussles, and near-constant funding shortages. Where tales of empire can often become mired in official actions that operate at cross-purposes, Jennings masterfully develops historical arcs that will draw in even readers unfamiliar with the intricacies of Spanish imperialism. Drawing evidence from official records and correspondence that document enumerated lists of enslaved people, Jennings weaves details together into a cogent sequence of events. The book’s first chapter describes the Spanish state’s history of enslavement up to 1700, enumerating the major categories of employment of enslaved people, including nimble task forces, undifferentiated workers, families, and fighters. The second chapter deals with the first half of the eighteenth century, including the establishment of the chartered Royal Company of Havana. Concluding on the pivotal 1762 British Siege of Havana, this chapter documents the wealth increases and lagging defenses that made the city a target of attack. Chapter three discusses the Spanish response to defeat, which included substantial rebuilding projects and thus greater enslavement activity, and delves into the specific tasks—unskilled and skilled—expected of enslaved people. It also points in the direction of diversification, including convict laborers and people hired out from private enslavers. Chapter four procedes from the remaining part of the eighteenth century into the nineteenth, during which enslaved people actively fought in military campaigns abroad in addition to continuing to work on defense projects in Havana. As funds dried up with diminished income from the loss of mainland colonies, Spain was forced to find new modes of managing its empire. Finally, the fifth chapter demonstrates even greater adjustments, as pressures to end the slave trade mounted. Colonial agents nevertheless continued their reliance on coerced work regimes, even as the state itself accounted for fewer enslaved people. One of Jennings’s most convincing arguments is that we can detect the emergence of a particular strain of capitalism by following the crown’s or individual enslavers’ respective treatment of people whom these putative owners claimed as [End Page 79] chattel. Accumulating wealth by stealing labor from agricultural workers, the bourgeoisie gradually amassed power over an entrenched monarchy. Even as the state relinquished its monopolies and ceded power to the private sector, however, it reserved the capability to grant favors to planters to solicit stolen labor. Thus Jennings argues that what differentiates the case of Cuba from, for example, the British planter class is the centrality of the state in acquiring or commandeering enslaved people of its own. Spain’s Caribbean competitor nations generally extracted capital from slavery indirectly, from duties on goods made by enslaved people. The Spanish state, on the other hand, owned and rented royal slaves and levied corv...

Rereading Russia through the Contact Zone of HBCUs

This article examines contributions Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs) have made and continue to make to the interdisciplinary fabric of Russian, East European, and Eurasian Studies (REEES). HBCUs are a uniquely American phenomenon and reminders of the history of enslavement and segregation in the United States. But HBCUs are also vibrant intellectual contact zones, which Mary Louise Pratt defines as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power.” Contact zones result in intercultural competencies, multilingualism, new methodologies, and critical reassessments. Faculty and alumni have described the extent to which HBCUs function as cultural and discursive sanctuaries. As such, HBCUs are places where legally, culturally, and racially segregated communities develop(ed) alternate ways to engage, experience, and (re)envision “Russia.”

Measures of depression, generalized anxiety, and posttraumatic stress disorders amongst Yazidi female survivors of ISIS slavery and violence

BackgroundIn 2014 the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) undertook a systematic and deliberate campaign against minority groups and non-Sunni Muslim communities. Amongst some of the greatest atrocities were those targeted towards Yazidi communities and in particular their women. The mental health outcomes of those women held in captivity requires investigation. This study sought to examine and compare levels of general psychological distress, depression, generalized anxiety, posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) and self-reported suicidal thoughts and behaviors amongst Yazidi women held in captivity compared with those without such experiences.MethodBetween January to May 2019, a total 348 Yazidi women located in internal displaced person (IDP) camps were interviewed. Of these 348, 139 females were survivors of ISIS captivity. Measures used included Kessler Psychological Distress Scale (K10), Patient Health Questionnaire (PHQ-9), Generalized Anxiety Disorder (GAD-7), and Harvard Trauma Questionnaire part IV (HTQ part IV).ResultsFormerly enslaved Yazidi females showed a significantly higher prevalence of severe mental distress (97.1%; P < 0.001), more severe levels of depression (36.7%; P < 0.001) and general anxiety symptoms (37.4%; P < 0.001), greater rates of PTSD (90.6%; P < 0.001) and higher reported rates of suicidal ideation (38.1%; P < 0.001). Logistic regression analysis undertaken to examine the role of sociodemographic factors as predictors of the assessed mental health conditions. Amongst the formerly enslaved group, no such significance was found, however amongst the non-enslaved group, unemployment was found to statistically determine depression, generalized anxiety and PTSD. Specifically, women from the non-enslaved group who were unemployed were 2.5 times more likely to have depression, 3 times more likely to have generalized anxiety and 3.3 times more likely to have PTSD. Finally, amongst the non-enslaved group, those women with between 5 to 8 siblings were significantly less likely to have depression than those with fewer siblings.ConclusionRates of distress and trauma related symptomology were significantly higher amongst those with history of enslavement. Sociodemographic factors and duration of enslavement do not seem to predict mental disorders among enslaved females.

Black cargo

Black cargo

Students’ Understanding of the History of Enslavement in America: Differences by Race, Ethnicity, and Gender

Students in the United States learn about the history of enslavement throughout their educational experiences. Yet our understanding of what students from different racial, ethnic, and gender backgrounds know about this difficult period in American history is limited. In this study, we use mixed methods to examine written narratives of students’ understanding of the history of enslavement in the United States. As a whole, narratives about enslavement were most commonly associated with its end (the Civil War and abolition) and with its violence (general brutality). Differences were found by race and ethnicity as well as by gender. Understanding how students narrate what they know can help educational researchers and teachers better serve diverse educational needs by designing curricula that relate to students’ multiple social identities.

Rivers and Oceans

Abstract This two-part article is a comparative analysis of two late twentieth-century works of art: John T. Scott’s Ocean Song (1990), an abstract, large-scale public art sculpture in New Orleans, Louisiana in the US, and Sold Down the River (1999), a major, self-portrait-centered painting by the Bristol, UK-based artist Tony Forbes. As outlined in both sections, contemporary artists have produced works that ensure a continuing civic dialogue about, and commemoration of, site-specific histories of enslavement. In examining and placing these two works in their social, political and cultural contexts, the article highlights the role that artists may play in offering pictorial counter-narratives that question “official,” often tourist-driven, narratives that tend to romanticize and/or mollify colonial and/or imperial initiatives, including enslavement and other legacies marked by trauma.