Post-slavery Society Research Articles

Vulnerability and Dependence in Slavery and Post-Slavery Societies: A Historicisation of the Enslaved Children (Pon Pekpen) from the Bamum Kingdom (West Cameroon)

This article is a reflection on the history of enslaved children (Pon pekpen) in African slavery and post-slavery societies, such as the Bamum Kingdom. This traditional monarchy of the Grassfields of Cameroon, founded in 1394 by Nchare Yen, was one of the largest providers of captives transported to the Atlantic coast and used locally to meet the needs of traditional slavery. In this kingdom, slaves and their descendants, as well as enslaved peoples, represented nearly 80% of the total population. The trade of captives and servile practices left indelible traces, particularly where enslaved children were concerned. So, what did enslaved children represent in African slavery and post-slavery societies, such as the Bamum Kingdom? The aim of this study is to show that the enslaved children were the most vulnerable and dependent members of slavery and post-slavery systems. This study is based on oral, archival iconographic, written and electronic sources, using theories of social dominance and subaltern studies. It clearly shows that the vulnerability and dependence of enslaved children (Pon pekpen) made them special, weak and hopeful links in the slavery system and the persistence of slavery practices. They were mainly victims of traditional slavery and of the trans-Saharan and transatlantic slave trades. Despite the formal abolition of the slave trade and slavery between the 19th and 20th centuries, enslaved children and the descendants of enslaved people continue to be victims of a kind of subalternisation because they are usually considered second-class citizens.

After the Colonial Past: Ambivalences of Assimilation in French Guiana from 1946 to the mid-1950s

Focusing on the case of French Guiana from 1946 to the mid-1950s, this article aims to contribute to reflection on the controversial notion of assimilation. The author therefore pays attention to the trajectories of the préfet, i.e. from 1947 the highest civil representative of the state and Creole teachers, the latter providing the largest contingent of indigenous colonial officials. The article argues that, while assimilation is often perceived as a policy that aims to impose an order designed for the mainland through a universalist ideal that erases differences, in reality it did not produce uniformity and its ideal could be – and often was – negotiated under the constraints of a post-slavery society in which the elites were indeed Black.

On a Human ScaleIndividual Trajectories and Group Portraits in the History of Slavery and Post-Slavery Societies

On a Human ScaleIndividual Trajectories and Group Portraits in the History of Slavery and Post-Slavery Societies

Writing Race, Class, and Social Mobility in Post-Slavery America

Abstract: The White Trash Menace excavates a transnational Americas archive of twentieth-century fiction that grapples with the tense and tenuous ties between class privilege and whiteness that are endemic in post-slavery societies. Linking the writings of William Faulkner with a broad and diverse array of authors working across the American hemisphere, Soto-Crespo identifies a literary tradition that moves across the US nation's southern-most boundary and into the West Indies, the Caribbean coasts of South and Central America, and beyond in order to delineate the mutually imbricated histories of race and class that these regions share.

Dalit in Black America

Abstract This article theorizes the gravitas of historical solidarity through a budding Dalit-Black archive. It looks at intersections of race and caste projects within the African American public sphere through an anchoring lens of concern for Dalits in India. The Black universalist vision exercised through media encompassed Dalit ontology and body politic as queering. Through “sibling solidarity,” it expanded the conceptual identification of similar conditions as opposed to an emphasis on sameness or likeness to build solidarity. Throughout the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, untouchability and colonialism were two prisms through which the Black public sphere reorganized its internationalism, often drawing on race-caste analogies to describe the complicated patterns of post-slavery society and to imaginatively formulate potential communities across diverse geographies. The foremost Dalit figure B. R. Ambedkar was an important reference point. His moves and strategies were reported in the African American press and intellectuals and leaders drew inspiration from his works. It is through Ambedkar that archives of Dalit-Black struggles were built, and in recent years Ambedkar has resurfaced as part of a growing interest in challenging dominant narratives of solidarity between the Black elite and Indian dominant castes. By informing contemporary discourses of race and caste with their more particular histories, we might build new social imaginaries founded not on an identification as sameness but rather through a feeling of relation/relatedness with another.

Of Rights and Riots: Indenture and (Mis)Rule in the Late Nineteenth-Century British Caribbean

Abstract This article builds on the work of Walter Rodney, Thomas Holt, Gad Heuman, Diana Paton, and others who have investigated the complexities of post-slavery societies in the Caribbean. It addresses the dynamics of resistance and the re-working of legal and cultural processes that took place in the half-century following emancipation. Whereas indenture plays a tertiary role in these previous analyses, it is the central concern of this article. Through a close examination of the 1872 killing of five indentured Indian workers on the Devonshire Castle plantation, I analyse how the institution of indenture restructured the interrelation of the colonial state, labour control and violence in British Guiana. I consider the killings not only in the context typically employed by Caribbean historians to examine race, labour and violence—that of slave rebellions and African-Caribbean revolts in the post-emancipation era—but also in relation to the 1857 Indian Rebellion and in the context of an Empire-wide narrative that justified violent state repression against colonised peoples. Although this is largely a microhistorical account, I hope to provide some useful avenues of analysis by which indenture (primarily approached until now through the lens of social history) can be more broadly engaged as an institution that catalysed a new relationship between the state and labour management, that fostered new (or, at least, revised) discourses of the role of violence in colonialism, and that generated new patterns of response and resistance among subalterns.

Iklan Aesthetics in Niger: Identity and Adornment from Servility to Self-agency

<i>Iklan</i> Aesthetics in Niger: Identity and Adornment from Servility to Self-agency

“Justice Has a Compensation”: The Ex-Slave Public and Federal Pensions, 1890–1935

This article examines the grassroots activities of poor, elderly ex-slaves and their descendants for reparative justice in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through petitions to government officials and membership in ex-slave organizations, these Black men and women publicly reimagined “ex-slave” as a patriotic, hard-working, and entitled status worthy of government benefits already extended to Civil War veterans and their widows. Their campaign for a federal pension opened a new sphere of African American politics during an era of disenfranchisement that demonstrated how the most vulnerable people in a postslavery society could organize for reparative justice. These unlikely activists faced challenges from government agencies, politicians, and other Black leaders who sought to relegate slavery and the experiences of formerly enslaved people to the margins of a modern US society. Their efforts to cohere an “ex-slave public” has, nevertheless, inspired subsequent generations to seek reparative justice.

“MR. PERPETUAL MOTION” ENFRENTA O JIM CROW: ANDRÉ REBOUÇAS E SUA PASSAGEM PELOS ESTADOS UNIDOS NO PÓS-ABOLIÇÃO

Resumo No verão de 1873, o jovem engenheiro afro-brasileiro André Rebouças chegava à cidade de Nova York. Segundo ele, conforme anotou no seu diário, a sua viagem era a “de alguém que vai estudar e aprender”. Porém, a passagem de Rebouças pelos Estados Unidos também foi marcada por repetidos episódios de racismo e segregação na Região Norte daquele país durante o período conhecido como Reconstrução. Com base no seu diário e matérias de jornais estadunidenses, este artigo vai utilizar a passagem de Rebouças pelos Estados Unidos para discutir as políticas de segregação racial vigentes naquele país, conhecidas como Jim Crow. Além disso, meu objetivo é situar Rebouças na condição de viajante negro, analisando sua condição racial, de classe e gênero para compreender as suas subjetividades e especificidades do seu lugar por diferentes sociedades pós-escravistas.

Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction by Nicholas Barreyre

Reviewed by: Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction by Nicholas Barreyre David K. Thomson Gold and Freedom: The Political Economy of Reconstruction. Nicholas Barreyre. Charlottesville. University of Virginia Press, 2015. ISBN 978-0-8139-3746-6, 336 pp., cloth, $39.50. Any sort of scholarly discussion of Reconstruction must contend with Eric Foner's definitive Reconstruction: An Unfinished Revolution (1988), now nearly thirty years old. Foner's work masterfully weaves together Republicans' political attempts to assert a new order on the South and the social dynamics at play in a postslavery society. Others have subsequently delved into this narrative always placing race relations at the forefront—and rightly so. That said, some scholars in more recent memory have tried to examine this Reconstruction story by moving into other realms, be it Heather Cox Richardson's excellent West from Appomattox (1998) detailing a more nationalist view of Reconstruction or Gregory Downs's very recent After Appomattox [End Page 422] (2015) examining the larger repercussions of a de facto guerrilla conflict that plagued the South following the Confederate surrender in 1865 until 1871. Nicholas Barreyre's Gold and Freedom can be said to be another work in this vein. Barreyre takes another look at the crucial period of Reconstruction but does so, as the subtitle implies, through the primacy of political economy. Barreyre repeatedly mentions "the spatial dimension of American politics" as a means through which to understand what the author describes as sectionalism, that is, "the geographical expression of antagonistic regional interests in a national framework" (4). Barreyre's chief objective is to demonstrate how much Reconstruction was a national dynamic. By looking at Reconstruction through a more northern lens and the conflict between the Northeast and West (our modern-day Midwest) as illustrative of the role of economic sectionalism in the larger narrative of Reconstruction, Barreyre contends we can have a firmer grasp of this critical period. Economic issues centered around tariff and monetary policy widened the fissure between the two regions of the North to the point that it dramatically affected larger questions surrounding Reconstruction. Race relations, questions over citizenship, and larger issues over southern reform all came to be part of the larger economic debates. Indeed, the author contends that to more properly understand this vital period in American history, it is necessary to understand Reconstruction politics in conjunction with political economy. Reconstruction politics and policies from a political economy standpoint revolved around the triumvirate of bonds, currency (greenbacks), and tariffs. Barreyre understandably dedicates most of his work to examining the rise of Civil War bonds and the rise of a national fiat currency in greenbacks. While both measures were implemented during the war as a means for the federal government to fund the Civil War (to the tune of nearly $3 billion just between these two measures), it was the debates over a return to the gold standard and possible resumption of bonds in greenbacks that generated extensive political debate. These proved to be the larger fiscal issues of Reconstruction that subsequently took on sectional implications within the North. As Barreyre rightly contends, "the sectional idea embodied a political significance that transcended its geographical definition" (104). These debates had national repercussions on larger Reconstruction policies, and it is in this examination that Barreyre is at his strongest. While Barreyre touches on the sectional and national issues of Reconstruction policies on larger notions of political economy, the work could certainly have benefitted from additional voices of the people at large. If this was indeed as divisive a set of issues as Barreyre details, the voices of the greater northern (and indeed southern) populace certainly were commenting in local, regional, and national papers, as well as petitioning members of Congress and writing to individuals at the Department of the Treasury. While the author at times does reference some newspapers commenting on the issue and details extensively the political debates occurring on Capitol Hill, these everyday voices would have further reinforced how these issues affected citizenry throughout the country. Similarly, drawing in the international dimension of these debates—especially as the United States developed an international presence in the Reconstruction era with a Treasury Office in London—would...

The Long, Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race, and Law in the American Hemisphere

The Long, Lingering Shadow: Slavery, Race, and Law in the American Hemisphere

Emancipation’s Encounters: The Meaning of Freedom from the Pages of Civil War Sketchbooks

The sketchbooks of Civil War-era soldiers and sailors offer a rich and largely untapped opportunity to explore one point of view in the complex drama that was emancipation. As complex as letters and diaries, the drawings of self-taught artists capture the questions that surrounded many sorts of encounters between Union men and enslaved and formerly enslaved people throughout the South. These images are striking for what they generally omit. Absent are representations based upon popular caricature techniques. Instead, sketch artists most often used their talents to carefully render black Americans as individuals rather than parodies. They also omitted antislavery’s visual tropes of punishment and the auction. These autonomous figures suggested a future for black Americans free from the express direction of whites. Most significantly, sketchbook images vividly expose the questions Union men held about who African Americans were and who they might be after slavery and with freedom. Their questions were about freedom, citizenship, and how the body politic of a post-slavery society might be organized. Their answers are more difficult to categorize. At their most insightful, sketchbook images reflect the multi-layered ambivalences that cast a shadow over the freedom claimed by African Americans. Depictions of African American dignity and competence are interwoven with images of ridicule and racism. Their visually rendered vignettes were part of personal reflections, camaraderie and curiosity in the field, and the raw materials of memory in the postwar decades. Emancipation’s encounters were one subject that few sketch artists would miss.

A herança musical da escravidão

A escravidão colocou em contato povos de diferentes origens em situações radicalmente novas, em um contexto de violência e dominação extremas. Apesar disso, tais contatos, a despeito da brutalidade que os fundava e das profundas desigualdades então engendradas, resultaram também em processos de mistura e criação cultural que produziram, especialmente, novas formas de expressão musicais. Este artigo busca analisar, de uma perspectiva comparada, processos sociais de criação musical no contexto de sociedades escravagistas ou pós-escravagistas, especialmente o surgimento de novas formas musicas nos Estados Unidos e na África do Sul.

Memory as reparation? The politics of remembering slavery in France from abolition to the Loi Taubira (2001)

This article charts the parallel evolution of the memory of slavery and the political status of French people from the vieilles colonies in relation to the problem of justice and reparation in a post-slavery society. By examining legal texts and political discourse produced at three critical junctures in the history of France's overseas departments: the 1848 abolition, the 1946 law of departmentalization and the 1998 national commemoration of the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in French territories, the author situates the current will to remember in the context of a history in which slavery has been, in the words of one prominent Caribbean writer, a crime without process. The aim is to demonstrate the ways in which both the official recollection and the forgetting of slavery have been instrumental to attempts on the part of the French state and of the framers of departmentalization to resolve or to displace the question of France's possible obligations legal, ethical, material and symbolic towards those it once enslaved, as the political status of these groups has changed over time. The French case is considered with respect to current theoretical debates around questions of memory, law and reparation of gross human rights violations.

Gregory Mann. Native Son: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006. ix + 334. Photographs. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $84.95. Cloth. $23.95. Paper. - Raffael Scheck. Hitler's African Victims. The German Army Massacres of Black French Soldiers in 1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xiii + 202 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $65.00.

Gregory Mann. Native Son: West African Veterans and France in the Twentieth Century. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2006. ix + 334. Photographs. Maps. Notes. Bibliography. Index. $84.95. Cloth. $23.95. Paper. Raffael Scheck. Hitler's African Victims. The German Army Massacres of Black Soldiers in 1940. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006. xiii + 202 pp. Photographs. Bibliography. Index. $65.00. Cloth. In 2004, a multimedia exhibition opened in Toulon celebrating the sixtieth anniversary of the liberation of the soudi of France by the Free French. In fact, the vast majority of these troops were the men of the Tirailleurs Senegalais from West and Equatorial Africa, together with contingents from North Africa, Indo-China (and General Patch's American Seventh Army). Yet despite the major role they played in the liberation of France, African soldiers had not been permitted to march in either the Bastille Day parades or the celebrations marking the liberation of Paris-thus perpetuating the de Gaulle myth that France was liberated by the French (with a little help from the Americans and the British). That the forgotten colonial soldiers were to be unexpectedly commemorated in Toulon sixty years later was a result of the challenge of the National Front in Le Pen's stronghold in France's own Deep South. Uncompromisingly entitled Nos Liberateurs, the exhibition was a poignant opportunity to remind the liberated of what they owed to those who had arrived from the colonies to free them. Having apparently slipped off the pages of history once France shed its empire, the Tirailleurs Senegalais finally achieved the recognition they deserved for the vital part they played in overthrowing the racist German state. Back in the dark ages of the 1980s, when I began my doctoral research, very little had been published on the Tirailleurs-and virtually nothing by African authors. Historians of modern Africa tended to emphasize resistance to colonialism; by implication, this registered disapproval of those who collaborated with colonial power-and, of course, the men that actually carried out the colonial conquest of Africa. If, as it is often claimed, history is tainted by being written by the victors, then what happened to the African soldier? Twenty years on, all this has changed. New books on the soldiers of Algeria, Burkina Faso, and Tunisia have appeared in the last two years alone; there is also a burgeoning comparable literature, refreshingly no longer restricted to the memoirs of retired British officers and colonial civil servants, on the soldiers of Anglophone Africa. Does all this mean the field is getting too crowded? Clearly not, for the two additions to the corpus here under review both (in different ways) make important contributions to our knowledge of the Tirailleurs Senegalais. Gregory Mann's Native Sons clearly commenced with a strong focus on Mali, but inexorably became concerned with a full sweep of the tirailleur [African colonial soldier] experience-although he does not explore in any detail the tirailleur in combat. Raffael Scheck's Hitlers African Victims, by contrast, focuses mercilessly on the matter of German inhumanity, notably toward captured African soldiers in that brief period during the collapse of the army in June 1940; but what Scheck forfeits in scope, he makes up in intensity. Native Sons takes the reader seamlessly from recruitment to retirement and thence from the politics of pensions to the politics of the connection. The reader will readily recognize Mann's determination to describe the situation in starkly realistic terms, without making concessions to any preference for palatability rather than accuracy. Mann reminds us early in the work that like many of its neighbors, contemporary Mali is as much a post-slavery society as a post-colonial one; the relationship between the Malian soldier and slavery is a prominent theme throughout the book, for many of Mali's former soldiers were drawn from the lower strata of society. …

Dispensers, Obeah and Quackery: Medical Rivalries in Post-Slavery British Guiana

This paper examines the ambiguous place of medical assistants-dispensers-in a post-slavery British Caribbean colony, British Guiana, from the end of slavery in the 1830s to the early twentieth century. Although the latter were crucial to the functioning of the colonial medical system, local physicians resented them, complaining about the economic threat they posed and at times condemning them as quacks. These attacks were part of a wider discussion about the composition of the medical profession and the role of medical auxiliaries in colonial society, and to an extent, they echoed debates conducted in other jurisdictions in this period. But in the British Caribbean, this discussion was significantly different. There, long-standing views about obeah-an Afro-Creole medico-religious practice-as a particularly dangerous and uncivilised type of quackery was part of the discursive context. That those participating in this debate included African-descended physicians whose arrival in the medical profession was recent and contested demonstrates the vexed and complex nature of professionalisation in a post-slavery society.

Black Women Writers and the Trouble with Ethos: Harriet Jacobs, Billie Holiday, and Sister Souljah

The assumption that black women lack a positive and respectable ethos is a historical and contemporary problem. To address the problem with ethos, I turn to Aristotle's Rhetoric to foreground an analysis of ethos. Then I examine Harriet Jacobs's slave narrative and the autobiography of Billie Holiday and Sister Souljah, respectively, to illustrate the difficulty they faced as they attempted to redefine an ethos of immorality to an ethos of respectability in their narratives. As each text demonstrates, acquiring a positive ethos becomes problematic given that a classical model such as Aristotle's excludes their lived realities and experiences as black women living in a slave and post-slavery society.

Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (review)

Reviewed by: Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World ed. by Pamela Scully and Diana Paton Rachel Sarah O’Toole Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World. Edited by Pamela Scully and Diana Paton. Durham: Duke University Press, 2005. In this expertly edited volume, contributors employ gender analysis to argue that enslaved women and men underwent distinct emancipation experiences while gender inequities increased in postemancipation societies. Providing provocative case studies from the Caribbean, the southern U.S., and coastal Africa, the tightly crafted essays reveal how racial hierarchies, patriarchal authorities, and labor relations shaped the structures of slavery and the processes of abolition. If slavery denied enslaved women’s femininity and usurped enslaved men’s masculinity, emancipation included opportunities to express desired gendered relations. Bridget Brereton describes how freed married women and mothers withdrew from fieldwork while families enrolled children in school following emancipation in the British Caribbean. Yet, as freedpeople embraced a model of respectability with the woman at home and the man working for wages, ex-slaves did not copy elite models but rejected monogamous Christian marriage. Likewise, Ileana Rodríguez-Silva shows how freedwomen employed the Liberal rhetoric of gendered family obligations to negotiate domestic benefits including a private life denied to male workers. Yet, by bargaining themselves into the category of worker and employing ideals of domesticity, freedwomen “consequently eroded their political legitimacy as workers” (207) idealized as male. Adding to the limited choices available to freed women, Martin Klein and Richard Roberts show how a mostly female enslaved population achieved freedom in French West Africa by obtaining divorces and reuniting with their families. Indeed, gendered expectations of freedpeople and ex-slaveholders shaped economic strategies before and after emancipation. Yet, the strength of the book lies in the related arguments that the process of abolition radically reconfigured gender inequality in postemancipation societies. Sue Peabody shows how republican ex-soldiers in the French Caribbean reintegrated into society through their roles as husbands and fathers. The male warrior ideal became central to Haitian nationalism the as nineteenth century brought increased codification of separate gender spheres. Furthermore, social conservatism grew in post-slavery societies where elites and nonelites, whites and blacks, strove for a Christian heterosexual family structure that necessitated policing women’s public activities. Pamela Scully shows how emancipated men in the Cape colony (South Africa) gained citizenship and the patriarchal authority of manhood while married freedwomen lost the right to make independent contracts. Still, as Hannah Rosen indicates, discourses regarding interracial sexuality in the postemancipation battles over U.S. citizenship were part of white men’s resistance to black men’s claims to patriarchal status. Embedded in liberal ideals of freedom were imposed domestic roles for women with male head of household as Roger A. Kittleson and Carol Faulkner demonstrate how abolitionists mobilized representations of virtuous and moral femininity to present white women as the rescuers of slaves and the caretakers of former slaves. Freedom, therefore, was intertwined with new articulations of dependence. Most compellingly, the essays illustrate how race and gender were simultaneous factors. Mimi Sheller demonstrates that in Jamaica, freedmen reconstructed masculinity along with blackness to exclude freedwomen and indentured Chinese laborers from claims to citizenship. Even as Afro-Jamaican men employed Christian discourse of a patriarchal family to include themselves into British discourse of “active masculine citizenship” (82), they developed a working-class masculinity in contrast to “both parasitical white upper-class masculinity and dependent indentured masculinity” (91). Likewise, Sheena Boa shows how poor women seized street activities to subvert codes of “proper” femininity in urban St. Vincent and mock authority figures who attempt to regain public spaces by deriding poor women for inability to achieve European gender standards of propriety. Recognizing the hegemony of British moral codes, Melanie Newton argues that elite nonwhite men asserted themselves as public leaders through philanthropy that required “domestication” (226) of women’s activities in order to counteract white representations of free women as sexually transgressive. Further tangling race with gender, Marek Steedman employs a complex case of white violence against a black couple in postemancipation Louisiana to demonstrate how “southern white men perceived a threat to their own social standing in the ability of freedpeople...

A Portion of the People: Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life

In the year 1800, South Carolina was home to more Jews than any other place in North America. As old as the province of Carolina itself, the Jewish presence has been a vital but little-examined element in the growth of cities and towns, in the economy of slavery and post-slavery society, and in the creation of American Jewish religious identity. The record of a landmark exhibition that will change the way people think about Jewish history and American history, A Portion of the People: Three Hundred Years of Southern Jewish Life presents a remarkable group of art and cultural objects and a provocative investigation of the characters and circumstances that produced them. The book and exhibition are the products of a seven-year collaboration by the Jewish Historical Society of South Carolina, the McKissick Museum of the University of South Carolina, and the College of Charleston. Edited and introduced by Theodore Rosengarten, with original essays by Deborah Dash Moore, Jenna Weissman Joselit, Jack Bass, curator Dale Rosengarten, and Eli N. Evans, A Portion of the People is an important addition to southern arts and letters. A photographic essay by Bill Aron, who has documented Jewish communities around the world, brings the story into the present.

Pastimes and politics: culture, community, and identity in post-abolition urban Zanzibar, 1890-1945

HISTORY Laura Fair. Pastimes and Politics: Culture, Community, and Identity in Post-Abolition Urban Zanzibar, 1890-1945. Athens: Ohio University Press, 2001. 370 pp. Maps. Photographs. Figures. Notes. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. $59.95. Cloth. $24.95. Paper. In his classic account of Zanzibar nationalism (Zanzibar: Background to Revolution [Princeton, 1965]), Michael Lofchie assumed that before World War II the island's poor had no political consciousness. Laura Fair's study of urban popular culture makes a major contribution by undermining that assumption, demonstrating that before the postwar era of party politics, the poor thought and argued about diverse issues of social and economic justice. Fair focuses mainly on leisure activities such as sport, music, and fashion. Invoking James Scott, she proposes that such pastimes can be shown to have served as weapons of the weak: not only forums in which the poor engaged in debates with each other, urban patricians, and their colonial masters, but also tools with which they effected social change (8-9). Fair succeeds in supporting the second of these propositions only occasionally, but it is difficult to imagine how one might have documented that colonial social structures were changed by the songs of the taarab master Siti binti Saad or by the clothes worn by lower-class women. Her most satisfying accomplishment in this regard comes in the chapter on the groundrent strikes of the 1920s, which had a lasting effect in limiting the commercialization of urban landholding. Fair's greater achievement lies in her support of the first proposition and in documenting the social commentaries of the urban poor. Keeping faith with Scott, she argues that these commentaries constituted alternative discourses,... trenchant critiques of the state that undermined colonial authority (25-26). One might demur that this is placing the bar a bit high; Scott himself never demonstrated convincingly the subaltern's penetrating vision. Yet in showing how ordinary Zanzibaris sang about the corruption of colonial bureaucrats, gossiped about the unfairness of European soccer referees, or protested the injustice of landlords, Fair opens a valuable window on popular political consciousness before the war. Fair interprets early colonial Zanzibar as a postslavery society. This is a useful perspective that enables her to make sense of many of the urban poor's struggles to shape new identities via leisure activities. …