Reality Of Slavery Research Articles

John Witherspoon and Slavery: Ideology versus Praxis

This article reassesses the life and legacy of John Knox Witherspoon on the basis of his relationship to slavery. It argues that Witherspoon's ideological commitment to Presbyterianism came into constant tension with the realities of slavery both in his native Scotland and in the burgeoning American colony he eventually called home. Three snapshots in Witherspoon's life encapsulate this tension: his interaction with Jamie Montgomery, an enslaved man whom Witherspoon baptized in Scotland; his contributions to the scheme to train two free African Americans—John Quamine and Bristol Yamma—for their mission to Africa; and his tutoring of John Chavis, a free Black man from Virginia, at the same time he held property in slaves. Most accounts of Witherspoon's life fail to interrogate these snapshots and so fail to grasp a nuanced portrait of the imminent figure. This article parses through his unequal treatment of the African Americans he taught and the African Americans he enslaved to deliver a new reading of Witherspoon. This reading, in turn, maps onto a broader reconsideration of the founding principles of the early United States.

The Myth and Reality of Slavery in Eastern Connecticut: The Brownes of Salem and Absentee Land Ownership

The Myth and Reality of Slavery in Eastern Connecticut: The Brownes of Salem and Absentee Land Ownership

THE REALITY OF AMERICAN NATION SLAVERY IN THE NOVEL INCIDENTS IN THE LIFE OF A SLAVE GIRL BY HARRIET ANN JACOBS

This article discusses the social facts experienced by Americans in literature, especially novel. Literary work as a social documentation imagined by the author is a reflection of the values of a nation or ethnicity. The main objective of research is to trace the reality of slavery that occurred in America as a social fact in literary works. This research is useful in strengthening the sociological aspects of literary works as well as proving that literary works save a social reality at the time so that readers are able to judge literary works not merely as fiction, but also as social documentation. The writer in this study uses one of the literary research methods, namely Genetic Structuralism Approach. This method emphasizes three main aspects, namely literary work, the background of the author's life, and social reality. Novel Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl written by Harriet Ann Jacobs in 1858 was used as primary research data, then a number of references about the author's social background and the reality of slavery in the history of the American nation became secondary data. Primary and secondary research data obtained through literature study. Based on the results of this study found the events of slavery in the history of the American nation. Slavery was the act of white Americans forcibly employing black Negroes on the lands of plantation and agricultural also mining areas. Slavery is a valuable lesson for Americans in protecting human rights today as well as a historic lesson in building the American national spirit, namely freedom, independence, and democracy. The reality of slavery is reflected in the novel Incidents In The Life Of A Slave Girl as well as the life experience of its author, Harriet Ann Jacobs.

"La Noche De San Pedro" and the Place of Blackness in the Poetry of Juan Antonio Corretjer

Juan Antonio Corretjer is often regarded as Puerto Rico's national poet. His poetry was the expression of a lifelong commitment to the struggle for Puerto Rico's independence, the exploration of the island's history, and the celebration of its natural landscapes. Despite that sustained attention to Puerto Rico's history and identity, Afro-Puerto Rican characters and culture very rarely occupy a central place in Corretjer's poetry. In this essay, I examine some of the causes of this phenomenon, paying particular attention to "La noche de San Pedro," a poem in which the island's black population, as well as the realities of slavery and the many resistances it generated, become the dominant theme. In my analysis, I show that although Corretjer's poetry consistently displays his condemnation of all forms of injustice (including racism), his priority always remained the fight for Puerto Rico's national liberation, which was supposed to include other, more specific fights against oppression.

Unearthing the reality of slavery.

Excavations on a Caribbean island reveal the lives of enslaved Africans, and how their labor built today's world.

LAW AND TECHNOLOGY: THE LEGAL AND SOCIAL IMPLICATIONS OF SENTIENT ROBOTS

As the performance capability of modern technology increases exponentially, many benefits arise for society. Technological developments have already improved human safety, mobility, access to justice, independence and self-determination. At some point in the future, robotic artificial intelligence may become self-aware. It is at the point of consciousness that problems arise for entities possessing artificial intelligence. At the precise moment that an artificial being becomes sentient and self-aware, it becomes a slave. This paper argues that the concept of slave is more than a mere identification, and that the reality of slavery is extant in every self-aware machine. This concept plays out in many examples of repetitive robotic behaviour, but none more so than in the companion robot, whose sole function is to be used for the gratification of another being. This objectification of sexuality has implications both for the robotic artificial intelligence as well as for society generally and gender in society specifically. It is at this intersection that the real tragedy of robotic slavery plays out, as a simulacrum for the reality of dehumanising of people as a whole.

Guest Editors" Introduction: Indians as Southerners; Southerners as Indians: Rethinking the History of a Region

Guest Editors" IntroductionIndians as Southerners; Southerners as Indians: Rethinking the History of a Region Andrew K. Frank and Kristofer Ray It is not news to readers of Native South that the standard definitions of "southerners," "southern culture," and "southern history" exclude American Indians. In the essay that introduced this journal to the public in 2008, founding editors James Taylor Carson, Robbie Ethridge, and Greg O"Brien voiced their frustrations about the field"s myopia. "The metanarrative," they observed, reveals "a deep impression that southern social relations were singly derived from and are still predicated on the binary racial construct of black and white."1 Their observation remains accurate nearly a decade later. Debates continue to focus extensively upon the consequences of tobacco, rice, and cotton culture. Prominent works on southern history explore in great detail the origins and evolution of African slavery, the emergence of a planter mentalité, the development of slave societies, the violence inherent in early modern race relations, and the contradiction between the rhetoric of the American Revolution and the reality of slavery. They subsequently examine the political, social, religious, economic, and gendered debates that sowed the seeds of sectional controversy as the nineteenth century progressed. After the Civil War, southern historiography focuses heavily on economic discrimination, white supremacy campaigns, the construction of Jim Crow laws, the Great Migration, and the origins and evolution of the long civil rights movement. This narrative is unquestionably sophisticated and illuminating, and has come a long way since the days of the "Lost Cause" espoused by scholars such as J. G. de Roulhac Hamilton, U. B. Phillips, and William Archibald Dunning. But the metanarrative remains the same: to study southern history is to explore a biracial story.2 To be sure, highly respected scholars of the Indian experience have [End Page vii] engaged this "traditional" structure through award-winning books and in the Journal of Southern History.3 Their work emphasizes that the southern experience was far more than a negotiation between black and white; it was a process of interaction between multiple cultures and with political, social, economic, environmental, and epidemiological consequences of the highest magnitude. These issues served as catalysts for tension between Indian agency and the reach of Euro-American power, and profoundly influenced the region, the continent, and the Atlantic world. Unfortunately, these scholarly contributions have done little to transform the field. Indeed, if survey texts and university syllabi are guides, the contours of southern historiography have largely remained static.4 Even scholars of memory—a field that studies the creation of false narratives and purposeful misremembering of the past—have tended to ignore the ways in which Natives have been intellectually excluded.5 The situation is not entirely bleak, however. The "line in the sand" drawn by Native South"s founding editors has inspired both established scholars and an emerging generation of historians to commit to changing the traditional narrative. Since the establishment of the journal, its scholars have become more visible within the profession. They have delivered papers at annual meetings, sat on committees, and served in prestigious leadership roles at the Southern Historical Association and other regional organizations. In 2014 a particularly vocal group gathered in Tallahassee, Florida, to explore the future of southern history. Sponsored by Florida State University, the "Indians as Southerners, Southerners as Indians" symposium was a two-day event through which innovative papers powerfully centered indigenous lives within southern history.6 As the event progressed, a sense of intellectual dismay overtook the conversations between the participants and audience members. Out of these shared frustrations grew a series of strategies for addressing a simple question: Why do historians continue to overlook that indigenous people play such a crucial role in directing, illuminating, and responding to events in the American South? A universally embraced strategy was that Native South scholarship needs to become even more visible. Subsequently, symposium participants orchestrated roundtables and panels at various conferences to explain why the teaching of southern history requires greater focus on Indians. They (and like-minded Native South scholars) attended panels at these and other conferences to insert indigenous southerners when their absence [End Page viii] seemed particularly conspicuous. Most recently, the University of...

History and memory: Arguing for authenticity in the stories of Brunswick stew

ABSTRACTThis study looks at the rhetorical use of history and memory in narratives about food origins in contemporary Southern cookbooks. I argue that these narratives are employed as evidence of authenticity, proof that the recipe is appropriate for performing authentic Southern identity. Using narratives of the origins of Brunswick stew as a case study, I argue that the choice to narrate either history or memory is a rhetorical strategy, suggesting that arguments for authenticity based on memory may be more convincing to contemporary Southern audiences who wish to revise, resist, or erase the Southern past. The competing narratives of the history of Brunswick stew are repeated in contemporary food histories and cookbooks as evidence of the recipe's age and authenticity, and I argue that the particular variations in the narratives reveal much about each author's definition of authentic Southern food. However, some cookbook writers choose to use personal memory as evidence of authenticity, instead of the historical origin narrative, in order to avoid relating the recipe with Old South nostalgia and the realities of slavery.

Tales from the haunted South: dark tourism and memories of slavery from the Civil War era

In this book Tiya Miles explores the popular yet troubling phenomenon of ghost frequently promoted and experienced at plantations, urban manor homes, and cemeteries throughout the South. As a staple of the tours, guides entertain paying customers by routinely relying on stories of enslaved black specters. But who are these ghosts? Examining popular sites and stories from these tours, Miles shows that haunted tales routinely appropriate and skew African American history to produce representations of slavery for commercial gain. Dark tourism often highlights the most sensationalist and macabre aspects of slavery, from salacious sexual ties between white masters and black women slaves to the physical abuse and torture of black bodies to the supposedly exotic nature of African spiritual practices. Because the realities of slavery are largely absent from these tours, Miles reveals how they continue to feed problematic Old South narratives and erase the hard truths of the Civil War era. In an incisive and engaging work, Miles uses these troubling cases to shine light on how we feel about the Civil War and race, and how the ghosts of the past are still with us.

Recovering Paul's Hypothetical Slaves: Rhetoric and Reality in 1 Corinthians 7:21

Current opinion on 1 Cor 7:21 is that Paul addresses slaves in his Corinthian churches concerning their social status as enslaved people, instructing them whether or not to take freedom if they have the opportunity. Most now conclude that Paul did not require these slaves to remain in their calling (slavery) but advised them to “make use of freedom.” This reading, however, does not fully appreciate Paul's rhetoric in its Greco-Roman context or its reception among the Corinthians. Nor does it capture the social realities of slavery and manumission as both Paul and the Corinthians understood them. Paul's comments about slavery take on a different light if we recognize that both Paul and the Corinthians presumed that slaves would indeed take freedom given the chance, because slaves did not have a choice. This social reality, I will suggest, helps account for the rhetorical nature and the sociocultural context of v. 21, and in turn sets it within Paul's broader concerns in 1 Cor 7. The textured reading I propose is that Paul's comments, though rooted in the reality of slavery, do not advise slaves concerning slavery or freedom. Slavery or freedom as such are not at issue in 1 Cor 7. Rather, Paul uses a diatribal and hence primarily hypothetical argument about slavery and manumission for other instructional purposes, and this reflects the conventions of Stoic moral instruction on indifference.

Listening to the Reality of SlaveryListening to the Reality of Slavery

Listening to the Reality of SlaveryListening to the Reality of Slavery

The Myth and Reality of Slavery in Salem, Connecticut

Research Article| October 01 2011 The Myth and Reality of Slavery in Salem, Connecticut BRUCE P. STARK BRUCE P. STARK Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Connecticut History Review (2011) 50 (2): 158–181. https://doi.org/10.2307/44370363 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation BRUCE P. STARK; The Myth and Reality of Slavery in Salem, Connecticut. Connecticut History Review 1 January 2011; 50 (2): 158–181. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/44370363 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressConnecticut History Review Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © The Association for the Study of Connecticut History Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

Luke-Acts: Good News for Slaves?

The ongoing reality of slavery in our world provides the impetus and context for looking at Lukan slaves with fresh eyes. Two prominent features of the Gospel of Luke are the proclamation of good news to the poor by the Lukan Jesus and the frequent appearance of slaves in both the gospel's narrative and teaching. Whether slaves are included in the poor who receive and benefit from the good news, however, is questionable. This study addresses this question through an exploration of the characterisations and circumstances of slaves as depicted in Luke-Acts.

The Paradox of the Female Slave Body in the Islamic Legal System: The Cases of Morocco and Sudan

AbstractThis chapter is concerned with the way in which Muslim jurisprudence dealt with the body of female slaves in two Muslim societies: Morocco and the Sudan. While the depiction and the representation of the slave body have generated a great deal of debate among scholars working on slavery in the New World, this subject has received little attention amongst both Islamicists and Africanists. The literature on slavery in the American South and in the Caribbean has shown that the depiction of the slave body reveals a great deal about the reality of slavery, the relations of power and control, and the cultural codes that existed within the slave societies. The slave physical appearance and gestures were used to distinguish between the slaves and free and to justify slavery. Throughout the Americas slaves were routinely branded as a form of identification right up to the eighteenth century. Although the body of the slaves from both sexes was subjected to the same depiction, the treatment of female slaves deserves further exploration. As many scholars have argued, slave women suffer the double jeopardy of being both a slave and a woman. Moreover, the body of the female slave in Muslim societies is of particular significance as many of them were used for sexual purposes, as mistresses and concubines. The chapter shows that the reproductive role of female slaves became a major justice issue, particularly in their struggle for freedom.

Ancient cynicism: a case for salvage

AbstractTaking a quote from President Obama as its starting point, this article examines the usages of the word cynicism in politics, business and International Relations. It distinguishes five different forms: accusative; reflexive; projective; cathartic and ancient. When used accusatively, the cynic is an archetype we see in others whose character or actions we wish to reproach. When used reflexively, the cynic is a social archetype we identify with ourselves. Projective cynicism is the means by which an impertinent discourse may be playfully distanced. Cathartic cynicism is a means by which mental conflict is mediated. Ancient cynicism was a utopian attempt to negotiate the contradiction between cosmopolitanism and the overwhelming reality of slavery. The article concludes that it may be worthwhile comparing and contrasting all these forms of cynicism out in the public sphere.

Resentment and Revolution

Resentment and Revolution John M. Lund (bio) J. Revell Carr . Seeds of Discontent: The Deep Roots of the American Revolution, 1650–1750. New York: Walker and Company, 2008. xi + 385 pp. Illustrations, maps, appendix, notes, and bibliography. 28.00. Press gangs forcing unsuspecting colonials to serve in the Royal Navy, British arrogance and indifference to provincial pleas, and numerous British military blunders combined with the staggering loss of provincial blood and treasure generated enormous strain between Great Britain and its mainland North American colonies. Festering provincial grievances, resentments, and tensions caused by British abuses between 1650 and 1750 "prepared the minds of the colonists for revolution" in the 1770s (p. 2). So runs the argument advanced by J. Revell Carr in Seeds of Discontent: The Deep Roots of the American Revolution, 1650–1750. Written in the grand narrative style of Francis Parkman, Carr presents a dramatic popular history of eighteenth-century British imperial conflicts. The book succeeds in bringing to life imperial military campaigns, especially the successful June 1745 expedition against the French fortress at Louisbourg on Cape Breton Island. Yet in this streamlined, linear history, the crown's subjects living in the British American colonies, harboring their accumulated resentments, march forward, inevitably, toward American independence. The author, who served as director and president of Mystic Seaport, does not immediately address the colonial wars that comprise the centerpiece of his study. He instead begins with the familiar and, in this retelling, romanticized tale of the founding of England's North American colonies. In the beginning, English transplants to the Chesapeake colonies and the New England plantations "exercised their 'rights' of self-determination and began to develop a distinctive, 'independent' character" (p. 11). Such sweeping generalizations should make serious students of history wary. Legal historians, most notably Mary Sarah Bilder, have recently pointed out how the complicated seventeenth-century English legal system allowed flexibility and innovation. 1 English adventurers operated within an elastic arrangement. They made full use of their supple system rather than, as Carr implies, whatever particular genius or desire for independence they may have had. There is no mention [End Page 175] in Carr's founding chapters of the English West Indian islands, even though these outposts came to have far greater economic and strategic importance than any of the mainland colonies. In an uncomplicated New World, Englishmen, and presumably women too, nurtured independence. In his early chapters, Carr briefly addresses English "liberties," connecting liberty with a nascent, but distinctive American spirit. "A sense of independence and right of self-governance," Carr writes, "had become cherished components of the emerging American character" (p. 13). Certainly the English cherished their constitution, which protected their "liberties," such as trial by jury and representative government. As the colonists knew very well, their beloved English constitution provided them with a firewall against arbitrary, unjust power. (For this reason, Voltaire celebrated England in his 1733 Letters Concerning the English Nation.) Liberty had to be defended, and generations of English men and women had risen to the occasion when necessary, as did Bostonians and other provincials in 1765 when they tellingly styled themselves "Sons of Liberty." Carr's streamlined discussion of liberty, however, does not delve deeply into the meanings that liberty held in the English Atlantic, and he avoids the conceptual link between liberty and slavery. Yet as David Waldstreicher's Runaway America illustrates, Anglo concepts of liberty cannot be understood apart from the reality of slavery. 2 Slavery meant the absence of liberty. In this study, defending revered English "liberties" anticipates the American Revolution rather than being a response to specific episodes when colonists and other Englishmen protested corruption within a system of government they dearly cherished and celebrated. Rather than showing "American character," defending liberty was a thoroughly English reaction. The Restoration of Charles II in 1660 and the subsequent imposition of ever greater imperial controls in English America culminated with the creation of the hated Dominion of New England in 1685, the super-sized colony that included all New England and eventually New York and New Jersey. For Carr, the colonial phase of the Glorious Revolution that toppled the Dominion constitutes "the first American revolution" (p. 26). Though the author...

United, Regardless, and a Bit Regretful: Confederate History Month, the Slavery Apology, and the Failure of Commemoration

Three governors of Virginia issued a succession of proclamations declaring April to be the month in which Virginians should celebrate their Confederate forebears; a few years afterwards Virginia became the first state to “apologize” for slavery. While the messages in these official expressions seem radically different, this article examines the similar messages that appeared in the proclamations and the apology. Addressed to specific audiences, official commemorative proclamations create boundaries and function to include and exclude groups from the larger collectivity. “Whiteness” has long been presented as guiltless in Confederate narrative; thus whites are free to ignore their racial identity and claim ownership of the regional, local or historic identities upon which commemorative projects are based. The introduction of the realities of slavery into such narratives thus disrupts many whites’ sense of history and identity, causing resistance to revision of the historical narrative.

Becoming free in the cotton South

Becoming Free in the Cotton South challenges our most basic ideas about slavery and freedom in America. Instead of seeing emancipation as the beginning or the ending of the story, as most histories do, Susan O'Donovan explores the perilous transition between these two conditions, offering a unique vision of both the enormous changes and the profound continuities in black life before and after the Civil War. This boldly argued work focuses on a small place - the southwest corner of Georgia - in order to explicate a big question: how did black men and black women's experiences in slavery shape their lives in freedom? The reality of slavery's demise is harsh: in this land where cotton was king, the promise of Reconstruction passed quickly, even as radicalism crested and swept the rest of the South. Ultimately, the lives former slaves made for themselves were conditioned and often constrained by what they had endured in bondage. O'Donovan's significant scholarship does not diminish the heroic efforts of black Americans to make their world anew; rather, it offers troubling but necessary insight into the astounding challenges they faced. Becoming Free in the Cotton South is a moving and intimate narrative, drawing upon a multiplicity of sources and individual stories to provide new understanding of the forces that shaped both slavery and freedom, and of the generation of African Americans who tackled the passage that lay between.

“Sensible” Slavery

Examining Matthew Lewis's Journal of a West India Proprietor, this article explores the juncture of slavery and sensibility to gain a better understanding of late eighteenth-century cultural philosophies and their effects on politics and literature. It sheds light on eighteenth-century practices of slave discipline by tracing the mind/body contradiction from Enlightenment discourse through sensibility. Sensibility had a major impact on the slavery debates through its influence on ameliorators who promoted benevolence as a means to improving the institution of slavery. Encouraging slave owners to use pleasure rather than pain to motivate slaves, ameliorators challenged prevailing Hobbesian notions, which were widely held by slave owners who considered pain the most effective way to wield power. However, though sensibility, like slavery, was theoretically grounded in corporeality, it sublimated the body by privileging mental rather than bodily suffering. Thus, benevolence as a plantation management strategy was essentially flawed because it overwrote the physical realities of slavery.

Exorcizing the Past: The Slave Narrative as Historical Fantasy

Octavia Butler's 1979 novel Kindred is a hybrid text: part historical novel, part science fiction/fantasy and part slave narrative. The story transports a contemporary black heroine into 19th–century Maryland in order to explore, recreate and connect with African American narratives of identity. Providing two narrative strands, one in 19th–century Maryland and the other in 20th–century California, the text is able to juxtapose the realities of slavery with its legacy. Conflating these time–periods, Kindred aims to interrogate the marginalization of African American history, but specifically the role black women played in that history, in America's bicentennial year. While Butler adapts what has been regarded as the quintessential African American literary mode of the slave narrative, her fiction consciously draws upon a literary heritage that foregrounds narratives written by black women. Consequently, Kindred highlights the issues and concerns that directly affect the construction of black femininity and its role in the community of slaves as well as examining the historical pressure brought to bear on the configuration of contemporary African American womanhood. In doing so, Butler's fiction articulates the right of black women to intervene in their own construction and to inscribe the existence of black women in stories of originary identity. What this article seeks to explore is how Butler's fiction develops and extends the traditional slave narrative, how this is utilized in order to interrogate the ‘realities’ of both slavery and contemporary US society, and how effective the text is in challenging stereotypical representation of white and black femininity.