Past Of Slavery Research Articles

Slaveholder ancestry and current net worth of members of the United States Congress.

Whether and how much past slavery affects contemporary social and economic conditions in the United States is an area of active debate. Newly available data on which members of the United States Congress are descendants of slaveholders provides an opportunity to examine this topic. This study sought to determine the relationship between slaveholder ancestry and net worth among members of Congress. Total assets and liabilities were collected from financial declarations of all members of Congress as of April 15, 2021. Net worth was estimated as the difference between total assets and liabilities. Information on slaveholder ancestry was obtained from a Reuters investigative series based on an extensive review of historical documents and verification by board-certified genealogists. Quantile regression was used to determine the association between net worth and slaveholder ancestry after adjustment for demographic factors. The median net worth of the 535 members of Congress was $1.28 million (interquartile range $0.11-5.87 million). On univariate analysis, net worth was associated with increased age, White race, increased education, and number of individuals enslaved by ancestors. On multivariate analysis, net worth was independently associated with age, White race, and number enslaved. Legislators whose ancestors enslaved 16 or more individuals had a $3.93 million (95% confidence interval 2.39-5.46) higher net worth compared to legislators whose ancestors were not slave owners after adjustment for age, sex, race, ethnicity, and education. Past slaveholding practices are independently associated with current wealth among members of Congress. Because members of Congress are a highly selected group, further work is needed to understand how slaveholder ancestry affects current wealth in the general population to inform efforts to reduce social and economic disparities.

United States Healthcare System

United States Healthcare System

The symbolization of a snake and tree among the devotees of the zar spirit in Sudan

This paper deals with a symbolic interpretation of the structural position that the snake and the tree possess in the local worship of the zar spirit within the borders of Islamic Sudan. The paper at hand aims to study, via bibliographic research, how the snake Azrag Banda, a manifestation of zar, and his tree-abode are regarded as significant symbols in the Sudanese zar tumbura, a self-nominated Islamic practice and spirit-possession cult with therapeutic functions. The snake Azrag Banda and his tree play a special role in the life of the cult and are meaningful symbols due to the collective historical experience of the Sudani, the devotees of zar tumbura. As it will be shown, the main characteristic of the Sudani Self is a past of slavery and displacement and a present of living on the margins of Sudanese society. In this regard, the current article aims at indicating what the snake entity Azrag Banda and his tree-abode mean for the Sudani. Adopting an emic approach, the snake and the tree will be seen as traditional Sudanese earth symbols, which are considered able to offer protection, heal the historical stigma of slavery, help the subaltern establish their “roots” in the Sudanese ground, and thus upgrade the low social status of the Sudani. In this way, the latter is transformed into free men and genuine landowners.

A World Transformed: Slavery in the Americas and the Origins of Global Power by James Walvin

Walvin’s concise review of slavery in the Atlantic argues that slavery has transformed the West or, indeed, the world to the present day. Chapters in six sections include overviews of Iberian and northern European slave systems, examples from the Middle Passage, slave trade within Brazil and the United States, “managing slavery,” the campaign for freedom, and the argument about the world transformed by slavery—as seen through sugar, tobacco, servile labor, and plantation economies. Walvin’s purpose for writing the book was to restate the history of slavery in support of the discourse around Black Lives Matter.The book’s most original observations are signaled at the opening of the concluding chapter: “The furore which swept round the globe in the wake of the killing of George Floyd in May 2020 brought slavery back into widespread public debate.” In Walvin’s words, “Critics everywhere were swift to point out that the origins of that injustice lay deep in the history of relations between Black and white … [and] the history of slavery” (331). As he suggests, public discourse turns to history when the issues become most painful and difficult.Walvin argues that the intensity of the reaction to Floyd’s death was reinforced by an earlier debate. “The 1619 Project,” a series published in New York Times Magazine, appeared in 2019 with the 400th anniversary of the delivery of African captives to Virginia.1 These essays, which reviewed U.S. history through the lens of slavery, prompted heated discussion among Americans of varied backgrounds, but they made virtually no reference to history outside the United States. Walvin argues, however, that this renewed interest in U.S. slavery ignited a global debate that linked police violence worldwide to reminders of social inequity, to statues of imperial generals, and to the wealth garnered by powerful families and institutions from the work of forced laborers.Having argued that statements about the past of slavery and inequality need to be updated, Walvin turns to the historical background underlying the explosion of Black Lives Matter. He begins with World War II, in which people from all over the world fought the Axis powers, after which the inhabitants of colonies were able to claim the rights of national citizens. He acknowledges that the U.S. civil-rights movement of that era performed a similar function: “In the USA, the reconstruction of the Black past lifted slavery out of its essentially regional setting.”Walvin’s perspective on the British Empire reaffirms the argument that the slavery/inequality debate is worldwide, not just American. Walvin shows how children born to immigrant parents in Europe found that their school curriculum did not address their family or national background. Educators had to address the issue of whether a history of Europe were even possible without looking at slavery. In ex-colonial countries, the inherited imperial school curriculum was inflected by a study of national rights and independence, relying on national scholars to explain the contrasts of wealth and poverty. Walvin mentions James and Williams for the Caribbean cases.2 In both the United States and overseas, expanding studies of slavery brought new disciplines to historical study—linguistics, archaeology, and expanded digital analysis.Walvin refers ambivalently to both West and world as the locus of slavery’s transformation. Thus, “for centuries, the Western world at large was inextricably entangled with slavery.” But his sense of the underlying dynamic is clear. The spreading realization of the global ubiquity of slavery and its effects begged two inescapable questions: “Why were we not told?” and “How had Europeans become the Lords of Human Kind?” (336, 343). In fact, preceding research, especially in the last fifty years, had deeply documented slavery. Evidence was plentiful, but many saw it as new. Such is the interplay of scholars and communities.Finally, given the insistent question of what would be a fair response to the end of slavery, Walvin addresses reparations, focusing especially on the website that reveals details of payments to British owners of slaves in the 1830s (www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs). The discussion is evidently continuing. At the institutional level, banks and universities have made compensatory payments in recognition of their earlier profits from slavery. Walvin concludes the book with a rhetorical question: “Who could now deny that slavery matters?” (354).

Scotland, Atlantic slavery and the Scottish National Party: From colonised to coloniser in the political imagination

AbstractOver the last three decades, a major shift has taken place in Scottish nationalist understandings of Scotland's colonial past. During the second half of the twentieth century, independence supporters viewed Scotland's relationship with England in colonial terms. Since the Scottish Parliament was established in 1999, nationalists have increasingly recognised Scots' role in Atlantic slavery. This paper explores this change within the Scottish National Party (SNP) using archival sources, published material and Scottish Parliamentary records. It demonstrates that a maturing historiography has drawn attention to Scotland's slavery past. History has become politically relevant in transatlantic deliberations over racial injustice, which have grown in intensity since the international Black Lives Matter protests in 2020. SNP ministers and parliamentarians have responded to this context by incorporating addressing Scotland's role in Atlantic slavery within a case for independence that is styled as progressive and contrasts with the more recalcitrant attitudes, which predominate at UK level.

Cross-Genre Explorations in Black British Narratives of Slavery and Freedom: Bernardine Evaristo and Andrea Levy

This article considers Bernardine Evaristo's Blonde Roots (2008) and Andrea Levy's The Long Song (2010) as innovative works of fiction that experiment with the form of the slave narrative to produce new visions of Atlantic slavery. The authors maintain the genre's original political intent to bear witness to unspeakable realities, but they also channel their ethical commitment into fictions that flout the expectations of restraint and seriousness and deploy humor as a complex mechanism that both involves and distances readers. Evaristo and Levy grant their narrators humorous voices and weave in elements from disparate literary genres at odds with the slave narrative, such as speculative fiction and Augustan satire in Evaristo's text and the intrusive narrator and other conventions of comic, self-reflective eighteenth-century fiction in Levy's case. Blonde Roots and The Long Song repurpose these writing traditions to critically intervene in the dominant narratives of the British nation and the role of slavery in it. The essay argues that humor can have a distancing effect that is not necessarily alienating but that can work to connect readers with the enslaved lives presented while revealing the impossibility of full identification with and understanding of these experiences. The aesthetic innovations in the novels are thus linked to their ethical commitment to remember the past of slavery and make it relevant to not only Black history but British history.

Shaping the Identity through Dramatizing the Memories - A Study of August Wilson’s The Piano Lesson

There is no doubt with the claim that the African-American people have been suffering from a traumatic past of slavery and injustice long time ago. Similarly, they still suffer, but presently with another form of discrimination which is racism. The study argues that August Wilson, in particular, and the African-Americans, in general, are tremendously keen on maintaining their memories because memories do have an irreplaceable part in one’s identity. The study explores Wilson’s The Piano Lesson as a case in point. The present study aims at exploring Wilson as a prolific dramatist whose style was so vigorous and a reflection of the African-Americans’ life of. Furthermore, it sheds light on his play, The Piano Lesson, and how it plays a significant role and a powerful testimony in shaping the memories of the African-American people.The study is divided into two sections and a conclusion. The first section introduces the concept of identity, and it comes across August Wilson as a dramatist. Then it deals with the African American Theatre. On the other hand, the second section deals with The Piano Lesson and how it is viewed as a powerful testimony to the idea that the African-American people cherished their own memories since memories shape one’s identity. Eventually, the last part is the conclusion which sums up the research’s findings.

The representation of quilombolas in Torto arado, by Itamar Vieira Junior (2019): structural racism through the female perspective

Analysis of Torto arado (2019), by Itamar Vieira Junior with attention to the point of view of narration, since the narrators of the novel, three quilombola women, reveal in the work the marks left by slavery in Brazil, which consequently helps in the understanding of structural and institutional racism in Brazilian society. As a result, it appears that the novel expresses the relationship between the slavery past and the current portrait of blacks, quilombola communities and social inequality in Brazil.

What is Meant by ‘Repair’ when Claiming Reparations for Colonial Wrongs? Transformative Justice for the Dutch Slavery Past

While Transitional Justice instruments have been implemented in plenty of post-conflict cases, what little knowledge we have about the effects of these measures shows contradictory findings, indicating that they are often ambiguous and disappointing. Consequently the last decade has seen a specific call for a ‘new agenda for practice’ proposing a transition from Transitional Justice to Transformative Justice. It is a request by scholars such as Paul Gready and Simon Robins (2014) to develop from the bottom-up a concept of justice that is more ‘transformative,’ specifically challenging ‘unequal and intersecting power relationships and structures of exclusion at both the local and the global level’. This article contributes to this consideration by exploring the Dutch debate on its slavery past with the following question: how could reparations—fundamental in the debate around the acknowledgment of the slavery past—facilitate transformative justice? In the Netherlands over the last decade, memory and reparation activists seeking recognition for slavery and the transatlantic slave trade have been influenced by two major events; the 10-point reparation claim put forward by the Caribbean CARICOM countries against the formerly colonizing powers in Europe (2013), and the UN-International Decade for People of African Descent (2015-2024). This article describes the reparation claims articulated by various groups in and outside the Netherlands addressing the slavery past of the Dutch and some of the institutional responses. Reparations have gained little conceptual attention in transitional justice scholarship, and in investigating the concept of reparation we refer to Lisa Laplante’s (2013) dictum, which is that ‘Reparations can and should be viewed through a lens of justice’. Laplante made an important intervention in the field by asking which reparations contribute to what kind of justice. Reading the Dutch question through the lens of Laplante’s continuum justice model (2013) makes it possible to identify different justice claims made by interested and affected parties. Laplante’s model ranges from a narrow (minimalist) to a broader (maximalist) conceptualisation of justice; distinguishing four types of justice aims: reparative justice, restorative justice, civic justice and socio-economic justice. All four types are relevant when considering the various options a government and a society have in dealing with (historical) injustice. The empirical findings suggest that current reparation claims in Afro-Caribbean and Surinamese communities are less about a specific product (such as an apology or reparations) but rather about a social process of relation building (such as addressing structural injustices). This notion of ‘social repair’ challenges and extends our current understanding of what justice for historical wrongs is about, but—as is argued in this article—it will at the same time also make reparations more acceptable to larger parts of Dutch society. It avoids the narrow ‘blame-and-guilt’ framework associated with reparations in politics and the media, which exacerbates the problem of acceptance in the first place.The key arguments in this article firstly show that reparation theory is essential in identifying the kind of claims for justice that are being made, and secondly evaluate whether those claims are being addressed. Laplante helps us to see that if these justice goals of social repair are not clearly articulated and addressed, we would be likely to disappoint memory politics and memory activists, who ‘may compromise the overall justice project,’ thus jeopardising the potential for a transformative outcome.The notion of social repair, as proposed in this article, recognizes a joint struggle for a more fair and equal society.

Adopting a Memory Law on the Dutch Slavery Past? (A Study Prepared for the Advisory Board Dialogue Group on the Slavery past and the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations)

Adopting a Memory Law on the Dutch Slavery Past? (A Study Prepared for the Advisory Board Dialogue Group on the Slavery past and the Dutch Ministry of the Interior and Kingdom Relations)

The Predicament of Contemporary Brazilian Fiction and its Spatiotemporal Modalities

This article will argue that the irruption of the present economic and political crises reveals a challenge to a certain optimism that enveloped the discourse of the contemporary since the beginning of the century. Through the readings of a small selection of novels from 2018 and 2019, by the writers Joca Reiners Terron, Chico Buarque de Holanda, Ana Paula Maia, Itamar Vieira Junior, Luiz Ruffato and Milton Hatoum, we will analyse divergent historical perspectives revealed by these narratives as implicit or explicit intervention into the present authoritarian brutalization of the national self-fashioning. In Essa Gente, the author’s ambition aims to dive into the ‘presence of the present’ in a hallucinatory simultaneity with political occurrences; Torto Arado by Itamar Vieira Junior offers another dimension of the anachronical actuality of the traumatic past of slavery; while Verão Tardio by Luiz Ruffato dives into the melancholic return of the main character to a past he cannot get rid of. In Joca Reiners Terron’s A Morte e o Meteoro and in Enterrem seus Mortos by Ana Paula Maia the retrofuturistic narratives expose the ongoing extermination of indigenous cultures in the Amazon region and the latency of the anthropocene through human interaction with animal nature.

Afterword: Ghosts of Slavery

AbstractThis afterword engages with the theme of this Special Issue by discussing the significance of urban slavery in slave societies and societies where chattel slavery existed in Europe, Africa, and the Americas. It discusses how, despite the omnipresence of slavery in cities such as Rio de Janeiro, Salvador, New York, and Charleston, the tangible traces of the inhuman institution were gradually erased from the public space. It also emphasizes that, despite this annihilation, over the last three decades, black social actors have made significant interventions to make the slavery past of Atlantic cities visible again.

Migration Themes and Transnational Identities in Mohammed Ben-Abdallah's The Slaves, Haile Gerima's Sankofa, and Rachid Bouchareb's Little Senegal

86 CLA JOURNAL Migration Themes and Transnational Identities in Mohammed Ben-Abdallah’s The Slaves, Haile Gerima’s Sankofa, and Rachid Bouchareb’s Little Senegal Helena Woodard Since at least the 1980s, high-profile West African slave forts, also known as dungeons, have attracted visitors in the international community for the forts’ role in the Atlantic Slave Trade. Ghana’s Elmina and Cape Coast Castles, along with Senegal’s House of Slaves at Gorée Island, originally functioned as holding cells or prisons for slave captives awaiting sell to European traders before being transported across the Atlantic in the Middle Passage. In Trade Castles and Forts of West Africa,A.W. Lawrence writes,“Nowhere else have small and transitory communities of traders so changed the life of the alien peoples who surrounded them and indirectly of a vast region beyond” (29). Renovated and designated as world heritage sites by UNESCO to mark its historical role in the slavery past, the slave fort has also appealed to certain writers who--through tourism as prism--transformed it from mass cultural artifact to a geo-political, public memory space. Though I write about the slave fort in the context of Atlantic Slavery in my book, Slave Sites on Display: Reflections of Slavery Through Contemporary “Flash” Moments, I am primarily interested, here, in the symbolic slave fort’s mediative function in select contemporary literature between African “locals” and disproportionately slave-descendant African Americans who travel to those sites.In this article,I have chosen to focus on three works that expose complexities in that relationship through partial or full settings that begin at a slave fort in Africa before evolving, diachronically, through a failed Pan-Africanist motif (or the notion of an African diaspora unification) to immersion in debate about tourism, responsibility for the slavery past, and relations between Africans and diaspora slave descendants. By appropriating that motif in this article, I regard the slave fort’s function as a potent symbol for Atlantic slavery through complications regarding departure and return for African diaspora slave descendants who visit slave forts as tourists, and their relationship with African locals that they encounter. Haile Gerima’s classic film, Sankofa (1993), and Rachid Bouchareb’s independent film, Little Senegal (2000), for example, employ migrations themes and transnational identities through African and slave-descendant African American protagonists, but their relationships demonstrate deep fissures largely attributed to the Atlantic Slave Trade. Opening scenes in Sankofa and Little Senegal foreground the slave fort--or what Playwright Mohammed Ben-Abdallah refers to in The Slaves as the “stone CLA JOURNAL 87 Migration Themes and Transnational Identities in The Slaves, Sankofa, and Little Senegal monster” by the sea--where an African griot and slave-descendant African Americans briefly converge and communicate a need to mend their strained relationships. Both films intersect with Ben-Abdallah’s The Slaves through the dungeon as a geo-political, public memory space. The play formalizes the dungeon as a foundational setting for Atlantic slavery, a precursor to the Middle Passage journey, and a foreshadowing of tensions between Africans and slave-descendant African Americans in contemporary society. I therefore place Sankofa and Little Senegal in conversation with The Slaves as these works dramatize the fort or dungeon as a pivotal, originary site that communicates a need for slave-descendant African Americans in the U.S. to connect with their African ancestry and the slave past in an effort to heal its lingering wounds. But while Ben-Abdallah allegorizes Atlantic Slavery within the confines of that space for captive Africans, Gerima and Bouchareb reinscribe its lineage in a complex meditation on slavery and race across the Atlantic through migrations themes and transnational identities for Africans and slave-descendant African Americans in contemporary society. Appropriating the Dungeon as Public Memory Space in The Slaves In anAuthor’s note about The Slaves Revisited,in the publication,titled The Fall of Kumbi and Other Plays, Mohammed Ben-Abdallah stated that his first objective for the revised script was“to provide a confrontation, a dialogue as it were, between the pain and angst of Africa at large, and the Big, White, Stone Monster by the sea . . . the slave fort” (iii, 25 March 2011...

Het gruwelijke gezicht van de geschiedenis

Abstract The memory of colonialism and slavery is finally becoming more widespread in the Netherlands. However, the field of literary studies still falls behind compared to the central place of the Dutch-Caribbean slavery past in recent societal debates. One of the reasons could be that the representation of trans-Atlantic slavery in literature is often oblique and allegorical. This article proposes a reading of such allegories in The Sign of Jonah (Van Leeuwen 1995) by the Dutch-Antillean writer Boeli van Leeuwen. The novel’s intertextual references to both the Biblical story of Jonah and numerous other intertextual references, connect European, South-American and religious texts with the violent colonial history of the Caribbean. Using European (Walter Benjamin) and Caribbean (Eduard Glissant, Antonio Benítez-Rojo) theory, we argue that it is precisely this hybrid and postmodern practice of meaning-making that shapes the depiction of slavery and colonial memory in Van Leeuwen’s novels. Binary oppositions between Europe and South-America, masters and slaves, humans and nature, are deconstructed and readers are encouraged to understand man as fundamentally entangled with his other, be it animal, botanical and mineral. The postmodern use of the allegory turns out to produce cultural memory, and also to announce a future of ‘ecobe-comings’.

Fictions of Migration in Contemporary Britain and Ireland by Carmen Zamorano Llena

Reviewed by: Fictions of Migration in Contemporary Britain and Ireland by Carmen Zamorano Llena Rita Sakr Fictions of Migration in Contemporary Britain and Ireland, by Carmen Zamorano Llena (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020, 220 p., hardcover, €75) A broad range of scholarship explores literary representations of the Irish migrant experience across the world and, more recently, the experience of migration to an increasingly multicultural Ireland (Pilar Villar-Argaiz, 2017; Ailbhe McDaid, 2017; Anne Mulhall, 2020, among others). There is an even larger body of criticism on the dynamics of migration, diaspora, and asylum-seeking in British literature (Agnes Woolley, 2014; Matthew Chambers, 2015; Deirdre Osborne, 2016, among others). Given the intertwined histories and geographies of the two islands, constructing a coherently productive methodological [End Page 154] approach to the literatures of migration in the two countries in the same study is both a convincing as well as a challenging intellectual feat, especially from the perspectives of postcolonial theory and globalization studies. Yet Carmen Zamorano Llena's Fictions of Migration in Contemporary Britain and Ireland achieves precisely this. Zamorano Llena's monograph focuses on fiction published since the 1990s. While the pairing of Ireland–Britain in the title could suggest a duality of national literatures, the book's significant scholarly contribution is its exploration of a vast network of transnational dimensions, including the contributions of non-migrant writers on this topic. The introduction offers an overview of relevant fields, including comparative literature and world literature, as well as the multifaceted concept of cosmopolitanism. It may not necessarily be clear at the start in what ways and how successfully the study will map "the connection between present fictions of migration and earlier migration literature, as well as postcolonial writing and new forms of cosmopolitan writing, with special attention to their role in redefining national literature and literary traditions." However, the case studies in the six main chapters deliver on the promise, in some instances with astonishing rigor and originality. The succinct discussion of "new cosmopolitan theory" in terms of redefining the interrelationship of postcolonialism and globalization at the start of Chapter 2 is more impressive than the relatively brief close readings of the disruption of nationalist "home" imaginaries in Caryl Phillips's A Distant Shore and Foreigners. Chapter 3 cleverly addresses "the democratising effects" of Colum McCann's Let the Great World Spin as a literary rendering of Ulrich Beck's concept of "inclusive differentiation" in terms of its narration of both the experience of 9/11 as well as of exile. Engaging Global North–Global South relations in Abdulrazak Gurnah's By the Sea and Gravel Heart, Chapter 4 incisively sets up Achille Mbembe's reconceptualized "Afropolitanism" as a groundwork to discover "new possible worldviews." Chapter 5 takes Jacques Rancière's work, particularly The Politics of Literature (2011), as well as Martha Nussbaum's and Sara Ahmed's writings on emotions, as a starting point to analyze Elif Shafak's Honour as "a fictional narrative that counters the simplifying narratives of the Muslim other." Chapter 6, on Rose Tremain's The Colour and The Gustav Sonata, is a standout in many respects, not least in its ambitious triangulation of Hannah Arendt's thinking on solidarity and "enlarged mentality" with Giorgio Agamben's concept of "bare life" and Michael Rothberg's notion of "noeuds de mémoire" in order to engage historical fiction in the context of what it correctly identifies as the fruitful "synergetic combination of migration studies and memory studies." The treatment of transcultural memories, particularly through Rothberg's "multidirectional memory," continues in Chapter 7 as a foundation to examine "the interconnections between Irish Famine diasporic [End Page 155] memory, transatlantic slavery past and Australian convict narratives" in Evelyn Conlon's Not the Same Sky. One of the study's strongest elements is the close analysis of formal techniques in the selected works of fiction. Zamorano Llena deftly addresses the often innovative narrative methods and motifs that approximate the sociohistorical shifts that are engendered and the ethico-political turns that are triggered by the "timespaces" of migration. This ranges from McCann's use of the metaphor of the tightrope walker signifying the migrant's "acrobatic mobility"; Gurnah's spatiotemporal "dialogism...

Cultural Melancholy: Readings of Race, Impossible Mourning, and African American RitualIn the Wake: On Blackness and BeingLong Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project

Cultural Melancholy: Readings of Race, Impossible Mourning, and African American RitualIn the Wake: On Blackness and BeingLong Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project

A produção de balanços historiográficos no Brasil: entre o poder político e o poder discursivo (1990-2011)

A produção de balanços historiográficos, entendidos como avaliações/apresentações de um conjunto de textos historiográficos referentes a um determinado tema, apesar de ser uma prática de longa data, configurou-se como tópico até hoje ainda não problematizado de forma sistemática pelos teóricos da história. No presente artigo pretendemos fazer uma análise de algumas das relações de poder que acreditamos estar no cerne da produção de tal modalidade enunciativa. A partir de duas funções do balanço historiográfico, a do balanço enquanto expressão de um lugar político, e a do balanço enquanto procedimento de delimitação discursiva, buscamos fazer uma análise de alguns balanços ligados à temática do passado escravista no Brasil e produzidos entre 1990 e 2011. Trata-se de um recorte temático e temporal pertinente, uma vez que foi neste período que se deu a consolidação dos cursos de pós-graduação no país, o que fomentou, por parte dos autores do período, a percepção de um novo modo de se fazer história.Palavras-chave: balanço historiográfico, relações de poder, discurso, escravidão.

Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project. By Catherine A. Stewart

Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project. By Catherine A. Stewart

Sociocultural Influences on African Americans' Representations of Type 2 Diabetes: A Qualitative Study.

Illness representations, known as patients' beliefs and expectations about an illness, may be influenced by cultural beliefs and personal experiences. This study explored African Americans' perceptions of the sociocultural factors that influence their representations of diabetes. Six semi-structured focus groups. Private space at a convenient site. Forty African Americans, aged 45-60 years with type 2 diabetes for at least one year prior. Participants perceived that there was a race-mediated effect of how they developed diabetes because of poverty due to past slavery, racial discrimination by health care providers, and the stigma associated with diabetes within the African American community. Participants perceived that poverty influenced African Americans' unhealthy eating habits, which led to diabetes diagnosis among their ancestors and their development of the disease since it was hereditary. Participants also perceived that there was provider ill intention, ie, providers were purposefully making people sick, and their lack of education on diabetes from providers was done on purpose, as information on diabetes was withheld and not shared due to racial discrimination. Perceived stigma by the community led to African Americans' avoidance and denial of the disease, and subsequently the development of diabetes. To enhance disease management for African Americans with diabetes, it is important to focus on the sociocultural context of how African Americans view their world that may be influenced by their knowledge of negative historical circumstances and their current provider relationship, which, in turn, may be reflected in their perceptions of diabetes.

Catherine A. Stewart. Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project.

Catherine A. Stewart. Long Past Slavery: Representing Race in the Federal Writers’ Project.