Male Slaves Research Articles

Nature of slavery and servitude in Mughal India

ABSTRACT The nature of service and submission in Mughal India was starkly different from modern times. The rhetoric of complete submission to the person of the Emperor guided the social relations of all orders. A reflection of this must have been experienced at the level of the household service gentry. Important elements in this service class were chelas (freed male slaves), sahelis (freed slave-girls) and khwajasaras (eunuchs). All three sections had an ambiguous placement in the social order. The chelas and sahelis were in principle free but their social realities and the nature of their services were similar to that of slaves. Eunuchs, on the other hand, provided widely varied services, ranging from administrative duties to mere harem attendance. The conditions of all these groups depended largely on the interactions between them and their immediate masters. The paper explores the dynamics of the varying nature of social realities and mobility experienced by these different sections, locating them within class and gender contexts.

“Unable to Defend Him”: Conflicting Views of Female Violence in Swedish Medieval Law

“Unable to Defend Him”: Conflicting Views of Female Violence in Swedish Medieval Law

Obrazovanje kao put do "Oslobođenja jedne žene" - jedan od četiri puta do oproštaja Ursule le Gvin

In this paper we discussed Ursula Le Guin's story "A Woman's Liberation. In this science fiction story the author chronicles a slave society on a far-away planet in distant future. She describes the relationships between slaves and owners but also the position of women in such an unjust society in which female slaves are inferior to everyone, including male slaves. Since the aim of science fiction is to make us think about our present, the author draws parallels between this fictional slave society from the future and slavery on our planet from not so distant past. Le Guin deals with the ways one social class percieves the other and how their perceptions are similar to ours, as well as with the position of a woman in such a cruel society. The story ends with a union between two main characters, and the author concludes that the personal relationship between two people is at the core of change in the world around us. She teaches us that, in order to improve the society we live in, we should change the way we look at things, and the best way to achieve this is through learning, through education.

메타비평, 해체, 트랜스텍스트성으로 읽는 노예법

This essay reads the slavery laws in the Covenant and Deuteronomic Codes with key words such as polyphony, construction, metacriticism, deconstruction, and transtextuality. We first observed inconsistencies within the slavery law in Exodus 21. The beginning part of the law talks about the possibility of liberation of male slaves and guarantees rights of the slave-wife taken before another one, presenting the slave owner as a generous man. But then the law regulating the owners’ violence against women and men slaves assumes that all slaves are exposed to excessive and regular violence. For us, the coexistence of the slave laws of the Covenant and Deuteronomic Codes in the Pentateuch with more differences than similarities powerfully demonstrates the polyphony of the Bible.<BR> We argued that the slavery laws as disciplinary discourses enculturate values and construct identities. The slavery laws construct class and hierarchy, serving the interest of the rich male slave owner. While the owner is constructed as both generous and violent, the male slave is constructed as one with low self-esteem, having to say that he loves his owner as he chooses to become a permanent slave. The female slave is constructed as lower than the male slave and is sexualized, being subject to her owner sexually.<BR> We observed metacritically how western scholars’ interpretations and commentaries come from their male, middle class, and western backgrounds, and how they remain in the ideologies of the text. Above all, they tend to identify themselves with the slave owner, the subject of the law. Their male-centered interpretations construct the abandoned slave-wife as the body with which they are entitled to sexual pleasure.<BR> We read the slavery laws transtextually with the Hagar-Abraham and the Jacob-Laban narratives. Abraham is described as stingy and passive, unable to protect his slave-wife Hagar and his child Ishmael. Laban is described as a (slave) owner who would not send off his (slave-like) Jacob with gifts. The characterizations of these male figures undermine the male slave-owner who was constructed as both generous and powerful by the slavery laws. Thus we argued that the narratives deconstruct and relativize the laws.

Diego García's Long and Winding Road to Freedom: A Microcosm of Slavery in Costa Rica, 1705–1744

ABSTRACT ‘Diego García’ was the name given to a West African-born man who was brought to Costa Rica at the turn of the eighteenth century. His life history reflects many of the unusual features particular to the slave regime in that peripheral Spanish colony. These include rapid creolization, the intense and sustained contacts between members of different ethnic and racial groups, the broad geographical mobility of male slaves, the spatial separation of male and female Africans in the colony, and the enhanced possibilities for manumission available to male Africans.

“Thou maiest inforce my body but not mee”: Racializing Consent in John Marston’sThe Wonder of Women

“Thou maiest inforce my body but not mee”: Racializing Consent in John Marston’s<i>The Wonder of Women</i>

La gran recompensa en el otro mundo: esclavitud y manumisión en Tetuán (1800-1956)

Este estudio analiza la práctica de la manumisión de esclavos y esclavas entre los notables de Tetuán entre 1800 y 1956, a partir de fuentes notariales inéditas combinadas con fuentes orales y coloniales. Esta documentación nos permite concluir que la manumisión formaba parte de un mecanismo moral según el cual los propietarios esperaban adquirir un mérito religioso antes de morir para asegurarse una recompensa y un lugar en el paraíso. La liberación contenía también una dimensión pública y ritual. En sus testamentos, los notables, tanto hombres como mujeres, expresaban su generosidad redistribuyendo su riqueza entre los pobres y otorgando dinero en metálico o el usufructo de sus residencias a sus libertos. Este material notarial permite analizar las desigualdades en la estructura social marroquí desde el punto de vista de los propietarios, pero también ofrece valiosas informaciones sobre las características físicas, nombres y estatus de sus esclavos y esclavas, así como de sus trayectorias una vez liberados.

The Silencing of Slaves in Early Jewish and Christian Texts by Ronald Charles

Reviewed by: The Silencing of Slaves in Early Jewish and Christian Texts by Ronald Charles Mary Ann Beavis ronald charles, The Silencing of Slaves in Early Jewish and Christian Texts (Routledge Studies in the Early Christian World; London: Routledge, 2020). Pp. xvii + 272. $124. This book sets out to examine a wide range of early Jewish and Christian texts in which enslaved figures are represented and, according to Charles, rendered silent, by their authors, “who had no intrinsic interest in slaves . . . used, abused, and silenced their enslaved characters to articulate their own social, political, and theological visions” (p. 1) The Jewish texts considered all belong to the so-called Pseudepigrapha: Sibylline Oracles, Testaments of the Twelve Patriarchs, Testament of Job, Letter of Aristeas, Jubilees, Joseph and Aseneth, and Wisdom writings that include Ahiqar, 3 Maccabees, Pseudo-Phocylides, and the Sentences of the Syriac Menander. The early Christian writings are both canonical and extra-canonical: 1 Corinthians, Philippians, Philemon, the Gospels, Acts, the Passion of Perpetua and Felicitas, Acta Perpetuae, Letter of the Churches of Lyons and Vienne, and the Acts of Andrew. C. approaches these texts through the lenses of Michel-Rolph Trouillot’s Silencing [End Page 330] the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon, 1995), and Subaltern studies, to “uncover small tales constructed around slaves, or better, to consider how particular narratives could be understood differently if the reader pays attention to enslaved persons in their characterizations in the texts” (p. 12). Not surprisingly in a project that covers so much ground, the results are uneven. In my reading, several “small tales” stand out: the slave woman in the Testament of Job who gives her own loaf of bread to Satan, disguised as a stranger, when Job snubs him (7:5). Admittedly, the woman is rebuked for her kind act, but by Satan, hardly a reliable character. C. pays special attention to the slave characters—an unnamed slave girl and Malchus, the male slave of the high priest named in John 18:10—who figure in the scene of the denial of Peter (Mark 14:66–68; Matt 26:69–71; Luke 22:56; John 18:15–26), meticulously detailing the unique features of each narrative. C. highlights both the devalued figure of Rhoda (Acts 12:1–16) and the unnamed fortune-teller of Acts 16:16–18, characters often neglected by interpreters. Although all act/speak truthfully (and, in the case of the slave woman in Testament of Job, righteously), their words are dismissed, like the true words of the women disciples in Luke 24:11. Similarly, the slave Felicitas is sidelined by the freeborn Perpetua in the Passion, and both women are silenced in the Acts. In the Acts of Andrew, the body of the slave woman Euclia is used, abused, and discarded to preserve the chastity of her Christian mistress Maximilla: “The body of the elite woman is protected, while the body of the slave is exploited” (p. 196). Several of C.’s interpretive moves are less compelling. Some of the references to slaves in the pseudepigraphal writings he includes are slight or nonexplicit, as with the figure of Hermon in 3 Maccabees 5, who “is not explicitly called one [a slave] in the text” (p. 47). The observation that “he is an administrative person, who is in danger of being killed because of the king’s caprice” (p. 47), suffices to explain his vulnerability. C. adopts the traditional, but highly contested, hypothesis that Onesimus (Phlm 10) was a runaway slave, although why a fugitive slave would seek refuge by visiting a Roman prisoner is not explained. C. assumes that Epaphroditus (Phil 2:19, 25; 4:18) was a freedman (and thus outside the scope of the study), although he could just as likely have been enslaved or freeborn. To be sure, Eusebius’s construction of Blandina as a Christ figure whose death has cosmic significance (p. 182) subordinates her to a “highly theologized salvation history” (p. 183), but this is no different from his portrayal of other martyrs, enslaved or free. Charles’s study features a conclusion that thoroughly summarizes his analysis, chapter by chapter, seemingly in response to the critiques of...

Black Health and Wellness: Past and Present Implications of the “Slave Diet” for African Americans

12 | BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 84, NO. 2 84 No.2 BLACK HEALTH AND WELLNESS: PAST AND PRESENT IMPLICATIONS OF THE “SLAVE DIET” FOR AFRICAN AMERICANS By Michelle B. Pass and Sharon K. Bullock The transatlantic slave trade has affected every aspect of the African and African American experience. As such, through the lens of critical race structuralism (CRS), a theoretical framework that analyzes racial and ethnic relations in social and institutional systems in terms of patterns and relationships between race, culture, gender, and social structures , this article explores the evolution of African Americans’ dietary consumption and its impact on their health and wellness . CRS is composed of five tenets: (a) critical analysis of societal structure; (b) addressing dominant cultural indoctrination in education practices and policies; (c) utilizing social justice to advocate for equitable representation, access, and resources; (d) synergizing institutional change by being a catalyst for deconstructing racism and bias; and (e) engaging in intercultural collaborative communication and actions of change.1 Thus, this article seeks to answer the following question : How has the “slave diet” impacted the health and wellness of African Americans? Considering CRS, the social and historical context for the nutrition of African Americans is a central aspect of Black health and wellness. Furthermore, social studies knowledge can stimulate critical dialogue regarding the past and present, and it can help nurture a diverse society.2 The diet of enslaved Africans and African Americans in the colonial American South has been well studied through zooarchaeology, which is the study of the remains of animals (or humans) recovered from archaeological or other sites. 3 In light of zooarchaeology, there are some reports that suggest that slaves were generally well fed to ensure high levels of productivity on plantations. Other reports suggest there were differences in the nutrition of slaves based on their status .4 Slaves who worked in the fields or otherwise had a heavy workload were fed a little more, while slaves who did not have the heaviest workload, like women and children, were not as well fed. As a result, malnutrition was the leading cause of death for babies and children of slaves. 4 Since much of the land was reserved for agriculture, meat was an expensive rarity on colonial plantations. Children were considered important assets , but not as valuable as adult males. Consequently, meat was often not included in the diets of enslaved children until age ten, at which time they were allotted a serving of pork on most days.5 This included leftover parts the slave owners did not consume, like the feet, tail, tongue, intestine, etc. Per CRS, those who suggest that adult male slaves were “well fed” may be exaggerating the amount of food slave owners allotted to the enslaved. A more accurate suggestion is that adult slaves who labored in the fields were sufficiently fed. The rations of pork, a generally parasitic meat often consumed by European slave owners, and corn provided to adult slaves were sufficient to prevent death from malnutrition, but failed to provide all the necessary calories and nutrients for the labor-intensive work of a field slave. 6 Although the quantity of food given to slaves remains a subject of debate, what seems to be agreed upon is that its quality was poor. The inadequate diet forcefully imposed upon enslaved Africans was the precursor for the poor eating habits that have been traditionally found in the African American community, putting them at higher risk for chronic illnesses. Pre-Colonial African Diet Prior to slavery, the pre-colonial West African diet consisted primarily of vegetables, as many people were farmers and ate the produce generated from their farms.7 Fruits, BLACK HISTORY BULLETIN VOL. 84, NO. 2 | 13 84 No.2 vegetables, grains, and nuts were common foods in the West African diet. Meats were largely used as supplemental nutrition during times in the agricultural cycle when harvests were not available. 8 According to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) and the U.S. Department of Agriculture (USDA) Dietary Guidelines for Americans, a healthy diet consists of nutrient-dense foods from the following groups: vegetables, fruits, grains, dairy, protein from lean meats or plant...

Black Cookstove: Meditations on Literature, Culture and Cuisine in Colombia by Germán Patiño Ossa

Reviewed by: Black Cookstove: Meditations on Literature, Culture and Cuisine in Colombia by Germán Patiño Ossa Sandra Aguilar Rodríguez Germán Patiño Ossa. Black Cookstove: Meditations on Literature, Culture and Cuisine in Colombia. trans. Jonathan Tittler. University Park, PA: Pennsylvania State UP, 2020. 82 pp. ISBN 9780271086989. Black Cookstove, first published in 2007, and recently translated into English, provides readers a window into the culinary landscape and history of the Cauca River Valley, on the Pacific coast of Colombia. Patiño’s main argument is that the Cauca region is heavily influenced by African culture, which is evident in its cooking tradition. He explores cooking practices departing from the novel María, written by Jorge Isaacs and published in 1867. Patiño also incorporates references from travelers’ chronicles and commentaries written in the colonial period and early nineteenth century. Cooking, according to Patiño, is an essential element of culture, and it is cooking through which he demonstrates the process of transculturation in a Colombian region. Transculturation implies the mixing of different cultures to produce a new one. In this region, as in many other parts of Latin America, Spaniards, Africans, and Native Americans mixed and created a culture that is shared by all according to the author. The process of transculturation was not a peaceful one, as it was the outcome of wars, slavery, and violence. However, each group tried to survive and adapt to the region and in that way contributed to the formation of a unique culture. Enslaved Africans and Afro-descendants had a major impact in culinary practices since they were in charge of growing crops, fishing, butchering, gathering fruits and wild plants, and provisioning. Among Afro-descendants it was women who played a central role as they were in charge of cooking as well as raising children, both white and black, and preserving their music, dance, and culture. As Patiño notes, Afro-descendants represented the majority of the population by 1789, when a census of the Popayan regions revealed that of the 64,463 inhabitants, 41,484 were black and of those 12,241 were enslaved. Slaves represented the main workforce in María, as this institution pervaded in the Cauca Valley until 1852. Patiño highlights that although María portrays an idyllic world in which [End Page 164] slaves and masters coexisted in relative harmony, Isaacs was aware of, and denounced the iniquities of slavery. So even if female slaves are portrayed merrily preparing a traditional dessert called dulce de leche, which implied constantly stirring the thick mixture, they knew that any mistake could result in physical punishment. Patiño highlights the abundance and availability of food in the Cauca region. Food was always plentiful so even the poor did not experience hunger. Corn, yucca, and fish were the main ingredients of this cuisine. The Spaniards brought beef, sheep, goats, and swine. Cows were particularly valued. Cows produced milk used to prepare a wide variety of foodstuffs, such as cheese, butter, and dulce de leche. Sugarcane encountered an ideal environment to thrive in this region, and of course slavery resulted in great profits for masters. Spaniards also brought fruits, especially citrus, along with vineyards, olive groves, and other vegetables like onion and garlic. Plantains and coconut, basic foodstuffs in African cuisine, played a central role in the food of the Cauca River Valley too. Catching fish, as well as hunting wild animals and butchering them, were tasks in which only men participated. Men were in charge of cooking outside after fishing or hunting. If the master was leading the hunt his male slaves butchered and roasted the meat. Slaves also had to hunt bears and jaguars if they were eating the master’s cattle. For slaves, hunting was indispensable and dangerous, whereas for masters and landowners it was almost like a sport. Fish was an everyday staple due to the challenges of raising cattle in this climate. Beef was scarce and consumed jerked in most cases. Salted beef was a common ingredient of Chocó, a stew that included plantains and yucca. This stew, also called sancocho or ajiaco was prepared with other vegetables like winter squash and also...

Fetishizing the Foot: Mobility and Meaning in Indian Ocean Sandals

Fetishizing the Foot: Mobility and Meaning in Indian Ocean Sandals

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.

“Any place is better than here”: Afro-Zionism in the Science Fiction of Ray Bradbury and Derrick Bell

CLA JOURNAL 25 “Any place is better than here”: Afro-Zionism in the Science Fiction of Ray Bradbury and Derrick Bell Trent Masiki The Field Negro’s Lament In his 1963 speech “Message to the Grassroots,” Malcolm X tells a parable about the house Negro and the field Negro, two male slaves who hold opposing views on the merits of escaping their life in racial bondage. Paralyzed by the creature comforts of his relative privilege, the house Negro is satisfied with the status quo. When approached with the idea of running away, the house Negro balks, “Man, you crazy. What you mean, separate? Where is there a better house than this? Where can I wear better clothes than this? Where can I eat better food than this?” Fearing neither uncertainty nor the unknown, the field Negro replies, “Any place is better than here” (Malcolm X 11).The field Negro’s lament epitomizes how African Americans have, from the nineteenth century to the present, theorized and practiced emigration as a response to US racism and racial terror. Because they demonstrated the capacity to imagine and effect a liberated future for themselves, fugitive-minded slaves like the allegorical field Negro were, loosely speaking, afrofuturists. In his 1993 article “Black to the Future: Interviews with Samuel R. Delany, Greg Tate, and Tricia Rose,” Mark Dery coined the term afrofuturism,1 defining it as an aesthetic mode of expression that focuses on African Americans and their relationship to advanced science and technology in the near or distant future (Dery 180). Since the 1990s, afrofuturism gained a host of proponents in literary and cultural studies because it advances the idea that African American speculative culture should promote African American social, political, and cultural agency. Scholars and writers like Alondra Nelson, Sheree R. Thomas, Nalo Hopkinson, Reynaldo Anderson, Kodwo Eshun, and Jeffery Allen Tucker were key in promoting the critical study of speculative literature by writers of African descent and defining afrofuturism as a Pan-African aesthetic rather than an exclusively African American one.2 Although afrofuturism is ethnocentric in its content, it is racially ecumenical in its authorship. Just as anyone can sing the blues, play 1 “Black to the Future” was first published in South Atlantic Quarterly, vol. 92, no. 4, 1993. For a twenty-five year scholarly retrospective on afrofuturism, see Barber et al. 2 Each of these scholars and writers has written seminal texts about afrofuturism and African American science fiction, see Nelson; Thomas; Hopkinson and Nelson; Anderson and Jones; Anderson; Eshun; Tucker. 26 CLA JOURNAL Trent Masiki jazz, or perform hip hop dance, Dery suggests that anyone, regardless of race, can produce an afrofuturist text.3 Afrofuturism’s ethnoracial pluralism is essential to its efficacy as an antiracist cultural technology, argues literary scholar DeWitt D. Kilgore. Afrofuturism, contends Kilgore, “can be viewed as less a marker of black authenticity and more of a cultural force, an episteme that betokens a shift in our largely unconscious assumptions about which histories matter and how they may serve as a precondition for any future we might imagine” (“Afrofuturism” 564). On one hand, afrofuturism’s racial pluralism poses the threat that speculative literature and media about people of African descent will be produced by people who have no existential investment in the history and condition of being a person of African descent. On the other hand, afrofuturism’s pluralism encourages all people, regardless of their race, to consume speculative literature, film, music, and art that centers and/or features people of African descent.4 The rich tension between afrofuturism’s ethnocentrism and its racial pluralism invites one to analyze understudied racial themes in Ray Bradbury’s “Way in the Middle of the Air” (1950) and Derrick A. Bell’s “The Space Traders” (1992). Since 2003, scholars in African American literary studies have been reinvestigating “Way in the Middle of the Air” and “The Space Traders” because these stories directly address science fiction’s evasion of the history of slavery, segregation, and racial terror in the US. In his book Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction, André M. Carrington notes that Bradbury is a significant science fiction writer because he explicitly engages racial...

Long-range continuities in comparative and historical sociology: The case of parasitism and women’s enslavement

In this methods-building article, I show how attention to long-term continuities in female enslavement patterns helps us understand the emergence of the Black Atlantic. Slavery, I argue, is one form of human parasitism. I extend Orlando Patterson’s theory of human parasitism to examine the phenomenon of parasitic intertwining, wherein the forced labor of women became integral to broader social projects including household functioning, elite status maintenance, and population expansion. The thousand-year period between the fall of Rome and the rise of the transatlantic slave trade was once described as a rupture in European slavery, with serfdom gradually supplanting slavery. The mass capture, transport, and enslavement of women, however, continued even as male slaves and ex-slaves gained significant status changes. The entrenchment of women in zonal slave trades generated both a potent cultural logic and a structural blueprint for the transatlantic trade.

Morrer de pé para não viver de joelhos: o suicídio de Bertoleza em &lt;i&gt;O cortiço&lt;/i&gt;, 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).

From ethnobotany to emancipation: Slaves, plant knowledge, and gardens on eighteenth-century Isle de France.

This essay examines the relationship between slavery and plant knowledge for cultivational activities and medicinal purposes on Isle de France (Mauritius) in the second half of the eighteenth century. It builds on recent scholarship to argue for the significance of slaves in the acquisition of plant material and related knowledge in pharmaceutical, acclimatization, and private gardens on the French colonial island. I highlight the degree to which French colonial officials relied on slaves' ethnobotanical knowledge but neglected to include such information in their published works. Rather than seeking to explore the status of such knowledge within European frameworks of natural history as an endpoint of knowledge production, this essay calls upon us to think about the plant knowledge that slaves possessed for its practical implementations in the local island context. Both female and male slaves' plant-based knowledge enriched - even initiated - practices of cultivation and preparation techniques of plants for nourishment and medicinal uses. Here, cultivational knowledge and skills determined a slave's hierarchical rank. As the case of the slave gardener Rama and his family reveals, plant knowledge sometimes offered slaves opportunities for social mobility and, even though on extremely rare occasions, enabled them to become legally free.

Voter ID Laws: The Disenfranchisement of Minority Voters?

AMERICANS THINK OF THEIR NATION as an exemplary democracy despite its long history of disenfranchising racial and ethnic minorities. It was not until 1870 that the Fifteenth Amendment gave former male slaves and their male descendants the right to vote. It took another 50 years until women became enfranchised by the Nineteenth Amendment. Still, many citizens had to deal with systematic disenfranchisement caused by regressive state laws such as poll taxes and literacy tests—some of which remained in effect as late as the 1960s. It was not until the 1965 Voting Rights Act was amended in 1975 that citizens were guaranteed voting information or even ballots in a language they could understand. In light of this history, any reform that could put an extra burden on minority voters needs to be carefully examined. For this reason, this article examines the effects of strict voter identification (ID) laws on minority voters.

Lo status dello schiavo per l’islam: cenni storici, questioni terminologiche e legali

Arabic terms and translations for “slaves” – either male or female − clearly sum up the functions assigned to them: male slaves are mostly servants, military personnel or guardians, whereas the females areusually maids or musicians-prostitutes. Historically, slavery has been allowed and practiced since the beginning of the Islamic era. In fact, the Koran regulates some aspects of it, especially related to moral issues or relationships between men and women. The Islamic Law too, and the Maliki school in particular, mentions legal cases concerning the sale of slaves (hence, it must have been aquite common business). Additionally, the events that took place in Iraq and Egypt between the 9th and 13th century prove that the power in charge made use of slaves, especially for filling specific offices in the military field. It is exactly from this sector that a new caste first emerged, and then became gradually stronger. It initially defended and later inherited the management of the Arab-Islamic empire

SLAVES IN LUSITANIA: IDENTITY, DEMOGRAPHY AND SOCIAL RELATIONS

Se presenta un análisis de las inscripciones lusitanas que mencionan los esclavos, limitado necesariamente a personas identificadas de manera explícita como servi o similares. Una proporción bastante más alta de esclavos masculinos refleja tanto un énfasis en el labor físico como una posible exposición de vernae femeninas. Según las edades atestiguadas, muchos esclavos habrían muerto como jóvenes, pero esta documentación no incluye esclavos manumitidos. Además, las inscripciones proporcionan informes interesantes sobre las relaciones de esclavos con sus padres, sus dueños y sus cónyuges.

Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive by Marisa J. Fuentes

Reviewed by: Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive by Marisa J. Fuentes Mariana L. R. Dantas Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. By Marisa J. Fuentes. Early American Studies. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. [x], 217. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-2418-4; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-4822-7.) Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive is an ambitious attempt to foreground enslaved women in the history of urban slavery in Barbados and the Americas more broadly. It does so by developing new [End Page 967] methods to reconstruct their experiences and voices from bits of archival evidence produced by and for the dominant forces and narratives of slavery. It cautions us against the danger of reproducing white colonizing power, and the commodification and brutalization of enslaved bodies and persons, through traditional readings of historical documents that are only layers deep. It calls instead for readings "along the bias grain" of historical evidence, which stretch out the fabric of the past to visualize underlying threads of meanings, intentions, and power dynamics that frame patterns of behavior, understanding, and practices (p. 7). In this manner, Marisa J. Fuentes argues, we can begin to reconstruct and critically examine the complexity of enslaved women's experiences. It also becomes possible to address agency through a careful contextualization of the actions and decisions of enslaved and slave-owning women in a constraining world that normalized gender, racial, and sexual violence. Fuentes's analysis builds on an extensive historiography (carefully acknowledged in her footnotes) that has expanded knowledge about the history of women in slavery, reframed questions, and revealed methodologies that counter the silence of the archives. She adds to that historiography by weaving together several analytical threads—borrowed from women and gender studies, black feminist theory, critical historiography, and cultural studies—into a rendering of the past that resists unexamined and complicit accounting of the degradation black women suffered. The book's five chapters are centered on fragments of enslaved women's stories that are barely visible in the historical record, which Fuentes unravels to reveal the strands of an exploitative and violent reality that (re)shaped black women's lives and bodies. Through Jane, who briefly appears in a runaway slave ad, Fuentes discusses how the built environment of Bridgetown manifested and enforced white colonial power. She imagines Jane's interactions with and knowledge of the town's sites, from wharves to jails, to consider how slaves who contemplated flight assessed the promises and dangers of the urban space. Rachael Pringle Polgreen, the well-known mulatto freedwoman and Bridgetown brothel owner, and Joanna, a former slave manumitted in Polgreen's will, help Fuentes explore black female sexuality and the question of agency in the context of sex work. The violence of slavery, including perceptions of enslaved women as sexually available, left them vulnerable to abuse, coercion, rape, and economic exploitation. Enslaved women in this environment were hardly sexual operators, Fuentes argues, but survivors of their sexualized status. Fuentes's analysis of an adultery case involving a white woman, and complicated by an attempted armed assault against her husband by her lover's cross-dressed male slave, further highlights the sexualization of black female bodies in Barbados. The white woman's claim to sexual propriety, and the black enslaved boy's ability to cross town unnoticed at night in women's clothes, relied on assumptions about black female promiscuity. Through Molly, a slave executed for an attempted poisoning, Fuentes explores slavery and its archive's relentless criminalization of enslaved men and particularly women. As Molly's case reveals, any nonconforming or suspicious action by the enslaved was used as justification for the punishment, brutalization, and destruction of life and body. The final chapter of Dispossessed Lives examines testimonies of the brutality of slavery collected by the Privy Council investigating slavery and the case for [End Page 968] abolition in the late eighteenth century. Guided by the faint cries of the women instead of the recorded words of the witnesses of their debasement, Fuentes demonstrates that these testimonies often ignored the perspective of enslaved black women and aimed to expiate the guilt of...