Slave Body Research Articles

Varieties of Southern History: New Essays on a Region and Its People

Introduction The Social Sciences and Southern History Stories of Enslavement: A Person-Centered Ethnography from an Eighteenth-Century Virginia Plantation by Rhys Isaac Texts, Texture, and Context: Toward an Ethnographic History of Slave Resistance by Charles Joyner Reading the Slave Body: Demeanor, Gesture, and African-American Culture by Shane White and Graham White Deadly Amusements: Spectacle Lynchings and Southern Whiteness, 1890-1940 by Grace Elizabeth Hale Who Were the Victims of Lynching? Evidence from Mississippi and South Carolina, 1881-1940 by Terence Finnegan Southern History through Life History Thomas Thistlewood Becomes a Creole by Trevor Burnard Doing God's Service: Adelbert Ames and Reconstruction in Mississippi by Warren A. Ellem Frank Cushing and W.E.B. Du Bois: Religion, Social Science, and Traveling South in the Late Nineteenth Century by Sam Elworthy Race, Gender, and Modernism: The Case of Lillian Smith by Bruce Clayton Labor in the New South Aspects of Modernization in the Loray Mill Strike of 1929 by John Salmond Coming into the Real World: Southern Textile Workers and the TWUA, 1945-1951 by Timothy J. Minchin Bibliographical Essay Index

A two-level iterative FEM technique for rigorous solution of non-linear interaction problems under large deformations

Various problems arising in applied mechanics involve interaction between two bodies having separation, bonding, re-bonding and slip at the interface. Simple FEM models assume one of the two extremes, “bonded interface” or “smooth interface”. Alternative spring models have been developed to model slip, shear strength and dilation. These models are applicable for small deformations and coincident nodes at the interface. The paper describes a rigorous solution for the problem which does not sacrifice the simplicity of the FEM approach. In this study the deformations are assumed to be large enough to change the geometry of the problem and the interface is assumed to be a frictional adhesive one with a coulomb failure criterion. The technique examines the interaction of two bodies, namely the slave and master bodies. It simulates frictional slip, separation, bonding and re-bonding of the slave body with respect to the master allowing for large deformations and non-matching nodes at the interface. The proposed solution is iterative where two levels of iterations are used. The first iteration procedure is used to satisfy equilibrium and to deal with the geometrical non-linearity, while the second is used to satisfy the interaction conditions at the interface. The proposed technique is illustrated with a number of test problems of varying complexity. These demonstrate that the approach performs well for problems involving interaction of two bodies under large deformations.

Louisiana Subjects: Power, Space and the Slave Body

Louisiana Subjects: Power, Space and the Slave Body

Touching liberty: abolition, feminism, and the politics of the body

In this striking study of the pre-Civil War literary imagination, Karen Sanchez-Eppler charts how bodily difference came to be recognized as a central problem for both political and literary expression. Her readings of sentimental anti-slavery fiction, slave narratives, and the lyric poetry of Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson demonstrate how these texts participated in producing a new model of personhood, one in which the racially distinct and physically constrained slave body converged with the sexually distinct and domestically circumscribed female body. Moving from the public domain of abolitionist politics to the privacy of lyric poetry, Sanchez-Eppler argues that attention to the physical body blurs the boundaries between public and private. Drawing analogies between black and female bodies, feminist-abolitionists use the public sphere of anti-slavery politics to write about sexual desires and anxieties they cannot voice directly. Sanchez-Eppler warns against exaggerating the positive links between literature and politics, however. She finds that the relationships between feminism and abolitionism reveal patterns of exploitation, appropriation, and displacement of the black body that acknowledge the difficulties in embracing 'difference', in the nineteenth century as in the twentieth. Her insightful examination of issues that continue to be relevant today will make a distinctive mark on American literary and cultural studies.

Fleshly Ghost and Ghostly Flesh: The Word and the Body in Beloved

FLESHLY GHOSTS AND GHOSTLY FLESH: THE WORD AND THE BODY IN BELOVED David Lawrence University of Pennsylvania In William Faulkner's Light in August, Byron Bunch reflects that no matter how much a person might "talk about how he'd like to escape from living folks . . . it's the dead folks that do him the damage ."1 The damage done by dead folks in Toni Morrison's Beloved points to the central position accorded to memory, the place where these dead folks are kept alive, in this novel of futile forgetting and persistent remembrance. Operating independently of the conscious will, memory is shown to be an active, constitutive force that has the power to construct and circumscribe identity, both individual and collective, in the image of its own contents. Sethe's "rememory," in giving substance to her murdered daughter and to the painful past, casts its spell over the entire community, drawing the members of that community into one person's struggle with the torments of a history that refuses to die. In portraying the capacity of the past to haunt individual and community life in the present, Beloved brings into daylight the "ghosts" that are harbored by memory and that hold their "hosts" in thrall, tyrannically dictating thought, emotion, and action. The stories of the tightly woven network of characters culminate in a ritualistic sacrifice of Beloved, a ceremony that frees the community from this pervasive haunting. The supernatural existence of Beloved, who acts as a scapegoat for the evils of the past, threatens the naturalized set of inherited codes by which the community defines itself. The climactic scene shows how a culture may find it necessary in a moment of crisis to exorcise its own demons in order to reaffirm its identity. Morrison first exposes, however, the workings of the internal mechanisms that have generated the need for exorcism in the first place. A deeply encoded rejection of the body drives the highly pressurized haunting in Beloved. The black community of Cincinnati is caught in a cycle of self-denial, a suffocating repression of fundamental bodily needs and wants. The inability to articulate such embodied experience, to find a text for the desiring body within communal codes, obstructs self-knowledge and does violence to the fabric of community. Woven into the dense texture of the novel, into what Morrison has called the "subliminal, the underground life of a novel,"2 the interaction of language and body underlies the collective con- 190David Lawrence frontation with the ghosts of memory. In her representation of this psychic battle, Morrison fashions word and flesh as intimate allies in the project of constructing a domain in which body and spirit may thrive. The exorcism of Beloved, an embodiment of resurgent desire, opens the way to a rewording of the codes that have enforced the silencing of the body's story, making possible a remembering of the cultural heritage that has haunted the characters so destructively. In the end, the communal body seems ready to articulate a reinvigorated language that, in returning to its roots in the body, empowers its speakers to forge a more open, inclusive community. In a novel that examines the dehumanizing impact of slavery, one might expect that the white man, the monstrous enforcer of slavery 's brutality, would haunt the black community. The haunting occurs , however, within a social structure relatively insulated from the white community and, in its most intense form, springs from the "rememory" of an ex-slave in the form of one victimized by slavery. There is nothing mysteriously threatening about whites; on the contrary , "white folks didn't bear speaking on. Everybody knew."3 Of course, whites "spoke on" their slaves tirelessly, and, in the exploration of political power in the novel, ownership of body and authorship of language are shown to be insidiously linked. Under the regime of white authority, the "blackness" of the slave's body represents for "whitefolks" an animal savagery and moral depravity that, ironically, ends up remaking them in the image of their own fears: Whitepeople believed that whatever the manners, under every dark skin was a jungle. Swift unnavigable waters, screaming baboons, sleeping snakes, red gums ready for sweet...

Medical practices in the French West Indies: master and slave in the 17th and 18th centuries.

In these pages, the example of Guadeloupe is used to evaluate the power of coercion exercised by French slavery on the body of the slave afflicted by illness. The prohibition of African healers and their practices aimed to prevent the expression of the slave's body through its own medicine. Conversely, by wishing to forcibly promote their own order, the white masters were able to impose — as far as this was possible — their own vision of the body and of its relationship to nature and to society.