History Of Slaves Research Articles

Liberating the Colonized Body and Mind

AbstractThe interstitial space at the intersection of race and disability is primed for a decolonial analysis. By examining the colonial history of Indigenous people and Black chattel slaves in North America, this paper will show how the contemporary definitions of race and disability are inherited social constructs created for the colonizer's utility to control the bodies and minds of those occupying and working the land the colonizer seeks to control for the private accumulation of imperial wealth. I will give examples of how socio‐cultural institutions like the church have inherited the logic of colonialism, creating ideologies of domination that must be challenged by a robust decolonial theology. Racism and ableism are the direct end product of a colonial view of the world that sees land and people as exploitable and expendable. A theology of liberation must grapple with the demands of decolonization to produce a just and equitable society.

Rebuilding life after slavery. Manumission, emancipation, and family networks in European empires, 1750–1900

Wherever and whenever systems of slavery existed, enslaved people struggled to attain freedom. Spanning various imperial contexts from 1750 to 1920, this special issue convenes a team of scholars to investigate the aftermath of emancipation. What did freedom from slavery entail in deeply unequal colonial societies? This issue explores diverse experiences, from maroon communities in the Caribbean wilderness to the forced resettlement of freed slaves in European colonies in Africa, and the legal emancipation of slaves in segregated colonial port cities in Asia. Enslaved people encountered ‘freedom’ with its attendant threats and opportunities in myriad ways. Building on the rich historiographical tradition of slavery studies, this special issue aims to broaden the scope of historical research from the slave trade and the lives of enslaved individuals to their post-emancipation existence. However, even recent literature often treats freedom after abolition and manumission as distinct phenomena, representing different legal paths to freedom—one associated with the early modern period and the other with the nineteenth century. This special issue re-evaluates this presupposition by foregrounding the post-emancipation life events of formerly enslaved individuals. It questions whether and how these different transitions from slave status to freedom can and should be structurally compared in slavery studies. By tapping into previously unexplored sources, re-examining older datasets with fresh perspectives, and employing record linkage to uncover forgotten slave histories, the authors seek to assess the living conditions of formerly enslaved people and their direct descendants after emancipation. In doing so, we aim to explore how past experiences of enslavement influenced future life choices and opportunities, thereby questioning the so-called afterlives of slavery.

An Accounting Historian’s Response to Accounting for Slavery: Masters and Management by Caitlin Rosenthal

Caitlin Rosenthal’s monograph Accounting for Slavery examines the interface of business, accounting, and slave histories on both ante- and post-bellum plantations in both the Caribbean and the United States, providing archival examples and a comprehensive review of relevant literature from all three genres. Rosenthal also stimulates important questions that suggest pathways for extending research. While acknowledging the magnitude of the task, I question several major conclusions, especially those regarding accounting. My critique is rooted in an accounting historian’s perspective, whereas Rosenthal worked in management consulting prior to conducting her study. This distinctive background may account for many of our divergent views.The review focuses on plantation accounting practices during slavery, where Rosenthal’s monograph includes the most archival examples and speculative conclusions. It addresses four topic areas where Rosenthal and I differ substantially: first, characteristics of managerial and accounting practices on plantations; second, the comparability of these practices to those of northern US manufacturers; third, the relation of slave plantation management to scientific management; and fourth, the use/non-use of depreciation accounting on slave plantations.

Slave Episteme in Biocapitalism

This article explores the connection between the extraction and dispossession of human reproductive labor power and its products in the contexts of Atlantic slavery and contemporary biocapitalism. It argues that the conceptualization and practice of slave reproduction that sustained slave racial capitalism is forwarded into the biocapitalist present through “the slave episteme.” This becomes evident when reproduction in biocapitalism is viewed through the lens of the long history of slave “breeding” in the Atlantic world. While the “blackness” that enslavers attributed to enslaved mothers and their progeny objectified and dehumanized both and rationalized their treatment as fungible and alienable commodities, in contempory biocapitalism the racial formation that subtends reproductive extraction and dispossession has been complexly recalibrated to do related ideological and material work. The article concludes with a discussion of the sublation of “blackness” in contemporary market exchanges in which reproductive labor and its products are bought and sold.

Glimpses of an Untold History of the Gulf: Notable Slaves as an Example

Although the history of slaves and slavery in the Gulf has been the focus of some research, certain aspects of this history have been lost in the dominant historical narratives. This paper focuses on an untold aspect of the local history: notable slaves. Despite the obstacles to researching this topic, the paper sheds light on a gap between local and foreign sources, whereby the local historiography of enslaved populations in the region since the 19th Century has been largely neglected. Giving a brief overview of local slave communities, the paper draws on examples from Kuwait, Najd, al-Zubayr and Hayil to show how certain enslaved individuals gained significant prominence, occupying a range of important positions within these emirates and sheikhdoms. In doing so, this article sheds light on a largely untold aspect of the Gulf and the Arabian Peninsula’s social and political history between the 19th and 20th Centuries, which is scarcely documented, except in a marginal manner.

Localizing the Narrative: The Representation of the Slave Trade and Enslavement Within Nigerian Museums

ABSTRACT This paper explores the interpretation and presentation of the transatlantic slave trade in Nigerian museums. It focuses on two contrasting case studies, namely the government-funded Slave History Museum (Calabar) and the privately run Seriki Faremi Williams Abass Slave Museum (Badagry). To investigate the complex and conflicting national and local narrative frameworks by which the slave trade and enslavement are presented to the public, this study focuses on qualitative content analysis of museum displays in addition to visitor observations. Comparative analysis of these museums suggests that this historically complex and emotional heritage cannot be understood in isolation from wider local, national, or global narratives. The paper explores the importance of taking a humanizing and empathetic approach to the presentation of the transatlantic slave trade in museums. I also consider how future practice might include ideas of localization and personalization to decolonize “official” slave trade heritage narratives in Nigeria and beyond.

Commemorating the abolition of slavery in Tunisia. The rights of black citizens and the history of slaves of European origin

This article contrasts a policy of commemoration of slavery in post-revolutionary Tunisia with the gradual and very slow history of the demise of slavery in this country since the beginning of the 19th century. It explores the choice of the Tunisian state to commemorate the abolition of slavery in Tunisia with reference to the promulgation of a decree enacted in 1846, and the way in which the end of West and East African slavery became central to civic memory in Tunisia.The first part of the article is based on recent, innovative and stimulating scholarly research by Inès Mrad Dali, Séphanie Pouessel, Maha Abdelhamid and Marta Scaglioni on black communities in Tunisia. The second part relies on works on European captives and the Mamluks or Muslim slaves and servants of often Caucasian origin in the Maghreb.The first section places the issue of the commemoration of slavery in the context of the emergence of civic claims from black activists in Tunisia since the 2011 Revolution. The profound transformations that black communities have undergone since decolonization in the 1950s have shaped these claims. Indeed, the categories of national belonging to a Tunisian civic community, and therefore the debates on collective memory and the historical representations of the nation, have become more decisive for these anti-racist activists than the narratives of local origins which aimed to explain or even legitimize the subordinate positions of these communities, especially in the south of the country.The second section broadens the discussion to include Christian male and female captives and especially the cases of male and female slaves of Caucasian origin converted to Islam (Mamluks and Odalisques) in 19th-century Tunisia. This section shows that the descendants of European captives are less concerned with the commemoration of the abolition of slavery. Their role in the country's history is greater because of their contribution to the founding of the Tunisian nation and its state. The uneven integration of the descendants of slaves into Tunisian society, in addition to the separate relationship with the memory of slavery of these groups explain over a long period of time the presence today of the differential treatment of Tunisians on the basis of skin colour.The article concludes with two observations: Tunisian anti-racist activists wanted to fight against racist discourses and categories. From this point of view, they succeeded in advancing their cause by giving official status to the commemoration of the abolition of 1846. Henceforth, the fundamental and difficult question of the unequal distribution of resources in post-revolutionary Tunisia remains to be asked.

"No doubt you think this will be one of those slave histories": Review of Sara Collins's The Confessions of Frannie Langton (2019)

"No doubt you think this will be one of those slave histories": Review of Sara Collins's The Confessions of Frannie Langton (2019)

The Backyard of Slavery: Child and Adolescent Slaves

Slavery is a phenomenon as old as the history of humanity. In the Ottomans era a non-free person called slave or captive. As in many societies, there is not only in ottoman society slavery adult but also children and this real undeniable. In the related literature, it is not so possible to find out studies on child slaves compared to the studies on adolescent slaves. Child slaves were also the tragic fact of history like adult slaves. The employment of child slaves and the sale of them as a trade product is another problem. The child of a married slave is born as a slave. For this reason, child slaves are as old as the history of slaves. Additionally, slaves captured in the wars or gained as booty were also enslaved. One-fifth of captives gained in the war were used in palaces or army by Ottoman on the rules kul system. The rest was distributed to the war participants or the ones who succeeded in the war. Thus, slavery turned into a form of meeting the need of the state, a commodity, a money prize, or a workforce in society.This study aims to make a general assessment on child slaves in the Ottoman society. In this context, child slaves were analyzed in terms of being leakage, their physical properties, and their original homeland. For this study, court records (şer’iyye sicili) of İstanbul, Üsküdar, Galata, Balat, Kadıköy, Eyüp, Manisa, Bursa, Balıkesir, Tekirdağ (Rodoscuk) and Konya were used as main sources.

Inundations, boundaries and intersections: flood as narration in Nigerian literature

ABSTRACT In this article, I explore the idea of flood as narration in selected Nigerian writings. In Niyi Osundare’s City Without People (poetry), I read how the poet recreates the Hurricane Katrina flood in overlap with diaspora, slave history and Yoruba cosmology. Wale Okediran’s After the Flood (novel) fictionalises the Ogunpa River floods and provides a text for examining how flooding intersects with the domains of family, community and nation, thereby questioning the concept of ‘natural disaster’. In Iyayi’s Violence, I explore how flooding is imagined as a form of slow violence in relation to exploitative capitalism. Both the views of narration as succession and as multilinear are employed for the purpose of delving into the ways in which flood-narrations tell multiple stories that overlap the domain of nature with those of human politics, culture and history.

New Postcolonial Dialectics: An Intercultural Comparison of Indian and Nigerian Plays by Sarbani Sen Vengadasalam

Reviewed by: New Postcolonial Dialectics: An Intercultural Comparison of Indian and Nigerian Plays by Sarbani Sen Vengadasalam Satkirti Sinha NEW POSTCOLONIAL DIALECTICS: AN INTERCULTURAL COMPARISON OF INDIAN AND NIGERIAN PLAYS. By Sarbani Sen Vengadasalam. London: Cambridge Scholar Publication, 2019. 243 pp. Hardcover, $72.00. In this book, Sarbani Sen Vengadasalam talks about her scholarly investigation on interculturalist philosophy in India and Nigeria before and after their Independence. Her research revolves around the struggle of Indian and Nigerian writers in finding a middle path for achieving a "cultural renaissance" in their respective countries by highlighting the role of interculturalism which neither denies tradition nor rejects western culture. Therefore, as a case study in her book, she presents the theatrical plays written by Rabindranath Tagore (Red Oleanders, 1925), Wole Soyinka (The Lion and Jewel, 1959 and The Road, 1965), and Badal Sircar (Procession, 1983) to examine the efficacy of interculturalism as a critical tool for achieving social amelioration in India and Nigeria at different phases of "culture encounter" during colonial and post-colonial periods. In the initial part of the book, the author states her objective is to cross-examine the above mentioned Indian and Nigerian intercultural plays separately and against each other to verify that "interculturalism as a comparative framework, could be a solution to the problems of comparative theories" (p. 47) and can be used to compare literature and portray social issues on the stage. As a reader of this book, I would agree that the author accomplishes her desired objective because her "investigation on four different intercultural plays confirms" (p. 215) that intercultural analysis could [End Page 590] be used to compare cross-cultural literature as well as act as a bridge for achieving cultural renaissance. The first chapter, "Colonial Encounter and the Intercultural Dialectic," illuminates the history of colonialism in India and Nigeria. The author explains how culture plays a vital role in determining the identity and character of human beings. She further states that "culture is the ethos of the nation, the character of a country and the spirit of people" (p. 2). After making her reader understand the importance of culture and its role in preserving the integrity of a community, she points out that first thing colonizers did while occupying a superior position in India and Nigeria was to inflict "cultural trauma" and create a "cultural cringe" among the colonized people so that they could be oppressed with their thought process controlled by British government. Vengadasalam is at her best in the first chapter while explaining the role of myths created by colonizers to destroy native culture in India and Nigeria and the creation of an elite class of Indians and Nigerians during the colonial period. As a reader, this part of the book helped me to understand why elites like Tagore during pre-independence and Sircar (and Soyinka both before and after) after independence in India and Nigeria adopted the intercultural model to modernize their societies. I also appreciate the explanation given by the author at the end of the chapter that the "interculturalism model is never outdated" (p. 48), as a result intellectuals like Tagore, Soyinka, and Sircar used intercultural philosophy in their plays. The second and third chapters are the essence of the book, where the reader sees how British imperialism expanded and denied the native cultures of India and Nigeria during the colonial period. The author illustrates how the colonial government controlled both countries by attacking their culture; the only difference between Indian and Nigerian colonialism was the latter's prior slave history. She further elaborates about nationalist movements that took place in both countries, especially Swadeshi in India and Negritude in Nigeria and how intellectuals like Tagore and Soyinka rejected these movements. Both Tagore and Soyinka believed an east-west synthesis could develop a new pluralistic and a modernized country. Most importantly the detailed analysis of Tagore's Red Oleanders in India and Soyinka's The Lion and Jewel in Nigeria highlights the history of performing arts field during the pre-independence period; such plays presented theatrical shows as a metaphor for social justice and championed intercultural philosophy. In the next two chapters, the author discusses the issue of neo...

Recirculating Memories of the Presidents as Benevolent Slaveholders on Presidential Slavery Tours

AbstractThis article investigates how slavery tours on the former estates of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and James Madison negotiate memories of the presidents as historically revered figures and prominent slaveholders. I argue that these tours recirculate benevolent memories of the presidents that work to sanitize the sites’ slave history and venerate the founders’ legacy. My analysis demonstrates that these tours do not just work to recirculate artifacts and narratives that speak to the presidents’ lives, but they revive a republican culture of remembrance from the nineteenth century through which to justify presidential actions and beliefs. In short, I suggest that this rhetorical negotiation helps craft new narratives of historical U.S. slavery and the early presidents’ lives that appear both more credible and less disturbing.

Reading the “Comfort Women” in Cloud Atlas: A Comparative Approach

This paper discusses some of the ways in which the interchange of fiction and reality can be studied through the use of a historical archive. In David Mitchell’s Cloud Atlas, the chapter entitled “An Orison of Sonmi~451” will be compared with the history of the Japanese military sex slaves or “Comfort Women”. The paper puts forward three main arguments. First, it suggests Sonmi’s futuristic fictional story is an archived narrative which contains the realistic issue of the service industry in modern times and references the human history of the collective self-expression of traumatic events. Second, it delineates the two narratives, the slave life of Sonmi in Cloud Atlas and the tragic history of the “Comfort Women” during the Second World War. Finally, the paper examines the testimonial features in the painting archive of these Korean survivors preserved by the two websites, the House of Sharing and the e-museum of the Victims of Japanese Military Sexual Slavery, suggesting that these two digital archives are equivalent to the technological device of the “orison” in Sonmi’s narrative. The paper concludes that the absence of language in the painting archive appeals strongly to a cosmopolitan morality in transcending effective language barriers in order to advance the causes of peace and reconciliation.

Diasporic dialogues: The role of gender, language, and revision in neo-slave narrative

Author/s
 Kalenda EatonArcadia University, USA
 
 ABSTRACT
 In this article I examine the creation of neo-slave narratives, or fictional texts written in the 20th and 21st centuries, yet set during an imagined period of American slavery or indentured servitude. In these novels the authors, usually African-descended, depict slavery and/or plantation life, generally, to privilege the experiences of the slave. The process of actively writing against traditional plantation narratives of the 18th and 19th centuries can liberate slave histories and allows silenced actors to speak. However, in this paper, I argue that there is a danger of further marginalization when History is the platform for creative expression. I examine two novels whose authors employ the use of satire to discuss slave experience and by doing so, I explore how the images of Black slave and servant women can be either devalued or empowered depending on authorial representation and intent.

Champeta’s Heritage: Diasporic Music and Racial Struggle in the Colombian Caribbean

The shifts and fractures introduced by UNESCO heritagisation processes, unleashed in the Colombian Caribbean from the early noughties, have been particularly acute when it comes to music practices. Eight out of ten Colombian practices inscribed on UNESCO’s heritage lists are indeed either music-based or strongly music-related. This paper focuses on the ways in which champeta—an urban music-based identity crafted in the city of Cartagena from the mid-1980s—has engaged in official and unofficial processes of heritagisation, in which practitioners have struggled to revise the locally contested and racialized burden borne by their cultural practice. Delving into the Afrocentric aims laid out by Afro-descendants and pioneers of champeta music—born out of a Caribbean remake of “African” music styles such as soukous—this community-based heritagisation process reveals itself as unsympathetic to hegemonic power formations, hence challenging those involved in the creation of heritage lists. This paper problematizes the relation between tangible and intangible heritage in Cartagena by assessing the impact of implementing safeguarding measures in tangible landmarks particularly enmeshed in colonial and slave history. It also explores how multiculturalism and heritage have become scenarios for political struggle in Colombia, hence shaping social and academic grounds for discussing issues such as cultural ownership, racial identification, musical genealogies and political upheaval.

The Great War, the Constitution, and the Court

The Great War, the Constitution, and the Court MELVIN I. UROFSKY As I am a historian, let me do what my mentor, Bill Leuchtenburg, taught me: “Begin with a story.” Alice Brandeis was in her Washington apartment on a cold December day in 1917 catching up on Boston news with her old friend Elizabeth Evans when the phone rang a little after 4:00. “Who is there?” she asked the building operator. “The President.” When Alice again asked who was calling, the opera­ tor said “President Wilson.” Realizing it was no joke, she told the woman to transfer the call to 809, the small apartment Justice Louis D. Brandeis rented as a study. Within an hour, Woodrow Wilson arrived at Stoneleigh Court and went up to see the Justice, while the two Secret Service men who accompanied him waited outside the door.1 We will get to what they talked about shortly, but first we have to set the context— the United States in a war unlike any it had ever fought before. My assignment is not, as it has often been in the past, to look at one particular Justice—although I will do a little of that— or discuss one set of cases, although I will do some of that as well. Rather, my task is to provide an overview, a context for the three remaining talks in this series of Leon Silverman Lectures. The Great War, as it is still called in Eu­ rope, began in August 1914: a war that no one wanted and that nearly everyone predicted would never happen. There is disagreement about the total number of casualties, but conservative estimates say that before the fighting ended, more than eight million sol­ diers and twelve million civilians had died. Germany lost 1.7 million dead and another four million were wounded. The United States did not enter the conflict until April 1917, and its first troops arrived in France the following September. In the fourteen months before the armistice in November 1918, 50,000 Americans fell in battle.2 The last big war the United States had fought was between the states from 1861 to 1865, and while that conflict raised a number of constitutional issues—such as the legitimacy of the blockade, the emancipation 252 JOURNAL OF SUPREME COURT HISTORY of slaves, and the suspension of habeas corpus—for the most part Supreme Court decisions played a relatively minor role. Abraham Lincoln has been accused, primar­ ily by southern sympathizers, of ignoring the Constitution and acting as a tyrant. Lincoln did neither, but he did “stretch” the Constitution.3 Before the Civil War, the accepted view held that the Constitution had created a government ofrestricted powers, which could act only in those areas specifically ascribed to it. Under John Marshall, the Supreme Court had broadly interpreted the reach of these delegated powers, but even Marshall often referred to the government as one of limited authority. While southerners took a narrower view of federal powers than did people in the North, even the latter shared this conceptual framework. If true, then the government in Washington had no powers to wage a war against the secessionist states, and the Union would collapse. While the obvious answer was to amend the Constitution, this route was impractical with eleven states in rebellion.4 To support Lincoln’s prosecution of the war, northern legal writers developed what the abolitionist legal scholar Timothy Far­ rar called the “adequacy of the Constitu­ tion” theory. Farrar and others argued that the southern emphasis on the negative con­ straints in the Constitution hid the positive commandments for the government to act ef­ fectively to preserve itself and the Union. As Sidney George Fisher, another legal writer, explained, the President and Congress had the power to react to concrete situations such as the rebellion and they also had the discretion to choose the most effective means to do so. Preserving the Union constituted a positive requirement of government, even if the particular means had not been spelled out in constitutional detail.5 As Timothy Huebner explained in his recent study of constitutional issues during the Civil War, the Constitution would either need to...

History of Slaves in Qatar: Social Reality and Contemporary Political Vision

Museums today play vital roles in the Arabian Peninsula in general and Qatar in particular. These functions vary between the social, economic and political. Recently, Qatar museums’ practices have focused on a political role. To highlight this role, I will take the recently opened slavery museum Bin Jelmood House (BJH) as a case study in this article. This paper aims to discuss and analyse the use of BJH in a comprehensive ‘soft power’ strategy to deflect international criticism of Qatar following the decision to award the 2022 World Cup to the country. Analysing BJH’s narrative was problematic, as the museum chooses to display a particular history which has been politicized to fit directly into Qatar’s international politics. The central questions this paper focuses on are as follows: Why was this specific social history chosen? What purpose does BJH serve? Why is Qatar trying to portray itself as liberating and open? To find the answers, I first interviewed the museum’s researchers, who talked about the process of collecting that specific narrative of the museum and the audience’s reaction. Second, analysing the museum’s narrative shows that museum practice today creates a different starting point than it used to, such as new ideas, strategies and policies. That conveyance the museum’s desire to become more open and liberal compared to previous practices.

Redd Slave Histories: Family, Race, and Sex in Pioneer Utah

Redd Slave Histories: Family, Race, and Sex in Pioneer Utah

Taphonomic Historiography: Excavating and Exhuming the Past in Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play

This essay examines Suzan-Lori Parks’s The America Play from an ecocritical perspective, analysing the play’s use of soil and its somatic, social, ecological, and historical significance. Taphonomy and historiography are put into conversation, as both disciplines investigate the processes that govern the persistence of remains over time and, thus, generate tools for theatre and performance studies. The essay contends that the Foundling Father’s repetitive digging in the soil communicates meaning regarding the history of antebellum slaves in the United States. It employs Deleuze and Guattari’s theories of affect and immanent philosophy to argue that the Foundling Father becomes Lincoln in the affective sense, as he unearths what Deleuze and Guattari call “concepts” that “reterritorialize” history. Layered on the imagery of slavery and predicated on a literal descent into historical earth, this affective relationship allows for a powerful interrogation and reconstruction of the dominant narratives of history.

Mustafa Olpak 1953–2016

Mustafa Olpak, author of Kenya-Crete-Istanbul: Human Biographies from the Slave Coast, a family history of African slaves in the Ottoman Empire and their descendants in the Turkish Republic, as well as founder of the Africans Culture and Solidarity Association, died of heart failure on 3 October 2016. He was 63 years old.