Slave Community Research Articles

Of Snakes and Men: Toni and Slade Morrison's and Pascal Lemaître's Adaptations of Aesop in <i>Who's Got Game?</i>

Toni and Slade Morrison and Pascal Lemaitre's reworkings of three of Aesop's fables, collected in a combined edition under the title of Who's Got Game? in 2007, were first published as individual children's books in 2003, each bearing a main title relating to the ancient original but framing its title significantly as a question: Ant or the Grasshopper? Lion or the Mouse? or the Snake? first of these is probably the best known of the fables attributed to Aesop. second, which reflects upon the use of power and clemency, the code of gratitude, and the situational definition of power, has been adapted in many versions. Poppy or the Snake?--a seemingly simple narrative that takes as its hypotext (or originary text) (1) a lesser-known fable called the The Countryman and the Snake (2)--concerns ill-judged acts of charity and the inadvisability of bringing snakes into your home, or as it is phrased in Ben Edwin Perry's translation of Babrius and Phaedrus, the tenet that To Pity the Pitiless Is Folly (187). context and motivations for the series, which will eventually comprise retellings of six of Aesop's fables, can be examined in relation to four key considerations. First, Morrison became well acquainted with the classics as a part of her formal education; Marc C. Conner comments that by the time began teaching in the late 1950s, she had studied Latin for four years, taken degrees in classics and literature, and written a Master's Thesis that employed structures of Greek tragedy to understand the work of Faulkner and Woolf; thus, any critical view that would blind itself to her training in a western, even classical background is misguided (xii). (3) Second, as Anne Lake Prescott notes at the end of her review of Annabel Patterson's Fables of Power (1991), is an important fable tradition in America derived from a black slave community born and bred in the briar patch of oppression and enforced double meanings (548-49). One could expand this point by observing that there is an affinity between African tales--which frequently involve animals such as Ananu or Anansi the Spider--and the instructive tales of the Aesopian tradition; and indeed the latter may well have been drawn, to a greater or lesser extent, from vernacular tales circulated in various parts of the ancient world. (4) Third, Aesop, who according to legend was born a slave and was deformed in body, represents an instance of the wise outsider gifted with trenchant yet subtly couched powers of expression. (The Roman writer Phaedrus, a less-noted fabulist who set Aesop's tales in verse, was also an ex-slave). (5) Fourth, the status of fables is curiously mixed, moving between the realms of the tract, particularly adapted to the instruction of children and easily taken up by those with vested ideological interests, (6) and the multivalent text which is open to diverse applications and interpretations. (7) Aside from the enduring influence of fables within European and world culture, English translations and adaptations of Aesop and other fabulists are innumerable; these have been variously dress'd, as the title of Bernard Mandeville's translation of Jean de La Fontaine's Fables puts it, in familiar and contemporary language for the readier understanding of their readers, and sometimes they may be directed to new, more open, or divergent frameworks--as indicated by the title of Lloyd W. Daly's 1961 volume, Aesop without Morals. Fables, with or without stated morals, are still very much alive in our time. This essay examines how the fine line between the moral and moralistic is handled in the Morrisons' and Lemaitre's reworkings; how the authors draw upon different source materials and mythic associations; and how the stories are directed to the interests of the contemporary child reader in such a manner as to sustain inquiry and provoke interrogation (not just in their endings, but throughout). …

A Inserção dos Africanos na Zona da Mata – Minas Gerais, Século XIX

O artigo aborda a inserção dos africanos em duas propriedades da Zona da Mata Mineira antes e após o fim do tráfico transatlântico de cativos em 1850. Percebe-se a importância deste mecanismo de reprodução da mão-de-obra para a manutenção/ampliação do contingente escravo. Detectamos que os escravos adquiridos por esses senhores eram, em sua maioria, advindos de uma determinada região do continente africano, e que estes africanos eram, majoritariamente, homens em idade produtiva (típicos de regiões de plantation), tendência que transparece mesmo após o fim do tráfico e em outras regiões da província mineira. A nosso ver são as tradições e memórias desses cativos que influenciaram a formação das comunidades escravas daquela região durante o século XIX.

Caminhos do cativeiro: a experiência de escravos e libertos em Castro (1800-1830)

Este artigo analisa a configuração de uma comunidade escrava em Castro, São Paulo, durante as três primeiras décadas do século XIX. Busca compreender o que significou para esses cativos viver em uma vila voltada quase que exclusivamente para a criação e o comércio de animais. Para isso, foi utilizado como principal corpo documental inventários post-mortem de proprietários de escravos e, além deles, Listas Nominativas de Habitantes e outros documentos oriundos do poder judiciário. Através desta documentação, foi possível seguir a trajetória de alguns escravos e examinar aspectos da constituição de suas famílias e de seus vínculos com a vida agro-pastoril. Suas experiências semelhantes, fosse conduzindo tropas, cuidando do gado ou buscando uma vida melhor fora da vila de Castro, após receberem sua liberdade, fizeram com que configurassem uma comunidade escrava com ideais, interesses e visões de mundo particulares.

Memórias sociais de juventude entre quilombolas do norte do Espírito Santo

Buscando um conjunto etário que tivesse vivido sua juventude entre as populações remanescentes de quilombos do norte do Estado do Espírito Santo e ainda na presença da Mata Atlântica, esta pesquisa teve como objetivo principal identificar as memórias sociais de juventude nessas comunidades, relacionando as representações desse passado compartilhado às mudanças ambientais e sociais que recentemente impactaram a sua região. Foram entrevistadas 11 pessoas, homens e mulheres, com idade entre 40 e 61 anos. Os dados, trabalhados através da técnica de análise de conteúdo, demonstraram um hiato na relação dos participantes com as gerações mais novas que não havia sido experimentado com relação aos seus ascendentes; bem como as implicações dessa transformação socioambiental que, ao atuar em estruturas arcaicas de constituição territorial e temporal das comunidades, funcionou como agente primordial tanto do distanciamento entre as gerações quanto da seleção das formas mnêmicas mais relevantes.

Lorenzo Dow Turner: Father of Gullah Studies. By Margaret Wade-Lewis. (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2007. xxvi, 323 pp. $44.95, ISBN 978-1-57003-628-6.)

This is the first biography of Lorenzo Dow Turner, an important figure in the first substantial wave of African American scholars trained in U.S. graduate schools. Born in North Carolina in 1890 to a family with deep roots in the state's antebellum free black population, Turner attended Howard University and earned a Ph.D. in English from the University of Chicago. Inspired by his encounter with Gullah-speaking students during a stint of summer school teaching in South Carolina in 1929, Turner retrained himself in midcareer as a linguist and thereafter focused his research on the language and culture of the African diaspora, especially in the Sea Island region where Gullah was still spoken. The most important product of this effort was Africanisms in the Gullah Dialect (1949), which was substantially completed early enough to be an important source for Melville J. Herskovits's influential The Myth of the Negro Past (1941). When Turner began his work on Gullah, prevailing opinion saw it as a degraded variety of English, suitable for an ignorant and childlike race. Turner quickly concluded that Gullah was rather a Creole language, with its own rules of grammar and based considerably on the languages that enslaved blacks had brought from West Africa. He thus placed himself firmly on the side of Herskovits and others who were arguing for a substantial African influence on African American life and culture, in opposition to those such as E. Franklin Frazier who insisted that the middle passage and slavery had virtually wiped out all such influences. Turner's influence on historians can be seen, for example, in Charles W. Joyner's Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community (1984).

Legalizing identities: becoming black or Indian in Brazil's northeast

Related black communities claim different ethnoracial identities based in laws. Anthropologists widely agree that identities - even ethnic and racial ones - are socially constructed. Less understood are the processes by which social identities are conceived and developed. Legalizing Identities shows how law can successfully serve as the impetus for the transformation of cultural practices and collective identity. Through ethnographic, historical, and legal analysis of successful claims to land by two neighboring black communities in the backlands of northeastern Brazil, Jan Hoffman French demonstrates how these two communities have come to distinguish themselves from each other while revising and retelling their histories and present-day stories.The invocation of laws by these related communities led to the emergence of two different identities: one indigenous (Xoco Indian) and the other quilombo (descendants of a fugitive African slave community). With the help of the Catholic Church, government officials, lawyers, anthropologists, and activists, each community won government recognition and land rights, and displaced elite landowners. The positive outcome of their claims demonstrates that authenticity is not a prerequisite for identity. French draws from this insight a more sweeping conclusion that, far from being evidence of inauthenticity, processes of construction form the basis of all identities and may have important consequences for social justice.

A New Look at the African Slave Trade in Puerto Rico Through the Use of Parish Registers: 1660–1815

Our knowledge of the volume of slave traffic as well as the geographic origin and ethnicity of slaves introduced into peripheral areas of the Americas, such as the former Spanish colony of Puerto Rico, is limited. Information contained in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century parish baptismal, marriage, and death registers enables us to locate and identify Africans in a number of island communities, including San Juan. Drawing upon data culled from parish registers this study seeks to broaden our understanding of the slave trade to Puerto Rico in the years 1672 to 1810. Few slaves were brought in either from Africa or from elsewhere in the Americas to Puerto Rico, and the supply of these was erratic and limited. Although they were small in number, there was considerable diversity in the geographic origins and ethnicity of African arrivals, with individuals from West and West Central Africa predominating. For the most part, these shared a relatively homogenous culture and a greater similarity insofar as the language(s) they spoke. Such commonalities facilitated integration and promoted social cohesion among the newly arrived Africans as well as those already present in the host population. It also facilitated their integration into what was emerging as a unified Afro-Puerto Rican slave community.

Slave Communities and Pottery Variability in Western Brazil: The Plantations of Chapada dos Guimarães

In the region of Chapada dos Guimaraes, Western Brazil, planters relied heavily on slave labor during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In this article, we examine the locally produced pottery found on slaves contexts in five rural sites of this region. Based in data from probate inventories and the pottery decorative variability we suggest that slaves used decorated pottery to express cultural and social differences.

Ética do desempenho e programas de transferência de renda: implicações para as populações tradicionais

This article argues that the devaluation of traditional cultures in Brazil is due to the process of modernization exported from the central economies to the periphery. This process gives excessive emphasis to the ‘work ethic’ related to valuable, competitive and disciplined work. This ethic guarantees social and civilizing recognition, not only in the economic sphere, but above all in other dimensions of social life. The power of such ethic determines the non-recognition and the lack of self-esteem of the traditional populations. To contribute to this debate, this article suggests the implementation of a Basic Income, which can contribute to the preservation of the culture of these peoples, in particular the remaining former slave communities (quilombolas), as these populations and people do not have a lifestyle based on modern production of economic surplus, competition and the organization of production units. The implementation of the Basic Income may help these people maintain their traditional ways of life.

The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery (review)

Reviewed by: The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery Randy M. Browne (bio) The Reaper’s Garden: Death and Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery. By Vincent Brown. (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008. Pp. x, 340. Cloth: $35.00.) Caribbean slave societies were notoriously deadly. African captives who survived the middle passage and a period of “adjustment” in colonial [End Page 336] Jamaica could expect to live less than two decades; between one quarter and one half of all enslaved children born on the island died before reaching their first birthday (24, 54). Whites also faced a grim reality: Throughout the eighteenth century, the death rate for the British in Jamaica exceeded 10 percent (13). Over the past several decades, works such as Richard B. Sheridan’s Doctors and Slaves: A Medical and Demographic History of Slavery in the British West Indies, 1680–1834 (Cambridge, UK, 1985) and Joseph C. Miller’s Way of Death: Merchant Capitalism and the Angolan Slave Trade (Madison, WI, 1988) have done much to document and explain these staggering mortality rates. Other historians have emphasized the role of this demographic catastrophe in inhibiting the maintenance of African cultural practices and in disrupting social life. In The Reaper’s Garden, however, Vincent Brown takes a different approach. How, he asks, did “death shape daily life” (6)? The result is a gripping, provocative, and broadly compelling analysis of the role of death in shaping cultures, social practices, and political discourses. The “extravagant death rate in Jamaican society” should not be seen “as an impediment to the formation of culture,” Brown argues: It was actually “the landscape of culture itself, the ground that produced Atlantic slavery’s most meaningful idioms” (59). Exploring a broad range of themes, including burial rites, inheritance, missionary activity and conversion of blacks to Christianity, slave resistance, the antislavery movement in England, the judicial treatment of enslaved peoples, and efforts to construct a collective memory of slavery, Brown concludes that “death in Jamaica destroyed individuals, while generating a society” (127). In this deeply researched and imaginative book, Brown shows how death in Jamaica had different consequences for three interrelated groups: enslaved blacks, white Jamaicans, and even British people on the other side of the Atlantic. “For all its economic success as an outpost of empire,” Brown explains, “Jamaica routinely destroyed its black people” (49). And yet, instead of stifling the cultural creativity of the enslaved, this grim reality was the very basis of the culture they formed. The social crises caused by the slave trade, for example, forced captives to form fictive kinship bonds onboard slave ships. In Jamaica, these “ ‘shipmates’ were treated as brothers and sisters” (44–45). Those who died while enslaved on the island also profoundly shaped the culture of Jamaican slavery. Burial ceremonies were central rituals of “social communion,” Brown argues; they functioned to reinforce bonds of “kinship and friendship” and helped establish social order in volatile, dynamic slave communities (63, [End Page 337] 73). Funerals were also important occasions for white Jamaicans, who actually died at a higher rate than blacks in the eighteenth century (13). Like blacks, whites used funeral ceremonies as opportunities to demonstrate the “social and financial status of the deceased,” which made burial “a civil and economic event [as much] as it was a personal and familial one” (82). After burial, the dead continued to influence the world of the living through the bequeathing of property, which was an attempt “to pass down their hopeful vision of the social order, beyond the limit of their lifetimes” (92). Enslaved Jamaicans managed to wrest “near-legal rights” of inheritance from the Jamaican plantocracy—a victory, Brown argues, that should “caution historians and others against viewing ‘social death’ as an actual state of being” (125, 127). In one of the most provocative sections of The Reaper’s Garden, Brown discusses “necromancy,” or “the conjuration and manipulation of the dead for the purpose of shaping actions and events” among the living (130). He shows, for example, how slaveholders tortured slaves convicted of various crimes and mutilated their bodies in an effort to intimidate and control the enslaved population. Convicted rebels and...

Tribe or nationality? The Sudanese diaspora and the Kenyan Nubis

The settlement of Sudanese soldier colonists throughout British East Africa was a legacy of colonial expansion and pacification. These settlements were developed from the institution of military slavery, which was marked by a close association of slave soldiers with the state and the isolation of military slave communities from the general populace. But once pacification was complete new policies representing new interests made the presence of these non-indigenous Africans redundant. Terms of settlement altered after World War One, and the right of Sudanese, or Nubis, to remain in their original settlements came under attack. The largest, and most problematic, Sudanese colony in Kenya was the former military encampment of Kibera, on the edge of Nairobi. Sudanese claimed that land had been granted to them as a community ‘in perpetuity’ in lieu of a pension, and in recognition for their services to the Crown. The resulting struggle to retain land ownership in Kibera drew on ideas inherent in the old institution of military slavery and was presented in terms of a reciprocal loyalty between the Sudanese and the British Crown and Empire, rather than the specific legal jurisdiction of the Kenya Colony government. These arguments for a special status within the Empire have since been turned against the Nubis to deprive them of citizenship and land rights in post-independence Kenya.

Courtship and Love among the Enslaved in North Carolina. By Rebecca J. Fraser. (Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 2007. x, 137 pp. $50.00, ISBN 978-1-934110-07-2.)

Courtship and Love among the Enslaved in North Carolina is a slim volume that traces how enslaved people negotiated the intimate relations of courtship and marriage within the confines of the nineteenth-century slave-labor system. Rebecca J. Fraser combines Works Progress Administration narratives, family papers, ex-slave narratives, and folklore with integrated historiography to provide an accessible analysis of the role of courtship in the daily contestations and experiences of slavery. The book is divided into thematic chapters that explore various aspects of courtship in slave communities. Chapter 1 begins with a longue durée overview of Euro-American stereotypes of Africans and African Americans as largely oversexual, animalistic, and childlike—in short, supposedly incapable of higher emotions such as love. Chapter 2, one of the most analytical chapters, traces the competing spheres of influences (slaveholders, families, friends, churches) on individuals’ romantic relationships. Chapter 3 moves more squarely to the experience of courtship, looking at the “semi-autonomous social world” of nighttime frolics, corn shucking, and other carved-out occasions for enslaved people to socialize away from slaveholder regulation (p. 64). Chapter 4 continues the focus on enslaved lives to look at courtships as part of a narrative of resistance, suggesting that intimate relationships provided opportunities for male performance of honor and courage. Chapter 5 briefly examines the significance of wedding rituals that served both to emulate and resist white gender norms.

Joining Places: Slave Neighborhoods in the Old South. By Anthony E. Kaye. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. x, 365 pp. $34.95, ISBN 978-0-8078-3103-8.)

For over three decades, historians have posited the existence of a slave “community,” loosely defined as a cultural space in which slaves could sufficiently escape from masters’ power and maintain a distinct and autonomous culture. Of course, such an escape could only be temporary, as the title of George P. Rawick's pioneering book From Sundown to Sunup (1972) suggests. But its existence allowed slaves or, perhaps more accurately, their historians, to construct a world of black agency within the crucible of slavery. Anthony E. Kaye begins Joining Places by asking how slaves conceived of the world beyond themselves and their families. Kaye argues that slaves (or ex-slaves in post-emancipation testimony) most commonly spoke of themselves as living, not in a community, but within a neighborhood. Nor were these neighborhoods the homogenous slave communities that scholars have imagined. For one thing, neighborhoods defined actual geographic spaces, bounded by adjacent plantations, and nearby towns, roads, and rivers. Moreover, they contained whites as well as blacks, either of which might be friends or foes in a given situation. By reconceptualizing slaves as living within complex, shifting, historically and spatially specific “neighborhoods,” Joining Places suggests a promising way out of the increasingly unproductive historiographical impasse between slaves’ agency and masters’ power.

Resistance and Collaboration: Political Strategies within the Afro-Carolinian Slave Community, 1700-1750

Previous articleNext article No AccessResistance and Collaboration: Political Strategies within the Afro-Carolinian Slave Community, 1700-1750Perry L. KylesPerry L. Kyles Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by The Journal of African American History Volume 93, Number 4Fall 2008Ending the Transatlantic Slave Trade: Bicentennial Research, Reflections, and Commemorations A journal of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/JAAHv93n4p497 Views: 76Total views on this site Copyright ASALHPDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World (review)

Reviewed by: Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World Lillie Johnson Edwards Rebecca’s Revival: Creating Black Christianity in the Atlantic World. By Jon F. Sensbach. Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2005. The title of Sensbach’s book denotes that he has written a biography of a Caribbean woman, Rebecca Protten who, he asserts, was probably “the first black woman ordained in western Christianity.” (7) Rebecca led a quite remarkable and extraordinary life as a free woman of color, household servant, teacher, and evangelist on St. Thomas, as a Moravian Church leader in Germany, and as a Moravian missionary on Africa’s Gold Coast. Sensbach tackles a far more ambitious agenda that transcends, but includes, Rebecca’s life story. He explores her singular evolution as a woman who encountered distinct, yet overlapping religious, cultural and political worlds. He also examines how African-American consciousness emerged out of the spiritual revolution of their conversion to evangelical Christianity and women’s ascendancy as transmitters and interpreters of this consciousness. Sensbach demonstrates how Rebecca embodied that process of spiritual, cultural and political transformation and how she served as the leader and conduit through which much of that transformation occurred from the 1730s to the 1760s. In doing so, Sensbach adroitly poses an essential question that scholars have pondered for several decades. What role did Christianity play in creating a space for African humanity to survive, thrive and assertively challenge established political, social, cultural, economic and gendered hierarchies? Sensbach answers this question in this history of the African and Creole Moravians on St. Thomas Island who emulated the New Testament martyrs and in doing so, asserted African-American religious authority. Furthermore, he concludes, “St. Thomas proved to be the model for the spread of evangelical religion through New World slave communities.” (240) Sensbach weaves an intricate tale that spans four continents (the Americas, Africa and Europe) and ultimately transforms our understanding of the entire Atlantic world of the early eighteenth century. He relates the horrific history of slavery on St. Thomas and the Moravian mission to the island’s black population—slave, free and Creole. Sensbach analyzes how evangelical Christianity transformed the black population and how they transformed and translated Christianity, in general, and Moravian beliefs, in particular, into their own empowering spiritual revolution. As one of the most effective and ardent Moravian evangelists whose obstinate resilience led to her imprisonment, near martyrdom and intermittent exile, Rebecca embodied the major social, political and cultural shifts in the Afro-Atlantic world. Sensbach also explicates her role as a catalyst that shapes this evolving world. Sensbach manages to capture the complex nuances of this religious and cultural transformation by illuminating rather than ignoring its inherent contradictions. Christianity undermined and disassembled notions of white supremacy and black subordination, just as much as it supported these ideas and the infrastructures that sustained them. Rebecca embodied the fluid nature of these changes as a woman who experienced many worlds: slavery and mutable definitions of freedom; European and African cultures that morphed in the new context of St. Thomas; and competing even hostile interpretations of Christianity, including evangelical Protestant sects, the Moravians being only one of several. Rather than drowning in the chaotic ebb and flow of an amorphous universe, Rebecca understood and embraced this political, cultural and “spiritual triangular trade” (242) of mutable worlds. None could exclusively claim her because she belonged to all of them. Sensbach successfully demonstrates the complex convergence of the multiple and mutable social, cultural and political contexts from which Rebecca chose who she wanted to be and what she wanted to become. Her vision—like that of all pioneers who seize transformative opportunities—presumed a mission greater than herself and therefore, greater than her own time and place. Sensbach provides compelling and convincing evidence that Rebecca’s vision evolved into a legacy of African-American evangelical Protestantism more powerful than she could have realized. This is a book everyone can enjoy. Sensbach translates superbly expansive and meticulous research into eloquent prose. His detailed descriptions of people and places provide powerful sensory images that stimulate readers’ emotions and intellect. At times his literary license compromises the historical evidence as he goes too far...

Conflict and the "Slave Community": Violence among Slaves in Upcountry South Carolina

IN 1826 WILLIAM HAMILTON, A SLAVEHOLDER IN PENDLETON DISTRICT, South Carolina, reported to the authorities his Negro Fellow Dave was violently Beat & abused. He identified Dave's attackers as Negro Fellows by the Name Ben & Aleck Belonging to John Adams & a Negro Boy Named Allen belonging to Archd Keaton. In another incident, two Spartanburg District slaves, Bob and Harry, the property Agnes Barnet, on the plantation the Widdow Mary Lewis in a tumultuous manner make an affray with the Slaves John S. Rowland in 1835. That same year the congregation Big Creek Baptist Church in Anderson District learned that Mr. Owenses ben had acted disorderly in striking his fellowservant. Only three years earlier, the same church had dismissed Brother Ceasor ... fornocking down his fellow servent with an Ax. All these episodes occurred within a decade one another in the remote northwestern corner upcountry South Carolina. Combined with dozens similar cases from the same region, they together speak to the complex role violence played among slaves, as both a creative and a destructive force in the quarters. An analysis violence among slaves reveals the values and unstated rules that governed their social world and contributes to the continuing effort to refine the paradigm. (1) Despite the relative lack academic fanfare it received when first published in 1972, John W. Blassingame's The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South quickly emerged as one the classic works in the historiography American slavery. The Slave Community effectively refuted the 1959 argument Stanley M. Elkins, who, drawing on an analogy to Nazi concentration camps, held that the closed system slavery in the American South produced a distinctive slave personality, the docile and childlike Sambo. Blassingame argued that the Sambo stereotype was not the dominant personality type among slaves; rather, it marked merely one in an entire range personality types. Moreover, Blassingame demonstrated that Sambo was a mask, a role that slaves performed for masters' edification, and that slaves could play Sambo without being Sambo. The submissive Sambo, Blassingame clarified, proved real, but Sambo-like behavior represented a ritual expression deference and did not signal any genuine psychic injury inflicted by the institution slavery. For slaves, acting like Sambo served as a defense mechanism, allowing them to cope with the oppression bondage. (2) In rejecting Elkins's Sambo thesis, The Slave Community not only provided a necessary corrective but also contributed to a fundamental reorientation in slave studies. Blassingame helped initiate decades sophisticated scholarship that looked at slavery from the perspective the bondpeople themselves. Increasingly, historians recognized slaves not as passive objects white treatment but as active agents shaping their own lives. These scholars emphasized the ways in which slaves' close familial networks, religious beliefs and gatherings, and rich culture insulated those in bondage from the brutal excesses enslavement and helped them resist dehumanization. (3) But as Peter Kolchin has observed, the resulting portrait antebellum slavery present[ed] an exaggerated picture the strength and cohesion the slave The scholarship's stress on the positive steps slaves took to cope with bondage and its celebratory tone often overlooked the harsh realities bondage, forging what he described as the myth of the utopian slave Taking to heart Kolchin's caution against such glorification, several historians, including most recently Brenda E. Stevenson, Christopher Morris, Anthony E. Kaye, and Dylan C. Penningroth, have challenged overly romantic interpretations a harmonious and idyllic slave community virtually devoid conflict. A look at violence among slaves in upcountry South Carolina adds to this ongoing scholarship designed to complicate our understanding the slave community. …

Beyond Slavery: The Multilayered Legacy of Africans in Latin America and the Caribbean

Students of “black history” in the United States have accomplished a great deal over the past several decades, but they have been surprisingly slow to acknowledge in practice that the stage on which the African diaspora has unfolded over five centuries is an extraordinarily broad one. Most African Americans have always lived outside the United States; most aspects of black experience here have parallels elsewhere; and the study of African American experience anywhere ought therefore to be informed, wherever possible, by comparative perspectives. Similar blinders have handicapped a good many specialists in Caribbean and Latin American black history, causing them to miss the opportunities for useful comparison with North America and Brazil.Though this tantalizing smorgasbord of a book, designed as a reader for undergraduate courses, is miscellaneous in coverage and only sporadically concerned with exercises in comparison, it can nevertheless contribute quite a lot to the development of comparative approaches. Those who seek new understandings of familiar subjects in a close examination of comparable experiences elsewhere will find plenty of sustenance in these pages. The contributors, mostly seasoned historians of Latin America, include David Geggus, Camilla Townsend, Ricardo Salvatore, Dario Euraque, Eduardo Silva, Aline Helg, Darién J. Davis, Judith Michelle Williams, Aviva Chomsky, Sujatha Fernandes, Jason Stanyek, Bobby Vaughn, and Ben Vinson III. The individual contributions are on the whole well written and convincingly documented. Notes are ample and conveniently situated at the ends of chapters.In the skillful hands of these authors we are introduced to the resounding impact that the Haitian Revolution and independence in 1804 had upon slave consciousness and political economy everywhere in the slave-holding Americas. Enterprising slaves in early nineteenth-century Guayaquil are seen organizing an effort to achieve their own freedom by collective self-purchase. In Buenos Aires, free blacks live large under the rule of their patron, caudillo and president Juan Manuel de Rosas, down to 1852; but they are soon pushed back into the shadows by the Liberal national elite that overthrows him. In Honduras, the descendents of eighteenth-century pardos and mulattos, now elevated to a provincial elite, play a key role in the submission and assimilation to the Liberal civil order of Indian communities, once populous and culturally independent. A few decades later, black abolitionists employ as their symbol of freedom the camellias cultivated by an escaped slave community near Rio de Janeiro, while struggling belatedly to eliminate the last remnants of the “peculiar institution” from the Empire of Brazil. Early in the twentieth century, the organized black citizenry of newly independent Cuba confronts head-on the barriers imposed by a deeply entrenched official racism. In the 1930s and 1940s, black pride movements sweep the Caribbean and Brazil with wide-ranging effects upon political, cultural, and intellectual life. In all of these instances, African American agency is evident, while the long-term constraints upon it are fully acknowledged.The resilience of Afro-Latin Americans and the startling precariousness and complexity of their life today are made unforgettable by three essays on current affairs. Millions of black Colombians from the maritime lowlands are displaced, despite the vigorous organizing of resistance at the grass roots, as the result of a half-century of U.S.-sponsored civil war and neoliberal land-grabbing. Hip-hop culture, both imported and homegrown, plays a many-faceted, deeply political role among black youth in Cuba, Venezuela, and Brazil. The migration of many thousands of black Mexicans from the Costa Chica of Guerrero to the Winston-Salem area of North Carolina reveals surprising things about race and social norms in both countries. Finally, a useful contribution by the editor himself reviews the evolving treatment of peoples of African descent in Latin American cinema, both feature films and documentaries.The introduction sketches broad outlines for nineteenth- and twentieth-century black history in the Caribbean and Latin America, and provides some conceptual framing for the stories to come. There is an index, a glossary, and a time line of recent Afro-Latin American history, a respectable list of suggestions for further reading, and even a list of NGOs and resources concerned with contemporary Afro-Latin American life. All in all, in addition to being usable as an undergraduate reader, Beyond Slavery has a reasonable claim to a place on the shelves of serious students anywhere of African diasporic experience in the New World.

Joining places: slave neighborhoods in the old South

This title remaps slave society. In this new interpretation of antebellum slavery, Anthony Kaye offers a vivid portrait of slaves transforming adjoining plantations into slave neighborhoods. He describes men and women opening paths from their owners' plantations to adjacent farms to go courting and take spouses, to work, to run away, and to otherwise contend with owners and their agents. Demonstrating that neighborhoods prevailed across the South, Kaye reformulates ideas about slave marriage, resistance, independent production, paternalism, autonomy, and the slave community that have defined decades of scholarship. This is the first book about slavery to use the pension files of former soldiers in the Union army, a vast source of rich testimony by ex-slaves.

Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue (review)

Reviewed by: Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue James E. McClellan III Karol K. Weaver . Medical Revolutionaries: The Enslaved Healers of Eighteenth-Century Saint Domingue. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2006. xii + 163 pp. Ill. $50.00 (cloth, ISBN-10: 0-252-03085-0; ISBN-13: 978-0-252-03085-7); $20.00 (paperbound, ISBN-10: 0-252-07321-5; ISBN-13: 978-0-252-07321-2). Saint Domingue (modern Haiti) was the most important and most intensely slave-based European colony in the eighteenth century. Disease and unhealthy conditions constrained its productivity, and French authorities invested significantly in medical personnel and infrastructures. Official colonial medicine has been well studied, and Karol Weaver summarizes this material in her first two chapters; commendably, she goes beyond official medicine to explore medical practice in slave communities. Two arguments inform this study. The first, medical, argument is that Saint Domingue's slaves created an "Afro-Caribbean health care system" (p. 59), that these enslaved healers therefore rank with Pasteur and Semmelweis as medical revolutionaries (p. 1), and, further, that their successors—"marginalized medical practitioners" (p. 127)—are key to transforming Third World communities today. The second, political, thesis is that the enslaved healers of Saint Domingue "participated in acts of rebellion that laid the foundation for the Haitian Revolution" (p. 130). There is more to this claim, but how much the resistance by slave medical practitioners was responsible for the Haitian Revolution, or to what extent such acts are distinguishable from slave resistance in general, is not addressed. Weaver is most successful in her chapter devoted to hospitalières, high-ranking slave women who tended plantation infirmaries. Hospitalières were essential to the day-to-day functioning of plantations. Slave midwives played similarly important roles. Weaver nicely shows the ambiguous position occupied by these women, simultaneously supporting and undermining the slave system. The remaining chapters—concerning slave herbalists, animal caretakers, mesmerists, and healers known as kaperlata—are informative, but they are not wholly persuasive, primarily because everything is made to fit the political thesis. For example, Weaver sees animal caretakers (p. 97) as "crucial actors" in the Haitian Revolution. In particular, she examines the case of the legendary insurrectionist slave Makandal, who was dramatically executed in 1758: Makandal became a symbol of rebellion and freedom that colored race relations for decades—but did his power stem essentially from his role as an herbalist and animal caretaker? Similar approaches shape chapters concerning "enslaved magnetists" (p. 107) and the kaperlata. European mesmerism deeply impacted Saint Domingue after 1784, but its crossover into slave communities is historiographically more problematic than is suggested here. Even if French officials were not simply projecting mesmerism onto voodoo practices, can we unequivocally assert the existence of a class of "enslaved magnetists" and claim that "the practice of mesmerism by slaves was a political act of revolution" (p. 112)? Weaver acknowledges that the kaperlata could be either slaves or free people of color, but rhetorically she makes them all enslaved healers. Her treatment raises questions about mulatto medical practice and the invisibility of gens de couleur in this account. The story of the [End Page 197] Haitian Revolution and of medical practice in the colony is less black and white than is implied here. Several assertions need more support. Given that Amerindians were essentially extinct, did slave medicine really incorporate indigenous Caribbean medical practices? Was it actually the case (p. 29) that "inoculation in the colony and in France [sic!] came from the use of the technique by enslaved men and women"? Similarly, Weaver's narrative contains many conditional statements; too often, matters are "likely," "might" have been, "seem," or are "not unreasonable to imagine" (p. 94). This book is well researched and nicely illustrated, but citations are overwhelmingly to whole books and without page numbers. What is one to make of the reference (p. 96 n. 98) to nine books (without page numbers) to support the point that Toussaint-Louverture was once an herbalist? Weaver's study is worth reading for the questions it raises and the vistas it reveals. It is a praiseworthy attempt to explore new and difficult territory, and her map will undoubtedly...

Popica/Popcorn: Resistance and Ritual Performance

'The Africans have a strange fetish for popcorn,’ writes the Jesuit Priest as he pens an early ethnography of the slave community in Brazil.(Bastide 1978: 382)I was amongst the crowd huddled on the...