Slave Life Research Articles

Shade-Grown Slavery: The Lives of Slaves on Coffee Plantations in Cuba. By William C. Van Norman, Jr. (Nashville, Vanderbilt University Press, 2013) 232 pp. $59.95 cloth $29.95 paper.

The last twenty years has witnessed a noted shift in the thematic interests and conclusions about the first half of nineteenth-century Cuban history. Previously, the dominant topic of historical investigation was the rise of the sugar economy, analyzed from the insights of dependency theory. Sugar became the single most important catalyst in explaining the causes behind Cuba’s war for independence, even helping to explain the historical roots of Fidel Castro’s 1959 Revolution. Beginning in the 1990s, however, when Cuba lost the Soviet Union as an ally and benefactor, its economy atrophied, and sugar production came to a grinding halt. The economic and political chaos of the 1990s led historians to look at topics far removed from sugar and its hegemonic role in shaping Cuban history. Van Norman’s excellent study is the latest addition to this budding historiography. Diligently working his way through imperial archives in Spain, national archives in Havana, and regional archives in Cuba, Van Norman examines the neglected role of coffee in Cuba during the nineteenth century. In particular, he analyzes how coffee produced a type of slavery vastly different from that on sugar plantations.Van Norman organizes his book into three parts that address three broad topics. Part I examines the structure and demographics of Cuban coffee plantations. Van Norman convincingly shows not only that “the crop mattered”—coffee plantations were not run like the agro-industrial work camps found on sugar plantations—but also that coffee’s economy of scale fostered the emergence of a rapid rate of creolization among the slave population. After analyzing the structural dynamics of coffee plantations, he then turns to the heart of his book, which explores labor, religion, family, housing, geographical space, and slaves marketing and selling their own goods. Readers of this journal will find the chapters about religious practices and the spacial layout of the coffee plantation to be the most interdisciplinary. Drawing inspiration from anthropological and religious studies, Van Norman describes the enslaved population’s attempt to re-create an African cosmology that also spoke to their immediate Cuban surroundings. Moreover, he employs scholarship about cultural geography and archival sources to show how slaves subverted their masters’ intent to convert them into crude instruments of labor by establishing their own family and kin relations.Another of Van Norman’s major contributions is the way in which he re-orients the study of resistance and slave revolts to show what was particular to coffee plantations. Over time, the rapid rate of creolization, the development of more stable family and community relations, and the opportunity to harvest and market agricultural production resulted in a “moral economy” that came to govern slave life on coffee plantations. When these rhythms and expectations were upset, rebellion often followed. For example, Van Norman cites the cholera epidemic as a cause of the 1833 slave revolt on the plantation Salvador. The slaves perceived cholera as an indication of malevolent forces at the command of whites that they had to eradicate. Hence, the uprising was not just about opposition to enslavement; it was also a religious movement to restore balance to the world that had been upset by evil spirits.More than seventy years ago, Ortiz, Cuba’s foremost anthropologist of the twentieth century, deftly counterpointed sugar and tobacco as the two dominant crops that shaped Cuban history.1 By counterpointing coffee to sugar, however, Van Norman’s book brings further complexity to the study of nineteenth-century Cuban history. Thus will it appeal to a broad range of scholars who study Latin America, the Caribbean, the Atlantic, and the African diaspora.

Shade-Grown Slavery: The Lives of Slaves on Coffee Plantations in Cuba by William C. Van Norman Jr. (review)

Reviewed by: Shade-Grown Slavery: The Lives of Slaves on Coffee Plantations in Cuba by William C. Van Norman Jr. Manuel Barcia William C. Van Norman Jr. Shade-Grown Slavery: The Lives of Slaves on Coffee Plantations in Cuba. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 2013. 232 pp. Unlike sugar and tobacco, coffee was not introduced in Cuba until the late years of the eighteenth century. Soon after its arrival, largely a result of the ongoing revolution in the neighboring French colony of Saint-Domingue, Cuban planters did their best to transform the new product into a viable commodity within the nascent and expanding slave plantation system that they were attempting to create. Beginning in the mid-1790s, the Real Consulado asked its members to propose the best methods for growing coffee on the island. There were memoirs on the advantages and disadvantages of growing coffee, with some planters convinced that because of its high maintenance costs, coffee would never emulate sugar’s profit levels. As it happened, they were wrong, and at least for the first three or four decades of the nineteenth century, coffee plantations expanded across the island and rivaled sugar at times as the leading Cuban agricultural export. Until now, Cuban historiography (both within the island and abroad) has produced a large number of studies focusing on the rise of sugar plantations and on the longevity of tobacco as a luxurious export. The works of Raúl Cepero Bonilla, Manuel Moreno Fraginals, Fe Iglesias, and Jean Stubbs, among others, are notable examples of the sophistication and depth of these studies. Unfortunately, coffee has never received the same sort of attention. As a matter of fact, since the foundational book El café, by Francisco Pérez de la Riva, little else has been published to explain the emergence and competitiveness of coffee in the early nineteenth century and its subsequent collapse. More significantly, even less is known about the social, economic, cultural, and religious living conditions that existed on these plantations. This book by William C. Van Norman Jr. rectifies this historiographical amnesia. Divided into three main parts, each dealing with crucial aspects relating to the introduction of coffee in Cuba and to its day-to-day evolution, Shade Grown Slavery constitutes a much-needed addition to our body of historical literature about the development of Cuba into a plantation-based economic and social organism from the last decade of the eighteenth century. Although Van Norman explores a plethora of issues, it soon becomes apparent that the slaves and their lives are at the very center of the book, just as the title suggests. Some of the arguments presented here are groundbreaking. For example, Van Norman pays close attention to the ethnic origin of the African and creole slaves and links them in a novel manner to their actions of passive and violent resistance. Specifically, he is keen to point out that the forms of resistance practiced by African and creole slaves were varied and [End Page 244] were “informed by cultural calculations.” Van Norman thus offers a perceptibly a revisionist position that endeavors to recognize the agency of the slaves, distancing it from the often drummed up “winds of change” associated with the European and American revolutions of the period and asserting its relative independence. Another of Van Norman’s important contributions is his powerful revision of slave rebellion on coffee plantations. Here he persuasively argues that coffee plantations constituted an “essential environment for African agency” (136). To Van Norman, the conditions of existence in coffee estates allowed the slaves to reproduce their identities and cultures in a way that was not often possible for those laboring on sugar plantations. Particularly noteworthy is the fact that Van Norman does not shy away from challenging the image of the coffee plantation as an idyllic environment, characterized by its beauty and tranquility, that has been recorded and unfailingly passed down from generation to generation. By addressing this issue, he also subverts the myth that has traditionally presented sugarcane plantations as the most propitious place for slave revolts to take place because of the prevailing hard working conditions. Even though this myth was proven erroneous even during the first decades...

A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia

A Tale of Two Plantations: Slave Life and Labor in Jamaica and Virginia

Gender and Slavery, Birth and Death on Atlantic Plantations

A Tale of Two Plantations is many things. It is a detailed comparative history of slavery over time and space that engages most of the themes that drive studies of slave life: ethnicity; creolization; natural increase in North America; reliance on the slave trade to maintain populations in the West Indies; the relationship between cultivation and culture; the divisions between fieldwork, domestic work, and “skilled” labor; the role of Christianity; the consequences of the secondary slave trade and high mortality rates respectively on slave life in Virginia and Jamaica; and, finally, the experience of family formation. In Richard S. Dunn’s widely anticipated comparative study, he illuminates in microcosm the lived experiences of these broad themes at the core of life and death on plantations. For a scholar accustomed to reading the seventeenthand eighteenth-century histories of slavery, Dunn’s work is something of a revelation. The text (and the accompanying genealogical website) offers a layered and complicated vision of enslaved family life. Further, it illuminates in sometimes astonishing detail the lives and experiences of enslaved women. Indeed, A Tale of Two Plantations is an important, if not entirely straightforward, contribution to women’s history and to gendered studies of comparative slavery. Dunn introduces the study with an overview that details the sex ratios on the Mesopotamia plantation in Jamaica and the Mount Airy plantation in Virginia as well as the consequences of women’s higher mortality rates on Mesopotamia and of their higher vulnerability to sale at the hands of the planter at Mount Airy. Importantly, he illustrates these dangers not with generalities but with particulars, as when he concludes his discussion of John Tayloe III’s efforts to maximize profits through moving enslaved people on and off the Mount Airy estate, a practice Dunn describes as both calculated and manipulative, by centering its impact on the family of Winney Grimshaw: “Winney’s family was not broken up; it was completely wiped out” (55). Indeed, Dunn organizes the entire study around the family lives of women—both Grimshaw on Mount Airy and Sarah Affir on

Travelling with Imoinda: Art, Authorship, and Critique

Travelling with Imoinda:Art, Authorship, and Critique Joan Anim-Addo (bio) Click for larger view View full resolution Joan Anim-Addo Photograph by A. H. Jerriod Avant © 2014 [End Page 570] This article raises questions concerning art, authorship, and to a lesser extent, critique, specifically in relation to my opera libretto Imoinda, or She Who Will Lose Her Name, written in 1997, given a first rehearsed reading in London in 1998 and first published in 2003 in Italy. Considering the scale of the art involved in this full-length work of music-theater, in terms of writing but also in relation to performance, I am interested to reflect upon what keeps those of us, black women especially, who find ourselves as artists woefully under-resourced in our diverse locations, nonetheless committed to developing that which seems at times to be an impossible practice. In the process of reflection, I borrow from the seminal Black British visual artists’ exhibition by black women curated by Lubaina Himid in 1985, the notion of “the thin black line.”1 For this purpose, the “thin black line” resonates ideas about resistance that retrospectively and disturbingly evoke 1980s Britain with its indifference or hostility to that which might yet be referred to as black arts practice. Addressing the question of commitment, I propose to consider desire in this context as perverse (in practical terms) and readily conjugated with commitment to highlight black arts practice as a perverse commitment. In this light, it is useful to be reminded that perverse commitment speaks also to the persistent, albeit largely dormant—and I contend still dominant—view of black arts practice in the diaspora. Notably, for example, Dame Janet Suzman, actor and ex-wife of Trevor Nunn, artistic director of the National Theatre, London, declared: “Theatre is a white invention, a European invention, and white people go to it. It’s in their DNA. It starts with Shakespeare” (Alberge and Brown). Readily discerned in this statement is a belief system that can be traced back to Enlightenment ideas of G. W. F. Hegel who posited that the “Negro” stands outside culture and “the history of intellectual, technological, moral, and cultural progress,” which in Michelle Wright’s words is “guided by the Absolute of reason.” She also reminds us of Hegel’s comments on the slave trade, “that slavery was most likely the only way Africans would learn to appreciate freedom and thus develop into subjects” (Wright 8). Later pseudo-scientific thought only aggravated that discursive reality which the “Enlightenment” had begun to produce. Following such enlightened tradition, Suzman adds further that “[theatre] is not in their [black] culture” and clinches her explanation with “Just as their stuff is not in white culture.” She states categorically: “Theatre is a totally European invention, as is tragedy. Other countries don’t do tragedy. It’s an invention by the Greeks.” Should it not be considered perverse on the part of black artists to persist in writing for the theater—especially theater considered high art—in the face of such clear-cut cultural battle lines drawn by (white) cultural gatekeepers in the diaspora? [End Page 571] Suzman is quoted at length because she articulates freely the substance of that which must be resisted by black artists. I underscore, too, the black artist’s propensity towards resistance or the “thin black line” (Himid) which in effect functions as intense engagement with a process of re(member)ing, as June D. Bobb refers to it with reference to the poets Derek Walcott and Kamau Brathwaite. Thus, to write Beloved, Toni Morrison has also felt the need to access the interior life of slaves via her imagination to bear witness to, in her words, “the interior life of people who didn’t write [their history] (which doesn’t mean that they didn’t have it)” and to “fill in the blanks that the slave narrative left” (Morrison 183). In addition, perhaps especially within the diaspora, there are levels at which the compulsion to act upon what is known though not always acknowledged as “shared knowledge,” as Glissant writes of it, is overwhelming. About Imoinda, or She Who Will Lose Her Name My idea for Imoinda was...

AAR Centennial Roundtable: Liberation Is Only for Those Already Free: Reflections on Debts to Slavery and Enslavement to Debt in an Early Indian Buddhist Monasticism

—For my old friend John Thiel— Although it appears that all surviving Indian Buddhist monastic codes, or Vinayas, have explicit rules barring admittance into the religious life of slaves and debtors, this fact has been largely avoided. Equally avoided, it seems, is the additional fact that a wide range of other monastic groups who had very different anthropologies and formal doctrines had the same restrictive rules. Moreover, these rules sit—at first sight oddly—with good historical evidence suggesting that monastic groups were, more often than not, heavily dependent on forms of unfree labor and engaged in creating debt in others, as well as incurring it themselves. By looking at one of the Buddhist codes in particular, and noting some of the parallels elsewhere, these issues come more clearly into focus, as do the problems involved—not the least of which would seem to be the limited reach of formal doctrine.

Production Activities in the Household Economies of Plantation Slaves: Barbados and Martinique, Mid-1600s to Mid-1800s

Formerly British and French colonies, the eastern Caribbean islands of Barbados and Martinique were major players in the early development of European overseas empires dependent on African slave labor and the large-scale production of sugar. Utilizing documentary and archaeological data we discuss and compare the independent production activities or household economies of plantation slaves on these two islands. The household economy was one of the more prominent aspects of plantation slave life throughout the Caribbean, and in this paper we examine the multiple adaptive production strategies slaves employed to ameliorate the poverty of their material and economic lives.

Praca w życiu chrześcijanina. Stanowisko św. Jana Chryzostoma

This article is a presentation of St. John Chrysostom’s social teaching on the value of work. This teaching is grounded in the Holy Scriptures. By describing Christ and certain biblical figures (e.g. St. Paul) as people of work, Chrysostom underscores the meaning and value of labor. He does so contrary to the opinion of the wealthy in the Antioch society, who despised both the physical labor and the people performing it. In the teaching of the Archbishop of Constantinople, physical work is a cooperation with God in the effort of transforming the world. It is an element which ennobles a human being, provides him with the means necessary to support his life and enabling him to undertake the works of mercy. St. John also highlightsthe difficult situation of many peasants, craftsmen and merchants, and in this way he tries to direct the attention of the wealthy to this social problem. It can be deduced from Chrysostom’s writing that the life of slaves, which constituted a large portion of the late antique society, was generally modest and filled with work – especially the most onerous one. In giving instructions to slaves, St. John admonishes them to be submissive to their masters and do their work well. In speaking to the masters, however, he recommended that their relationships with slaves were humanitarian and shaped according to the Gospel. It is noteworthy to see that the element of love of one’s neighbor (philanthropy) and forgiving mercy brought new quality into the social structures of the time, especially between a master and a slave.

William C. Van Norman Jr. Shade-Grown Slavery: The Lives of Slaves on Coffee Plantations in Cuba.

William C. Van Norman Jr. Shade-Grown Slavery: The Lives of Slaves on Coffee Plantations in Cuba.

The Civil War in Photographs: New Perspectives From the Robin Stanford Collection by Anne Peterson (review)

Reviewed by: The Civil War in Photographs: New Perspectives From the Robin Stanford Collection by Anne Peterson Bob Cavendish The Civil War in Photographs: New Perspectives From the Robin Stanford Collection. By Anne Peterson. (Dallas: DeGloyer Library, 2013. Pp 104. Color, sepia, and black and white illustrations, works cited.) “If he has not brought bodies and laid them in our door yards . . .” the New York Times said of Matthew Brady’s photographs of Antietam’s casualties, “he has done something very like it.” Photography matured during the U.S. Civil War, expanding beyond the key and the commonplace participants. Nineteenth- century Americans who would not typically travel more than ten miles from their “door yards” and neighborhoods saw a broader, war-ravaged America of battlefield sites, hospitals, camp grounds, and villages through a camera lens; photographs became the basis of newspaper sketches accompanying war dispatches published in the Times and Harpers Weekly. Photographers like Brady, Alexander Gardner, G. H. Houghton, Samuel Cooley, and dozens of others amassed extensive inventories of glass plate images, which ultimately became so commonplace that all too many wound up as windowpanes in postwar greenhouses if not lost altogether. Yet hundreds of others survived in the National Archives and in private collections of limited access. Fortunately for scholars and Civil War aficionados, Robin Stanford of Houston, Texas, spent forty years building a collection of primarily stereoscopic images based on well-known and also less familiar photographs. The Stanford Collection, the subject of this brief volume, completed its appearance in March 2013 at the DeGolyer Library on the Southern Methodist University campus in Dallas. Visitors saw antebellum and wartime images by less famous southern photographers, images of daily military life, slave life, and battle-site photographs from locales in Georgia, Louisiana, Mississippi, and Texas. Exhibit curator Anne Peterson’s Civil War in Photographs (CWP) is an introduction to the Stanford collection. In eighteen sections, she includes various stereoscope images, sepia-toned and some hand tinted. Included in CWP are rarely (if ever) seen before views of Brownsville, Texas, during occupation and poignant images of the country in mourning following Lincoln’s murder in 1865. Captions explain the background and subject matter for most of the sample images but there are occasional errors. A Winfield Hancock photograph caption scrambles the order of those in the picture and misidentifies Union general Francis C. Barlow (a future prosecutor of New York’s Tweed Ring) as Seth M. Barton, a Confederate general unlikely to appear in the same picture alongside Hancock in 1864. Peterson’s narration throughout CWP moves quickly. The raison d’être, however, is the corpus of photographs behind the glimpses afforded in these ninety-plus pages, a sample of images compiled by a less well-known body of men whose images we did not often see. This is not a major Civil War work but it does not purport to be. For the casual reader, CWP is an interesting commentary on our most devastating war. For the scholar, CWP is a treasure that escaped the fate of its greenhouse windowpane counterparts and made available thanks to the teamwork of the DeGolyer staff and Anne Peterson and the generosity of Robin Stanford. [End Page 441] Bob Cavendish Austin, Texas Copyright © 2014 The Texas State Historical Association

The Rhetoric of Inferiority of African Slaves in John Fawcett’s Obi; or, Three-Fingered Jack (1800) Re-evaluated in Charlie Haffner’s Amistad Kata-Kata (1987)

John Fawcett’s Obi; or, Three-Finger’d Jack (1800) draws a distorted picture of the life of slaves in Jamaica. This paper investigates the ambivalence in this distortion as Fawcett creates two kinds of slaves by pitting them against each other: the loyal and obedient slaves (but still inferior) vs. the superstitious-ridden and rebellious slaves deeply rooted in old traditions, thus considered inferior, uneducated, immoral and dangerous. The juxtaposition of what I call ‘anglicised’ slaves instrumentalised by the coloniser and the heathen ‘savages’ that are beyond the reach of the imperial ideology enables Fawcett to substantiate the claim that Christianity successfully promotes slaves to ‘anglicised’ mimic men/women who are then able to carry out its mission: to eradicate the pagan practice of obeah, three-finger’d Jack, and all those slaves that threaten the stability of the coloniser’s superiority. Charlie Haffner’s play Amistad Kata-Kata (1987) is about the heroism of Shengbe Pieh and his fellow slaves on board the La Amistad: on their way to the colonies they revolted, were sent to prison, tried, finally freed, and taken back home after 3 years. The paper shows how Haffner repositions the ‘Amistad trope’ in the 20th century by effacing the materiality of the body of the African slaves, thus re-evaluating the corporeality of the colonised slave in the 19th -century post-abolition debate by coming to terms with the cultural trauma postindependent African collective identity has been experiencing. The re-staging of the play by the ‘Freetong Players’ in 2007/8 commemorated the bicentenary of the abolition of the Atlantic Slave Trade, a unique opportunity to direct the attention to asserting the identity of ‘Post-European’ Africa.

Shade-grown slavery: the lives of slaves on coffee plantations in Cuba

Within the world of Cuban slave-holding plantations, all enslaved people had to negotiate a life defined by forces beyond their control, and indeed beyond the control of their masters. Slaves on coffee farms survived in ways that allowed them to marry, have children, and maintain and redefine cultural practices that they passed on to their children. Slaves were an important factor in creating a nascent Afro-Cuban culture and identity. In this broad, interdisciplinary study, William Van Norman describes how each type of plantation and the amount of manual labour it required directly influenced the nature of slave life in that community. Slaves on coffee plantations lived in a unique context in comparison to that of their fellow slaves on sugar plantations, one that gave them greater flexibility in cultural and artistic creativity. To gain a deeper understanding of plantation slavery in Cuba, Van Norman explores what life and labour was like for coffee slaves and how it was different from what sugar slaves experienced. Shade-Grown Slavery reconstructs their world and in turn deconstructs the picture we now have of Cuba in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Ultimately, Shade-Grown Slavery reveals the lives of enslaved Africans on Cuban coffee plantations and shows how they were able to maintain and transform their cultural traditions in spite of slavery.

Césaire and the Challenge of Translation: The Example of “Strong Men” by Sterling Brown

Césaire and the Challenge of Translation: The Example of “Strong Men” by Sterling Brown

Slavery and the Romantic sketch: Jean-Baptiste Debret's visual poetics of trauma

This paper is focused on a variety of works, made by Jean-Baptiste Debret in Rio de Janeiro in the 1820s, which describe slave life. It is argued that Debret committed himself imaginatively to responding to Brazilian slavery with an honesty of vision and a precision of form that allowed him to produce an artistic commentary on slave trauma unique in its emotional depth and formal range. As the work focussed upon Brazilian slavery, and until recently was almost completely buried in inaccessible archives, it has not been given the attention within studies of slavery, diaspora and Romanticism which it demands and merits.

Martha B. Katz-Hyman and Kym S. Rice, eds. World of a Slave: Encyclopedia of the Material Life of Slaves in the United States, 2 vols. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO/Greenwood, 2011. 581 pp.; black-and-white illustrations, bibliography, index. $180.00.

Previous articleNext article No AccessBook ReviewMartha B. Katz-Hyman and Kym S. Rice, eds. World of a Slave: Encyclopedia of the Material Life of Slaves in the United States, 2 vols. Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO/Greenwood, 2011. 581 pp.; black-and-white illustrations, bibliography, index. $180.00.Christine E. SearsChristine E. SearsUniversity of Alabama, Huntsville Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Winterthur Portfolio Volume 47, Number 1Spring 2013 Published for the Henry Francis du Pont Winterthur Museum, Inc. Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/670602 Views: 29Total views on this site For permission to reuse, please contact [email protected]PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Daniel Cavicchi. Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum.

Daniel Cavicchi. <i>Listening and Longing: Music Lovers in the Age of Barnum</i>.

The Subversion of Master’s Defining Power in Toni Morrison’s “Beloved”

Incorporated in Toni Morrison's creative enterprise to portray the unendurable life of slaves and to articulate their age-stifled voice in Beloved (1987) is the picture she draws of the ruthless slave-holder named Schoolteacher. This callous concurrent holder of power and subject of knowledge, who considers Sweet Home slaves subhuman creatures, tries to scrutinize their characteristics to know and define them, and thereby sustain his power over them. By her disdainful depiction of Schoolteacher's petrifying rationality via which he attempts to classify and define slaves, Morrison sharply criticizes his inhuman conduct, and furthermore reveals how the mortifying discourse of white racists sustained their power. On the other hand, she dramatizes how Schoolteacher's vicious exertion of power results in the ensuing resistance of the slaves who resist and subvert his defining power by such shocking acts as murdering their beloved child or laughing while getting burned which altogether reveal the spuriousness of his scientific classifications.

Ethnological Values and Opportunities for Establishing a Heritage Policy around Tuna-trapping in Andalusia (Spain)

·Allsopp, Richard T.,1996. Dictionary of Caribbean English Usage. Oxford, Oxford University Press. · Beckles, Hilary, 2006. A History Of Barbados: from Amerindian Settlement to Caribbean Single Market. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. · Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 1985. Contradictory Omens: Cultural Diversity and Integration in the Caribbean. Jamaica: Savacou. · Brathwaite, Edward Kamau, 1971. The Development of Creole Society in Jamaica 1770-1820. Clarendon Press. · Burrowes, Marcia, 2011. ‘Treat to Labourers: Plantation Crop Over from Slavery to Independence’ in The Journal of the Barbados Museum & Historical Society, JBMHS, 57, pp. 54-76. · Burrowes, Marcia, 2005. ‘The Cloaking of a Heritage: The Barbados Landship’ in Contesting Freedom: Control and Resistance in the Post-Emancipation Caribbean edited by Gad Heuman and David Trotman. Oxford: MacMillan Caribbean. · Chester, Grenville John, 1869. Transatlantic Sketches in the West Indies, South America, Canada and the United States. London. · Dickson, William, 1789. Letters on Slavery. 1st ed. J. Philips, London. Connecticut: Negro Universities Press, 1970. · Drayton, Kathleen, 1996. ‘Art, Culture and National Heritage’ in Barbados Thirty Years of Independence, edited by Trevor Carmichael. Jamaica: Ian Randle. · Hall, Stuart, 1995. ‘Negotiating Caribbean Identities’ in New Left Review, 209, Jan Feb (1995), pp. 3-14. · Handler, Jerome and Frisbee, Charlotte, 1972. ‘Aspects of Slave Life in Barbados: Music and its Cultural Content’ in Caribbean Studies, 11:4 (1972). · Hughes, Griffith, 1750. The Natural History of Barbados. London. · Ligon, Richard, 1657. A True and Exact History of the Island of Barbadoes. London: Frank Cass, 1976. · Mottley, Elombe, 2003. Identities: Volume One. Kingston: Fat Pork Ten Ten. · Nettleford, Rex, 1988. ‘Implications for Caribbean Development’ in Caribbean Festival Arts: each and every bit of difference, edited by John W. Nunley and Judith Bettleheim. Seattle: Saint Louis Art Museum and University of Washington. · Nicholls, Robert Wyndam, 2012. The Jumbies Playing Ground. Mississippi: University of Mississippi Press. · Nunley, John W., ed, 1999. Masks: Faces of Culture. New York: Harry N. Abrams. · Orderson, J.W., 1842. Creoleana: Social and Domestic Scenes and Incidents in Barbados in Days of Yore. London. · Smith, Lionel Harcourt, 2002. Death of a Village: The Story of St. Simons. Laudate Dominum Publishers: Mandeville, Jamaica · Thompson, Allison, 2009. ‘Sonia Boyce and Crop Over’ in Small Axe, 13: 2. · Warner-Lewis, Maureen, 2011. ‘West Africa in the Caribbean: Art, Artefacts and Ideas’ in Critical Arts: South-North Cultural and Media Studies: 25: 4. Ethnological Values and Opportunities for Establishing a Heritage Policy around Tuna-trapping in Andalusia (Spain)

“The Chief Glory of God [Is] in Self-Denying, Suffering Love!”: True Religion in Harriet Beecher Stowe’sUncle Tom’s Cabin

argument, about the evils of slavery. In this way, they are invited into the story and asked to make a connection to the lives of slaves in all their varied and divergent experiences. LANGUAGE AND THE DARKNESS OF DOUBT Although not emphasized as often by reviewers, doubt suffuses Stowe’s novel. One example among many others is the following: George Harris, responding to Mr. Wilson’s (his former boss at a mechanical factory) exhortation to trust in God in his attempt to gain freedom, replies by saying “Is there a God to trust in? O, I’ve seen things all my life that have made me feel that there can’t be a God. You Christians [whites?] don’t know how these things look to us [slaves]. There’s a God for you, but is there any for us?” (100). For themost part, only characters who have “white blood” truly express doubt about God’s existence and goodness, and this doubt is usually about the presence and problem of sustained and unrelenting evil. This doubt surfaces on various occasions and for various reasons: doubt that God can allow such terrible things to occur. Doubt that God’s presence can be felt, sensed, or known in the midst of hardships and inexplicable evil. Doubts about the Bible: is it a proslavery book? Doubts about the Bible’s authenticity and whether its words can be rendered efficacious to a different age. Doubts that the modern, hard Anglo-Saxon can accept the softness of Christianity, as Stowe conceives it. The novel also expresses doubt about the ability of the language and nature of the Bible to bring its saving message to white Anglo-Saxons. Stowe develops this point in several ways. Most prominently, Stowe wrestles with the presence of doubt mostly among white males. Through the figure or type of Cicero, noted Roman statesman, orator, and philosopher, she generalizes doubts about the Bible’s authenticity and trustworthiness to the entire Anglo Saxon race (primarily men are in view). Stowe compares Cicero to Uncle Tom, focusing on the former’s loss of his daughter. Cicero, unlike Tom, who clings to the words of Scripture, would probably not have found hope in such simple words. He would have entertained no hope of reunion in the future with his dead daughter, and even if he had read the words of Scripture, Stowe conjectures, “ten to one he would not have believed.” Cicero would have likely filled “his head first with a thousand questions of authenticity of manuscript, and correctness of translation” (125). Authenticity of manuscript and correctness of translation are about language and interpretation. Could this ancient text reach the logical and analytical mind of the modern Anglo-Saxon? This comment about Cicero filling his head with a thousand questions follows Stowe’s description of Uncle Tom slowly and tediously reading the Bible, laboring over every verse. Tom found in the Bible “just what he needed,” something “so evidently true and divine that the possibility of a question never entered his simple head” (125). Given the hardships and difficulties Tom has encountered and, at this point in the novel, his forlorn

Stella Blum Grant Report

The material culture of slave life has been an increasingly important topic for the past few years. Many studies have been done on several aspects of slave life, but research on dress is relatively scarce considering how much we now know about things such as diet, housing, and religious practices. By combining written, visual, and material sources, this project brings dress studies into this recent trend and increases our knowledge of the relationships slaves had to the clothing they made and wore.