Slave-owning Society Research Articles

Inscribing Experience: An American Working Woman and an English Gentlewoman Encounter Jamaica's Slave Society, 1801-1805

N r o eyewitness account of Jamaican life and society in the early nineteenth century surpasses Maria Skinner Nugent's rich and detailed journal of her four-year residence there. Her much-cited diary is a standard reference for Jamaican and Caribbean history.1 Yet despite Nugent's prominence in the historical literature of the Caribbean, women's perspectives remain scarce. This deficiency is unfortunate because AngloAmerican married women's experiences as femes covert might have produced more sympathetic responses to the plight of slaves and sharper critiques of slave-owning society than accounts authored by men. Like enslaved men and women, free married women faced violence with little or no legal recourse. They too experienced denials of independence, mobility, property ownership, control of children, access to higher education, occupational choice, and suffrage, although differing in degrees of magnitude, consequence, or

Postcolonial Experience in a Domestic Context: Commodified Subjectivity in Toni Morrison's Beloved

Many of the characters in Beloved are born into slavery and experience the imposed objectivity of its commodifying ideology. Clearly, as we know from historical and slave narratives, such objectivity does not exclude all possibility of experiencing some degree of subjectivity. In Beloved, however, denial and oppression of black identity by the larger slave-owning society leads to internalization of this colonizing discourse and subsequently to inability for some, and for others a constant struggle, to develop a self-empowered subjectivity when free from physical slavery. Thus, although the end of slavery signals the beginning of a post colonial(1) period for African Americans, their status continues to be defined by slavery's ideologies.(2) The imposed perception of themselves as commodified beings, when internalized, results in their continued struggle to develop empowered, agentive sense of self. In Yearning, bell hooks writes about black subjectivity as an oppositional worldview, a consciousness, identity, a standpoint that exists not only as that struggle which also opposes dehumanization but as that movement which enables creative, expansive (15). For Sethe, Beloved's central character, self-actualization, or the development of subjectivity, can be realized only outside the limits of a discourse and within a collectively defined alternate discourse signifying individual empowerment. This alternative discourse, I argue, is found in the free black community to which Sethe flees. But her subjectivity is realized only when she becomes a full member of her community. Membership depends on both Sethe's and the community's recognition of internalized ideologies of oppression. Morrison's text, then, can be read as postcolonial(3) because it delineates a process of self-liberation through communal support within the context of slavery. In a postcolonial analysis of Beloved, the work of Homi Bhabha(4) and Gloria Anzaldua helps us to read Sethe's self-actualization as a resistive process against objectifying definitions of black identity. Anzaldua's definition of consciousness(5) complements Bhabha's definition of the shifting positionalities within the colonial and the formation of a subjectivity through the fetish and stereotype. For Anzaldua, all women of color have the potential to reflect a mestiza consciousness. As oppressed woman of color, Sethe has this potential. In Sethe, then, the text develops a mestiza character. Together, the theories of Anzaldua and Bhabha serve to recontextualize Sethe's motivations for murdering her child, the subsequent ostracism by her community, her obsessive love for Beloved, and her final release from the ideological confines of commodification. This recontextualization of Sethe's story defines Beloved as a mestiza text. Within the postcolonial framework through which I read Beloved,(6) resisting the perception of self as commodified inferior is part of what Satya P. Mohanty terms decolonization. Developing empowered subjectivity involves learning to define oneself through a perspective uninformed by dominant definitions of black identity. Acquiring a perspective outside of constructs of inferiorized subject positions subverts these constructs and thus decolonizes the self. The process of decolonization is important part of this mestiza text because the main character moves from a limiting counterstance position, signifying a mere inversion of roles, to mestiza consciousness, signifying alternative discourse outside ideologies. Significantly, in Beloved decolonization occurs in a communal context. The book's central characters begin to define themselves against a colonially defined and internalized isolation, fear, or even pride only with the support of others who also have experienced oppression. …

The Presidency of James K. Polk (review)

BOOK REVIEWS79 based upon a blend of primary accounts and the latest scholarship in the field. Throughout Banking in the American South, the author is enlightening and challenging. He modifies Peter Temin's assessment of the Panic of 1837, takes issue occasionally with Bray Hammond, feels that Southern banking was not a colonial appendage to that of the North, believes that Southern banks provided sufficient capital to support Southern industrial development (had the region chosen to industrialize), finds that Southern banks fairly easily weathered the Panic of 1857, and contends that on the eve of the Civil War banking was sound in the Old South states and improving in most of those of the New South. The title is somewhat misleading, for this is not simply an institutional history of banking but also a consideration of the bankers as people, men who were not subservient to the planters or pawns in a slave-owning society, and men who generally were loyal to the Confederacy regardless of their convictions before secession. Despite the contributions of Schweikart, some caveats must be lodged. Too often, poor sentence structure undermines the effectiveness of his arguments. Citations are not as plentiful or as complete in some cases as might be desired. The index is suspect—despite references to such an important subject as "counterfeiting," that term fails to find a place in the index. A consideration of the Subtreasury and its impact on Southern banking is altogether missing. The typological distinction between the Old South states and the New South states (with which Schweikart seems more familiar) appears suspect on occasion. Nevertheless, given the scope of this work, it is a valuable addition to the literature of the antebellum South and banking in America. Alan D. Watson University of North Carolina at Wilmington The Presidency of James K. Polk. By Paul H. Bergeron. (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 1987. Pp. 310. $25.00.) The Mexican War era has elicited a galvanic response from recent historians. Irresistible issues, an expansive foreign policy, the question of democracy and empire, an emergent Hispanic population, a compulsive president and superpower relationships have reminded Americans since the 1960s of the increasing relevance of the 1840s. Yet if the crises of that latter decade have attracted the attention of scholars, the role of James K. Polk has remained more elusive. That void has finally been filled by Paul Bergeron. Polk emerges as an aggressive, activist chief executive, a man who exercised control over his political world. After choosing a competent cabinet, he held twice-weekly meetings with them and kept a watchful 80CTVTL WAR HISTORY eye on their activities. While stability and mutual respect marked relations with his cabinet, the Tennesseean—pledged to a single term—feared "presidential fevers" among his lieutenants. Secretary of State James Buchanan, with whom Polk often disagreed, became a source of frequent irritation. In foreign affairs, Bergeron rejects the notion that Polk served as the architect of the Mexican War. In detailing White House policy, the author sees Polk tapping "a nationalistic desire for expansion" already existent among the press and the populace. Bergeron admits that the president coveted California and the Southwest; however, he contends (in contrast to more imperially-minded historians) that Polk defensively backed into a conflict that was perhaps unavoidable. The same combination of forces operated in the Oregon crisis, but this time Polk played a high stakes diplomatic game with a major European power and won without force. Bergeron allows that the president , who possessed an "inclination toward disingenuousness," paid a heavy price in his relationship with Congress and the British. In domestic affairs the administration set its sights on reducing the tariff, reestablishing the Independent Treasury, and limiting federal funding for internal improvements. Successful in each area, Polk encountered difficulty only on the partisan tariff issue. Bergeron's Polk is a leader. While the author may rate Polk's relations with the press and his patronage activities as "mixed," clearly the tireless, seemingly obsessive-compulsive president achieved his goals. Only the issue of slavery in the territories left him hesitant and indecisive. Polk's belated (1848) endorsement of an extension of the Missouri Compromise line to the Pacific was ill...

Slavery and the social dynamics of male homosexual relations in ancient Rome.

More than any other institution, slavery placed its stamp on male homosexual relations in ancient Rome. While the pervasive Hellenization of Roman society in the second and first centuries B.C. mitigated the traditional hostility towards homosexuality and homosexual relations and even, in cultured circles, fostered an idealizing acceptance of male pederastic relations patterned after the model of classical Greece, this transformation of attitudes would have produced less concrete effects had Rome not concurrently become a slave-owning society on a large scale, due to overseas conquests. The strictures of Roman law and tradition applied only to sexual relations among free men and women; sexual relations between freemen and female or male slaves were unlikely to incur much social stigma. Although there is evidence that some Romans did indeed exploit their slaves, fortunately the great lacuna within the law and tradition, together with the emergence of more humane values regarding slavery and sexual relations, allowed genuine love-relationships (both heterosexual and homosexual) to receive a large measure of social sanction as a form of concubinage. Roman culture, however, unlike classical Green civilization, made little contribution to an informed acceptance of homosexual relations grounded in an understanding of human ethics and psychology.

What Were Those Systems of Slavery Defended by Confucius?

In the period of the Western Chou, China was still a slave-owning society. The period of the Spring and Autumn was a period of transformation from the slave-owning society to the feudal society, while the period of the Warring States formed the early stage of the feudal society. During the period of the Spring and autumn, due to the extensive use of ironware for tools of production, productivity rapidly rose; because of the violent struggle waged by the slave class against the slave-owner class, coupled with the struggle for power and wealth among the aristocrats within the different states and the wars fought by the feudal princes of different states for cities and territories, the economic base of the slave-owning society — the relations of production between the slave owners and the slaves — was gradually converted into the economic base of the feudal society — the relations of production between the landlords and the peasants. With the superstructure of the slave-owning society gradually converted into the superstructure of the feudal society, the system of the slave-owning society broke up and the system of the feudal society was gradually born.