Plantation Slavery Research Articles

Caribbean Exchanges: Slavery and the Transformation of English Society, 1640-1700. By Susan Dwyer Amussen. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. xiv, 302 pp. Cloth, $59.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-3165-6. Paper, $22.50, ISBN 978-0-8078-5854-7.)

In this fine book, Susan Dwyer Amussen adds to the familiar picture of the economic impact of plantation slavery in England's West Indian colonies by exploring the social, cultural, and political impact of that slave system. While entering into the wide variety of debates that are the staple of slavery and Atlantic historiography, this English historian emphasizes “the English character of this story” (p. 11). As such, Caribbean Exchanges possesses the considerable strengths of that imperial approach, as well as some weaknesses. While attending to important differences between Barbados and Jamaica, Amussen demonstrates the conflicting goals that actuated the rising planter class on both islands. The planters yearned for the paternalist hierarchy of English society while building an exploitative society centered on sugar profits. Because of that tension, “the harsh treatment of servants and the entire institution of slavery made the English uncomfortable,” if not enough to change their behavior (p. 67). Because slavery was so foreign to seventeenth-century Englishmen, they only awkwardly and slowly rationalized the slave societies on these islands. Their discomfort became evident in a phenomenon familiar to Americanists: the planters were squeamish about using words such as “slavery” even in slave codes.

Creole Cultures of the Caribbean: Historical Archaeology in the French West Indies

Historical archaeology is a relatively recent development in the French West Indies, in contrast to the Anglophone Americas where for over 30 years, historical archaeologists have investigated the sites of plantation villages in the United States and in the Caribbean to seek insights into the ways in which enslaved Africans adapted to and survived the horrors of slavery, and created unique and vibrant Creole cultures. Although plantations have been archaeologically investigated in the former French possessions of the United States, their Caribbean counterparts, and particularly the enslaved population who labored on them, have only recently become a focus of archaeological research. Yet the historical setting and development of plantation slavery in the French colonies of the Caribbean was necessarily distinct from both the British Caribbean and from North American French colonial establishments. This paper discusses the state of historical archaeology in the French West Indies, with particular reference to plantation archaeology in Guadeloupe and Martinique. This research identifies some of the unique aspects of the economic and historical context of slavery on French Caribbean plantations.

"An Abiding Faith in Cotton": The Merchant Capitalist Community of New Orleans, 1860–1862

"An Abiding Faith in Cotton":The Merchant Capitalist Community of New Orleans, 1860–1862 Scott P. Marler (bio) Although Louisiana was one of the Old South's chief producers of agricultural commodities, its most crucial economic contribution to the region was the commercial traffic steered through the port of New Orleans, a city whose business and financial district constituted one of the most intensely concentrated sites of capital in the mid-nineteenth-century Atlantic World. As plantation development had shifted steadily westward over the antebellum decades, the South's only metropolis had become its premier banking and mercantile center, and by the 1850s half of the region's total cotton production routinely passed through New Orleans. In addition, the city was important for its slave markets, as a source of imported manufactured goods, and as a prominent bulk-break point for Midwestern foodstuffs. Presiding over all of this wide-ranging commerce was New Orleans's large community of merchant capitalists: its banks, factorage houses, commission firms, brokers, wholesalers, and retailers.1 [End Page 247] At the onset of secession winter in 1860, New Orleans's privileged position at the nexus of slave-based plantation agriculture and transatlantic trade networks seemed to herald a leadership role for Louisiana in any new southern nation. But although it would eventually provide the Confederacy with several important statesmen, Louisiana generally suffered from the deep suspicion with which its mercantile and banking elites were widely regarded throughout the South. Its merchants' connections to northern and foreign capital caused contemporaries and historians alike to underestimate the depth of their support for slavery, secession, and the Confederacy. Their commitment to southern goals, born of their long-standing relationship to plantation slavery, has been partly obscured by the independent streak they sometimes displayed toward the Confederate government before the Union occupation of New Orleans in May 1862. Most notably, the New Orleans banks initially resisted aligning their currency policies with those of the Confederate Treasury, and the city's merchants organized a cotton embargo against the Davis administration's wishes during summer 1861. However, such reactions to government policies by the state's commercial and financial community should be understood within the context of the rapid and largely unique economic deterioration that Louisiana experienced as a result of the unprecedented pressures of secession and war. Understanding their reactions will help illuminate the global ramifications of the American Civil War during what historian Eric Hobsbawm called the "Age of Capital." The proud Crescent City business community's failed efforts to assert the primacy of "King Cotton" forced them to confront the dependent nature of southern merchant capitalism in an era of ascendant industrialization elsewhere, and the war's outcome would rapidly seal New Orleans's fate as perhaps the last major urban outpost of an increasingly anachronistic, trade-based Atlantic World economy.2 [End Page 248] In summer 1860, Dr. Joseph Slemmons Copes, a New Orleans commission merchant, took a hiatus from the city's notorious fever season to attend to his firm's interests in the Old Northwest. Referring to the escalating national political crisis in a letter to his business partner, Copes reported that he had found "scarcely any persons who are not sympathizers with the South" in Ohio business circles. Like many merchants, Copes clearly expected that the ties of commerce would provide a restraining influence on disruptive intersectional tensions. The year before, the New Orleans Delta, in an article titled "Commerce as a Peace-Maker," had asserted that the powerful New York City merchant community was "becoming, through the influence of commercial relations . . . essentially Southern in sympathies," and as the crucial elections of 1860 approached, New Orleans merchants appealed to their northern brethren for their help in averting a constitutional crisis. At the same time, some Louisiana businessmen also hoped that interregional ties based on the Mississippi River grain trade would promote similar political cooperation between southern and western states.3 Events had acquired a terrible momentum of their own, however, and uncertainty over the future began to be adversely reflected in the marketplace. In October, Walter Cox, another Crescent City factor, advised an Arkansas planter-client about the "growing distrust in the commercial mind...

Charleston, South Carolina Tourism and the Presentation of Urban Slavery in an Historic Southern City

ABSTRACT Heritage tourism's depiction of slavery makes for an interesting study. Several years ago, David Butler published an article in this journal that was highly critical of the depiction of slavery by Southern US plantations during tours offered to visitors, indicating that these attractions “whitewashed” this aspect of their history. The current study, intended as an extension of Butler's work, focused upon urban slavery versus plantation slavery and the handling of the issue by historic antebellum houses now opened as heritage tourist attractions in Charleston, SC. Encouragingly, it was learned that these historic homes are doing a much fairer job of exposing their guests to the issue than had been noted by Butler's plantation tours.

The Profitability and Viability of Plantation Slavery in the United States

The Profitability and Viability of Plantation Slavery in the United States

'Adonis' suivi de 'Zoflora' et de documents inédits by Jean-Baptiste Picquenard, Chris Bongie

MLR, I03. I, 2oo8 239 thedrably oppressive Grenoble of his childhood after thedeath ofhis beloved mother and the liveliness ofMilan, where the adult Stendhal experiences the love thatdefies description-and brings Brulard to an abrupt end-is a poignant reminder of an af fectivecircularity that reunites thegrownman with his formerself.The contrapuntal relationship between Stendhal's inner lifeand thewider world of society and politics isunderlined, too, so thathis account of the revolutionary years of his childhood can be seen as a 'way of understanding his relationswith his family and its social milieu' (p. 64). Above all, though, Bell's admirable studymakes itclear thatStendhal's ret rospective 'Qu'ai-je donc ete?' finds itsbest response in the present tense: 'j'ecris, je me console, je suis heureux' (p. 8 i). UNIVERSITY OF BATH PETERWAGSTAFF Adonis' suivi de 'Zoflora' etde documents inedits. By JEAN-BAPTISTE PICQUENARD. Ed. by CHRIS BONGIE. Paris: L'Harmattan. 2oo6. 264 pp. E26. ISBN 978-2-296 00929-5. In Silencing thePast (Boston: Beacon, 1995) Michel-Rolphe Trouillot has argued persuasively that theHaitian Revolution was silenced from the outset as much by thosewho feared itsexplosive impact as by progressive thinkers at the time. Without a conceptual frameof reference theevents that tookplace inSaint Domingue between I79 I and I804 remained incomprehensible. Inventing a narrative for this revolution has been important inCaribbean literaturebut italso challenged writers inFrance in the nineteenth century. Perhaps thebest-known narrative of the revolution was Bug Jargal (i 826) byVictor Hugo, who neverwitnessed theevents first hand. Chris Bongie has now made available the novels that influenced Hugo, Jean Baptiste Piquenard's Adonis ( 798) and Zoflora (i 8oo). The author of the very firstnarratives of theHaitian Revolution arrived in Saint Domingue in 179 I.Bongie's carefully researched introduction states thatPicquenard took a strong position against the local royalistwhite population in their resistance to abolition and launched a stridently anti-royalist newspaper with the telling title L'Ami de L'Egalite. During his stay he was the secretary toGovernor Sonthonax but in I793 he was mysteriously imprisoned and deported from the colony.The following year Sonthonax proclaimed the abolition of slavery.Disciple ofBernardin de Saint Pierre, Picquenard performed his own silencing of theHaitian Revolution by turning away from actual historical events to locate the 'happily ever after' ending of both these fables ofEnlightenment ideals in timeless pastoral settings. Picquenard's alter egos in these tales are the selflesswhite philanthropists d'Herou ville and Justin.The often tediously sentimental andmoralizing narratives pair them with theunfailingly faithful,noble blacks Adonis and Zoflora. The protagonists and their families eventually escape thehorrors of history and plantation slavery todwell forever, in the case ofAdonis, as a 'black and white French family' (p. 8 i) in a pastoral New World setting, and in the case ofZoflora in a quiet corner of France 'farfrom noise and intrigue' (p. 226). This idealization of fraternalRepublican ideals coexists in the narrativewith an almost voyeuristic concentration on the spectacle of physical abuse and eroticized whippings. As Marcus Wood astutely points out in Slavery, Empathy and Pornography (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002): 'The spectacle of extreme physical suffering is theultimate testof the sentimental imagination, but also shades very easily into pornographic fantasy' (p. I03). Ultimately, Picquenard's narratives are as interesting for what theyomit as they are forwhat they include. NEW YORK UNIVERSITY J.MICHAEL DASH ...

African origins of rice cultivation in the Black Atlantic

The African diaspora was one of plants as well as people. Rice (Oryza glaberrima) led the diffusion of African plants and agricultural systems that shaped environment, food preferences, economies and cultural identity during the era of plantation slavery. By the eighteenth century the cereal was widely established from South Carolina to Brazil in the Americas. Grown by slaves as well as maroons, on plantations for subsistence as well as for export, rice cultivation accompanied African settlement of the Americas. This article reviews the indigenous knowledge systems that informed the cultivation of rice along the African as well as American Atlantic. With identical methods and practices, slaves from West Africa adapted a favored dietary staple to new conditions in the Americas, thereby ensuring the cereal’s enduring significance in Diaspora cuisines. In illuminating the African origins of Carolina rice beginnings, this paper aims to recover a significant narrative of the Atlantic slave trade

Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic (review)

Dwelling Place: A Plantation Epic. By Erskine Clarke. (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2005. Pp. 601. Cloth, $35.00; Paper, $20.00.)Reviewed by B. W. HigmanWhen Erskine Clarke, professor of American religious history at Columbia Theological Seminary, came to ponder possible titles for the book taking form his hands, he was mindful of the many biblical and hymnological references applied to works on antebellum plantation slavery. His plantation narrative, situated the landscape of the Georgia coast - the low country - drew creatively upon the much referenced Children of Pride (Yale University Press, 1972), massive volume of letters of the family of the Rev. Dr. Charles Colcock Jones of Liberty County. Jones (1804-1863) was Presbyterian minister, missionary to slaves and, briefly, professor at Columbia, as well as slaveholder. editor of the family letters, Robert Manson Myers, had taken his title from the book of Job. Clarke turned the pages of his Bible beyond the harshness of Job's world, finding the next book, Psalms, notion nearer to his reading of the conjoined yet segmented world of master and slave. David's familiar psalm, which saw the Lord as shepherd and concluded with the hope of the righteous that they would the house of the Lord forever (Ps. 23:6), led directly to the hymnal and the faith that in God's house for evermore my dwelling-place shall be. concept of inhabiting landscape - more particularly house and home - pulled together theology and historiography. It also referenced Heidegger's idea that the world is the house within which we dwell and Bachelard's understanding that house as home is our primary universe. Clarke must also have had mind Eugene Genovese's Roll, Jordan, Roll: World the Slaves Made (Pantheon, 1974), that drew its title from song rather than hymns ancient and modern, but similarly turned to Psalms for its epigram: The earth is the Lord's, and the fulness thereof; the world, and they that dwell therein (Ps. 24:1).Whereas Myers took as subtitle for his collection of letters A True Story of Georgia and the Civil War, Clarke chose the epic as his model. result, he said, was a composite biography: the lives of owners and owned are seen overlapping one another and being layered together complex and interdependent ways, even as they are located within larger social and cultural contexts (x). To construct his fugai version of the story, he needed to follow both the history of the writers of the letters, the slaveowning Jones family, with their view from the top, and, from below, the history of the extended, enslaved family of Lizzy Jones. Clarke knew he could not find everything he wanted the seemingly ample evidence of the Jones family letters because of their one-sidedness. Besides, the letters commenced 1854, while he started his story 1805. Clarke went to the archives, and searched through the results of archaeological, linguistic, architectural, and geographical studies and much more. Here it was sometimes necessary to argue from the general to the particular and perhaps atypical; to assume, for example, that if kitchens were typically located outside big houses separate structures this must have been the case at Liberty Hall; or to assume that the questions typically asked at slave auctions were put directly to the slaves of Liberty Hall when they were auctioned 1808. Even all of this was not enough. To understand why people had faith what they believed and to ac- count for their actions, Clarke knew he had to take series of imaginative leaps. …

Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel (review)

Reviewed by: Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel Dave Gunning John J. Su. Ethics and Nostalgia in the Contemporary Novel. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2005. vii + 226 pp. In Chinua Achebe's Anthills of the Savannah, the overwhelming violence that continues to manifest itself in the fictional postcolonial state of Kangan leads the central character, Beatrice, to exclaim, "What must a people do to appease an embittered history?" John J. Su quotes the question in introducing his discussion of Achebe's novel (142), but the query can profitably be read into the whole of his illuminating study. Su looks to explore the articulation of possible ethical positions in a broad range of recent Anglophone narratives and, through doing so, to inspire a reevaluation of the idea of nostalgia, insisting on its utility for writers who desire to engage with history and to develop meaningful critiques of the present. For the nostalgic, the past exercises a pull that can only be pacified through return. The past offers a version of the world far preferable to that experienced in the present. The ethics of nostalgia, it is [End Page 627] often assumed, must then relate to a conservative view of the world and to a resistance to the notion of progress and to the embracing of positive change. However, Su's study is concerned to argue that the mode of nostalgia might also function to allow for progressive philosophies and, in fact, to facilitate modes of critique within the contemporary novel that constitute the foundations for invigorating ethical articulation. The greatest strength of Su's study is undoubtedly its range; the monograph is a fine example of the possibilities that are offered within a genuine comparative literary criticism. He offers close reading of novels by Achebe, Toni Morrison, Ian McEwan, N. Scott Momaday, V. S. Naipaul, Jean Rhys and others. His ability to move between various postwar literatures in English while neither minimizing nor reifying their differences is exemplary and allows him to propose readings of nostalgia as an ethical approach to narrative that are duly sensitive to context yet able to gesture toward a wider sense of a literary consciousness that struggles to formulate regenerative visions of the past to inform and motivate present knowledge and actions. However, Su's book does not seek to provide a unified theory of nostalgia or to suggest that the diverse writers he examines use it in anything like a uniform way. Rather, his attentiveness to literary form, as well as context, supports an exploration of nostalgia that is alive to the multiplicity of its manifestations and the many purposes to which it may be put. This awareness of diversity is perhaps the most valuable aspect of the book; the refusal to reduce nostalgia to a homogeneous symptom of the (post)modern age allows Su's study a genuine richness of approach and avoids many of the pitfalls faced by nostalgia's critics, who almost invariably delimit the possible referents of the term. Su identifies some of the most common criticisms made of the nostalgic mode, and, while he accepts that these objections must be given adequate acknowledgement, he nonetheless is determined to identify some of their inadequacies and to insist on the complexity of nostalgia in narrative and its ameliorating possibilities. The first of these possible objections, and one that perhaps contains many of the others, relates to the complicated interface between memory and nostalgia. Within this objection, the regenerative power of memory is brought to the fore; its ability to invoke perceptions and recollections of the world that may conflict with and confound an official history grants it a privileged role in disturbing hegemonic narratives that function to silence and to affirm philosophies of oppression. But, while the authentic alternatives offered by memory enable the unsettling of totalized hegemonies, the inauthenticity of nostalgia is unable to enact such positive intervention. With regard to the [End Page 628] history of North American plantation slavery, for example, the gathering of real or imagined memory (across such diverse projects as John Blassingame's assembly of slave testimonies or Toni Morrison's Beloved) allows the representation of experiences that have been previously sidelined or ignored. Nostalgia, on...

Remarx

The author explores two metaphysical errors in the Marxist understanding of wage labor and plantation slavery. The source of the first problem is the Hegelian repertoire of concepts for a dialectical schema of history. The second problem is Orientalism, as it implies a contrast at the extremes between the wage laborer and the Asian communal slave, between freedom and unfreedom—thereby building freedom into the very definition of wage labor.

Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform Kristen Tegtmeier Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform. By Bruce Laurie. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. 328. Cloth, $65.00; paper, $23.99.) In Beyond Garrison, Bruce Laurie acknowledges the profound influence the Bay State's famous native son had on shaping the abolitionist movement in New England. Laurie urges us, however, to push through Garrison's apolitical "moral dead end" (5) and accept the claim that "politics had meaning and significance extending beyond Garrison" (9). Laurie's detailed study of the roots of antislavery politics in Massachusetts offers historians a fresh interpretation of the demographic and ideological base of the antislavery movement. Perhaps most important, however, he demonstrates how Bay State politicians linked antislavery concerns with other social reforms, such as the ten-hour movement and temperance, and thus strengthened, rather than weakened, the effectiveness of antislavery politics. Ultimately Laurie argues that "political action was an effective strategy consistent with moral rectitude and not a naïve plunge into a smarmy world of compromise and accommodation" (5). Moving beyond Garrison and his allies, Laurie points to men like Elizur Wright and Lewis Hayden and the "ordinary" citizens who fueled political abolitionism as the most successful leaders of Bay State antislavery activism. Laurie charts the evolution of antislavery politics from its origins in evangelical Protestantism and Garrisonian abolitionism to the rise and fall of the Liberty party, the creation of the Free Soil party and its coalition with Democrats, and the beginnings of the Republican party. Through biographical narratives and a thorough examination of voting behavior and demographics, Laurie demonstrates the importance of men "of the country" from "middling families" who embraced the utility of political action. Elizur Wright, Rev. Joshua Leavitt, and William S. Robinson are just a few of the many politicians, journalists, and activists who Laurie unearths from the ashes of Garrisonian abolitionism; he follows their path toward partisan antislavery vehicles like the Liberty party. He also underscores the importance of free blacks like Lewis Hayden and John Swett Rock in pressing white reformers to enact civil rights legislation. Laurie claims that "black activists were emphatically more combative" than whites [End Page 205] in their resistance to segregation and the fugitive slave law and applauds their rejection of the "non-resistance" abolitionism touted by most Garrisonians and politicos alike (253–54). In addition, Laurie makes the trenchant observation that some of the most effective antislavery politicians opposed "all kinds of slavery, wherever it exist[ed]," referring specifically to labor reform in the textile mills but also referencing the efforts of many Bay Staters to liberate their peers from the liquor bottle (147). Laurie shows that by supporting the ten-hour movement in the 1840s and the Maine Law in 1852, the supposed single-issue antislavery parties actually gained support and widened their political base. He also eschews the predominant view that abolitionism's strength was grounded only in middle-class, educated urbanites who lived in Boston. Instead, he finds some of the movement's most radical champions in industrial centers like Lowell, where working women like Sarah Bagley participated in the "cross-fertilization of abolitionism and labor reform" (145). Laurie reveals one of the weaknesses of his study by highlighting Bagley, however. Laurie features Bagley's courageous leadership of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association, but Bagley is only one of the numerous reform-minded women who undoubtedly influenced political abolitionism in the 1840s and 1850s. If Bagley could encourage voters to link wage slavery with plantation slavery, as Laurie says she did, then other women like Abby Kelley and Lydia Maria Child certainly held sway with Liberty and Free Soil men in their home state. But Laurie almost wholly neglects women's antislavery activism, an oversight that could have been forgiven had recent studies by Julie Roy Jeffrey (1998), Melanie Gustafson (2001), and Susan Zaeske (2003) not provided numerous examples of how women participated in sectional politics. While it is true that many political abolitionists eschewed the "woman question," it is not the case that antislavery women were wholly divorced from political action. Although Laurie may have underestimated the significance of female politicos, he did provide...

Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform (review)

Reviewed by: Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform Kristen Tegtmeier Oertel Beyond Garrison: Antislavery and Social Reform. By Bruce Laurie. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp 328. Cloth $65.00; paper $23.99.) In Beyond Garrison, Bruce Laurie acknowledges the profound influence the Bay State's famous native son had on shaping the abolitionist movement in New England. However, Laurie urges us to push through Garrison's apolitical "moral dead end" (5) and accept the claim that "Politics had meaning and significance extending beyond Garrison" (9). Laurie's detailed study of the roots and multiple manifestations of antislavery politics in Massachusetts offers historians a fresh interpretation of the demographic and ideological base of the antislavery movement. Perhaps most importantly, however, he demonstrates how Bay State politicians linked antislavery concerns with other social reforms, like the ten-hour movement and temperance, and thus strengthened, rather than weakened, the effectiveness of antislavery politics. Ultimately Laurie argues that "political action was an effective strategy consistent with moral rectitude and not a naïve plunge into a smarmy world of compromise and accommodation" (5). One consequence of the study is to expand the focus from only Garrison and his followers when asking why Massachusetts integrated its common schools in 1855 or why state legislators supported personal liberty laws as early as 1843. Instead, Laurie points to men like Elizur Wright and Lewis Hayden and the "ordinary" men and women who fueled political abolitionism as the most successful leaders of Bay State antislavery activism. Laurie charts the evolution of antislavery politics from its origins in evangelical Protestantism and Garrisonian abolitionism to the rise and fall of the Liberty Party, the creation of the Free Soil party and its coalition with Democrats, and [End Page 100] the beginnings of the Republican party. Through biographical narratives and a thorough examination of voting behavior and demographics, Laurie demonstrates the importance of men "of the country" from "middling families" who embraced the utility of political action. He also highlights the importance of free blacks in pressing white reformers to enact civil rights legislation; he claims that "black activists were emphatically more combative" than white ones in their resistance to segregation and the fugitive slave law and applauds their courage and leadership in their rejection of the "non-resistance" abolitionism touted by most Garrisonians and politicos (253–54). In addition, Laurie makes the trenchant observation that some of the most effective antislavery politicians opposed "all kinds of slavery, wherever it exist[ed]," referring specifically to labor reform in the textile mills but also referencing the efforts of many Bay Staters to liberate their peers from the liquor bottle (147). Laurie shows that by supporting the ten-hour movement in the 1840s and the Maine Law in 1852, the supposed single-issue antislavery parties actually gained support and widened their political base. He also eschews the predominant view that abolitionism's strength was grounded in middle-class urbanites who lived in Boston. Instead, he finds some of the movement's most radical champions in industrial centers like Lowell, where working women like Sarah Bagley participated in the "cross-fertilization of abolitionism and labor reform" (145). Laurie, however, reveals one of the weaknesses of his study by highlighting Bagley. Her story reminds us that women played meaningful roles in the political sphere, even if they could not cast their own ballots. Laurie gives Bagley her historical due as he illustrates her courageous leadership of the Lowell Female Labor Reform Association. But Bagley and her Lowell cohorts are only a few of the numerous reform-minded women who undoubtedly influenced political abolitionism in the 1840s and 1850s. If Bagley could encourage voters to link wage slavery with plantation slavery, then other women like Abby Kelley and Lydia Maria Child certainly held sway with Liberty and Free Soil men in their home state. Laurie almost wholly neglects women's antislavery activism, an oversight that could have been forgiven if recent studies by Julie Roy Jeffrey (1998), Melanie Gustafson (2001), and Susan Zaeske (2003) had not provided numerous examples of how women participated in sectional politics. While it is true that many political abolitionists eschewed the "woman question," believing it to be outside the...

Set in Stone? Statues and Slavery in London

This article examines public monuments in London and their relationship to slavery and abolition, a topic that has attracted remarkably little empirical research. It argues that a significant proportion of the individuals commemorated by public statues in London during the long eighteenth century had important links with the slave-trade or plantation slavery and that these links need to be unearthed, contextualized and made explicit. It goes on to analyse those public statues and memorials which explicitly honour British abolitionists and finds that the way they are conceived and executed has generally favoured a conservatively self-congratulatory and defensive political agenda which has consistently marginalized the experience of enslaved Africans. However, the subsequent social lives of such monuments, it is further contended, merit closer investigation since their meaning is not set in stone but can be subverted and transformed according to context. © The Author 2007. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of History Workshop Journal, all rights reserved.

Antic Histories: Narrating the Past in a Martinican Novel and a Sumatran Mock Family Memoir

Using the concept of the memory artist developed by Mary Steedly, and Ann Stoler and Karen Strassler, this paper offers an anthropology of print literature reading of a linguistically playful Caribbean novel (Patrick Chamoiseau's 1992Texaco) in relation to an equally antic and language‐obsessed historical text from Indonesia (Mangaradja Onggang Parlindungan's 1964Tuanku Rao). Contemporary Caribbean novels are generally analysed in terms of a Caribbean basin (and, sometimes, African diaspora) concept of Créolité cultural production, a field covering Creole literatures tied directly to Caribbean history, plantation slavery and the Caribbean's specific mix of Creole languages and metropolitan tongues, such as French or English. This paper, by contrast, proposes a comparative framework that reads novels like Texaco contrapuntally in relation to texts from a geographically distant, but socially resonant, other region: the former Dutch East Indies. Using close readings of passages from both books and relying on Mikhail Bakhtin's theory of the novel as a linguistically omnivorous genre, this paper argues that literatures of the former East and West Indies can be productively compared in terms of their rhetorics of memory, their language play and their similar penchant for literary hilarity.

From Garvey to Marley: Rastafari Theology. By Noel Leo Erskine. University Press of Florida, 2005. 224 pages. $39.95

Noel Erskine’s book, From Garvey to Marley, is an excellent study of the social origins and significance of the Rastafarian religion in Jamaica. It is Erskine’s ability to make clear the social significance of this religion, its roots in the disinherited and racialized lumpen stratum of Jamaican society that is really impressive. Consequently, the text is marked by an almost seamless unity between the material, socio-historical, and spiritual dimensions of Rastafarian life. As the book unfolds, the Rastafarian religion emerges as a powerful spiritual response to the dehumanization that European colonialism had imposed on this particular stratum of Jamaican society. Yet there is no way in which one can say that Erskine’s text is sociologically reductionist. The successful negotiating of this particular tension is a very important key to the intellectual achievement of this work. Erskine’s text opens with a masterful historical analysis of the roots of Rastafarian theology. He locates these roots in a tradition of religious resistance to slavery and colonialism that dates back to the period of plantation slavery in Jamaica. The first phase in this tradition of religious resistance was obeahist. It is distinguished by its use of magical practices to bring harm and misfortune to slave owners. Obeah, together with the more spiritually oriented religion of Myalism, constituted the first major phase in Afro-Jamaican religious history.

French-Caribbean Refugees and Slavery in German Protestant Maryland

The late eighteenth century saw the immigration of thousands of French refugees from France and its Caribbean colonies to the United States. An examination of one family of these refugees, Jean Payen de Boisneuf and his relatives the Vincendieres, reveals that the values that the refugees imported, such as plantation slavery and Catholicism, could be antagonistic to social norms in the regions they chose to settle.

‘Subject to control’: shifting geographies of race and labour in US sugar agroindustry, 1930–1950

This article analyses how processes of racialization and place making converged in south Florida as the region's sugar agroindustry shifted from a southern US to a Caribbean labour market. The article engages theoretically at the intersection of the literatures on the geographies of race and labour, paying particular attention to ideas about the role of the state in each. I argue that such an engagement not only enhances the collective analytical power of such approaches, but that it is also critical for understanding agroindustry labour practices in south Florida. The empirical materials used include historical documents, reports and publications of the US Government and the United States Sugar Corporation (USSC). The analysis shows how ideas of corporate paternalism and industrial managerialism promoted by USSC were melded to an agricultural enterprise embedded in the racism of the Jim Crow South and the history of plantation slavery. The contradictions between USSC's dependence on cheap labour disciplined by Jim Crow violence and its corporate paternalism would never be fully reconciled and ultimately would prove untenable. As a consequence, sugar industry investors in collaboration with state labour regulators reimagined the ideal cane worker, elaborating intraracial categories of black labour based on place of origin. As the geography of labour markets was rescaled to the international level, the primary mechanism of labour control shifted from Jim Crow to summary deportation of foreign black workers from the Caribbean. This study contributes to our understanding of how historic processes of racialization are bound together with the political and economic processes of regional agroindustrial development.

Beyond Race and Gender: Recent Works on Afro-Latin America

Beyond Race and GenderRecent Works on Afro-Latin America Kwame Dixon (bio) Afro-Latin America, 1800–2000. By George Reid Andrews . (New York: Oxford University Press, 2004. Pp. 304. $19.95 paper.) Race in Another America: The Significance of Skin Color in Brazil. By Edward E. Telles . (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004. Pp. 336. $35.00 cloth.) Lydia Cabrera and the Construction of an Afro-Cuban Cultural Identity. By Edna M. Rodríguez-Mangual . (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. 216. $59.95 cloth, $24.95 paper.) Afro-Cuban Religiosity, Revolution, and National Identity. By Christine Ayorinde . (Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2004. Pp. 320. $59.95 cloth.) Laughter out of Place: Race, Class, Violence and Sexuality in a Rio Shantytown. By Donna M. Goldstein . (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003. Pp. 378. $60.00 cloth, $27.50 paper.) Neither Enemies Nor Friends: Latinos, Blacks, Afro-Latinos. Edited by Anani Dzidzienyo and Suzanne Oboler . (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2005. Pp. 336. $85.00 cloth, $26.95 paper.) A powerful black cultural renaissance is flowering in the Americas—Afro-Latin America is on the map. The black presence in Latin America—which until recently was socially invisible as blacks were cleansed from the sociological landscape—is more visible than ever. The cultural, historical, and sociological relevance of Afro-Latin America is now the subject of vigorous examination. Across Afro-Latin America—from Cuba to Colombia to Brazil—strong, positive, black-based social movements are creating new democratic space in their respective struggles for human rights protection, social equality, and democratic reform. After centuries of being relegated to the margins of Latin American societies, black communities throughout the region are challenging social hierarchies that produce structural inequalities. In the academy, [End Page 247] the Afro-Latin contribution to art, literature, race and gender models, social movements, the environment, and history, as debated within an Afro-Latin context, is changing Latin American and Africana studies. While accurate census data are hard to come by, it is estimated that there are about 150 million people of African descent in Latin America, thus representing about one-third of the total population. 1 At present strong black movements exist in Latin American countries with varying degrees of organization. Many of these movements are fighting against police brutality, disappearances, extermination, coerced sterilization, poverty, and other systematic abuses. Positively, they are fighting for legal recognition and basic socio-political rights. In general these movements are striving for social and economic development, equality before the law, democratic reforms, human rights, and citizenship. The history of these communities, their levels of empowerment, and their social standing vis-à-vis the overall population vary from country to country; it is true, however, that these communities share many similar problems. This essay is focused on cutting edge scholarship that examines the Afro-Latin problematic from various disciplinary perspectives such as history, cultural studies, sociology, and anthropology. George Reid Andrews's Afro-Latin America is a compelling historical narrative focused on the struggles of Afro-Latin Americans (1800–2000) for democratic participation, social equality, human rights, and citizenship. Such a work is long overdue. Perhaps not since Leslie B. Rout's African Experience in Spanish America, Franklin Knight's African Presence in Latin America, and Minority Rights Group's Afro-Latin America: No Longer Invisible has anyone focused on the collective struggles and problems of Afro-Latin communities in the Americas from a comparative perspective. While there are no new or novel questions posed, the ones raised are relevant, important, and are dealt with superbly. The author provides a tight analysis and synthesis of some of the key political issues facing Afro-Latin Americans. Andrews moves from country to country with ease as he situates the various struggles of Afro-Latin communities within the fluid parameters of Latin American history. By doing so, he demonstrates his fluency in the sociological language of plantation slavery, slave resistance, caste laws, racial and gender discrimination, miscegenation or mestizaje, and Afro-Latin social movements. He mainly focuses on Argentina, Brazil, Cuba, Costa Rica, Colombia, the Dominican Republic, Haiti, Panama, Puerto Rico, and Venezuela. There are also important discussions on Mexico and Uruguay. [End Page...

Catholicism and Human Rights in Haiti: Past, Present, and Future

AbstractThis article surveys the relationship between Catholicism and human rights during four periods of Haitian history: (1) the colonial era of plantation slavery; (2) the 'antisuperstitious' campaigns from 1898 to 1943; (3) the dictatorship of François Duvalier from 1957–1971; and (4) the rise and fall of liberation theology in Haiti from the mid 1970s to the present. My primary argument is that despite a generally deplorable Catholic track record vis-à-vis human rights, there has also been a consistent ethical tributary of Catholic struggle for social justice in this poor Caribbean nation. Its strongest current fed the church-based activism that helped topple the dynastic Duavlier regime in 1986—a current that has since weakened in part due to the emergence of the Catholic Charismatic Renewal. Prospects for a liberationist renewal within the Renewal, however, could dictate the future of the Haitain Catholic Church's engagement in the struggle for human rights.

Navegando contra a corrente: o papel dos escravos e da flora africana na botânica do período colonial

O caráter revolucionário das trocas ecológicas e botânicas que sucederam a expansão marítima Européia pós 1492 é hoje largamente reconhecido. Não obstante, a literatura que estuda as trocas culturais e comerciais do período pós-Colombiano permanece omissa no que se refere à disseminação alhures de plantas nativas da África e aos meios pelos quais isto ocorreu. Para reverter esta corrente, como revela este artigo, torna-se necessário que se caracterize o papel que o comércio transatlântico de escravos teve na dispersão destas plantas, assim como a importância que os escravos africanos desempenharam na consolidação de gêneros alimentícios básicos da culinária das Américas. Ao dar destaque à diáspora africana, enquanto um fenômeno que envolve tanto pessoas quanto plantas, coloca-se ênfase nos sistemas primitivos de conhecimento africano. A expressão destes sistemas de conhecimento na coesão de comunidades inteiras de africanos reflete formas particulares de relações de poder, preferências alimentares, identidade cultural, e disputas sobre o processo de trabalho. Ao dar relevo às plantas africanas estabelecidas nas Américas, este artigo procura corrigir uma distorção comum em narrativas sobre as trocas transatlânticas: a insistência em enfatizar o papel dos europeus na disseminação de plantas a nível intercontinental e em valorizar produtos agrícolas de origem Ameríndia e Asiática em detrimento da contribuição africana. O objetivo deste trabalho é promover o resgate histórico do papel da África na botânica colonial.