Slave Past Research Articles

Legacies of slavery for race, religion, and empire: S.J. Celestine Edwards and the Hard Truth (1894)

ABSTRACTS.J. Celestine Edwards (1857?–1894), the son of liberated West Indian slaves, was the publisher of Lux (1892) and Fraternity (1893). Edwards, a lay preacher, had established a national reputation before becoming the first black editor in the United Kingdom. In July 1894, shortly before his death, a new book, Hard Truth, presented a dialogue between Christ and Lucifer on slavery, emancipation, and imperialism. This novella and his journalism emphasised the continuities from the slave past for what he termed ‘Anglo-Saxonism’. Edwards offered a sophisticated analysis of slavery and racism and of its legacy for abolitionist, humanitarian, and missionary engagements with the empire.

Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France by Crystal Marie Fleming

development of their careers and, most interestingly, particular characteristics and the influences that impacted their art. Falino also identifies the social and cultural phenomena related to poster mania of the time, such as the cabaret world and its performers, as well as the portrayal of women in fin-de-siècle posters. The essay provides an excellent context for the appreciation and understanding of the works on display. The true stars of this large-format book are the color reproductions of these forty-four posters. Most informative are the brief paragraphs alongside each image that place the work in context and explain the product or event advertised, the persons depicted, and the circumstances of the creation of the poster. These details motivate the reader to look closely at each image and to understand it in the context of the period. This book brings to life these advertisements and provides us with a newfound appreciation for their beauty and cultural importance. Texas Christian University Sharon L. Fairchild Fleming, Crystal Marie. Resurrecting Slavery: Racial Legacies and White Supremacy in France. Philadelphia: Temple UP, 2017. ISBN 978-1-4399-1409-0. Pp. 276. How can we better understand the history of slavery and the present-day inequalities in France without asking the hard question: Is white French society inherently racist? Resurrecting Slavery cleverly traces the ways in which the contradiction between France’s color-blind political narrative and its ongoing legacy of racial oppression impact the current political climate. A wide-ranging contribution to race identity and race relations, this book is a clarion call to rethink race from the perspective of sociology, history, race, and ethnicity and to consider the legacy of France’s colonial and slave past. It also enlivens our thinking and challenges our understanding of how we view France today, especially in light of ISIS-inspired terrorism of the past few years. Exploring this highly controversial topic from present-day inequalities to past oppression, the succinct seven chapters make for an exciting and thought-provoking read. The author’s fascinating observations drawn from over a hundred in-depth interviews and archival work by communitarian groups gives insight into the ongoing struggles faced by French Caribbean and black French activists, including the challenges they face to connect historical racism with the exclusion they face in the present. Clear and precise in its arguments, the book not only raises thorny questions about ethno-racial boundaries and reparations but also tackles the initiatives of various French officials to “blackwash” slavery. One particularly noteworthy chapter, “Racial Temporality in Action,” explores how commemoration event organizers and participants subvert norms of color-blindness in France and widen the debate on the ideology of white supremacy. Moreover, the statistics, graphs, tables, and photographs give the reader a better understanding of the troubling reality faced by many French people of color. The riveting conclusion turns some preconceived notions about 190 FRENCH REVIEW 91.4 Reviews 191 France and French society on their head and asserts new arguments to fight racism. Overall, the book offers much food for thought and the extensive bibliography and methodological references provide a wealth of information for further research in the field.Although some of the content may make the reader feel uncomfortable, the core of the study offers an invaluable opportunity to grapple with the injustices faced by black and brown people, a reality that unfortunately extends well beyond the borders of France. This book will certainly appeal to scholars as well as their students who need an entry point into the oftentimes overwhelming field of critical race theory but also to those who are passionate about the need for change and hope to inspire others to make a difference to systematic oppression from all walks of life. University of Toronto Catherine Gaughan Guiney, M. Martin. Literature, Pedagogy, and Curriculum in Secondary Education: Examples From France. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017. ISBN 978-3-31952138 . Pp. 305. How does one effectively teach literature today when students and parents and politicians demand that schools guarantee good jobs? Moreover, what can France teach America about Gen Ed reform? The teaching of literature in France has almost come full circle, moving from the idealist, aristocratic...

Staging Slavery in Post-Katrina New Orleans: Crisis as Shock Therapy?

Staging Slavery in Post-Katrina New Orleans:Crisis as Shock Therapy? Nathalie Dessens (bio) We should stop for a moment and ask ourselves—at this point in our history—after Katrina, after Rita, after Ike, after Gustav, after the national recession, after the BP oil catastrophe, and after the tornado—if presented with the opportunity to build monuments that told our story or to curate these particular spaces … would these monuments be what we want the world to see? Is this really our story? (Landrieu) These are words Mitch Landrieu, the mayor of New Orleans, delivered in a speech on 23 May 2017, referring to the Confederate monuments the city of New Orleans had removed in the previous month. With this long list of the disasters that afflicted the Crescent City since 2005, he clearly suggests that these disasters have inexorably altered the perception New Orleanians have of the history of their city. He claims that Katrina was the first of these eye-openers. Katrina was not the strongest hurricane of all time despite its strength. It was 400 miles large, thus smaller than Sandy in 2012 (482 miles) and Igor in 2010 (920 miles). It was a category 3 hurricane, while Irene, in 2004, and Andrew, in 1992, were respectively classified as category 4 and category 5. It provoked a rainfall depth equivalent to Irene (17 inches) and, although it is among the deadliest hurricanes that have hit the United States with 1,833 lives lost, it caused the deaths of fewer people than the hurricanes that hit Galveston in 1900 and Florida in 1928, for instance, with respectively 8,000 and 2,500 casualties.1 Yet because it hit New Orleans and revealed major flaws in the environmental, social, urbanist, and racial policies of the city, it triggered a number of nation-wide conversations on climate change, environmental issues, poverty, and race relations in New Orleans and the United States more generally. Because of the deep inequalities and fractures it revealed among races, it was the origin of a debate on persisting racial inequalities in the city and, ultimately, it launched a conversation about New Orleans's slave past and the amnesia that had surrounded it for more than a century. [End Page 1] While the question of memory had long been a neglected topic, in the last two decades of the twentieth century, most societies of Europe and the Americas initiated a conversation on memorialization, which inaugurated a movement often termed "memory boom," which, in turn, triggered a powerful need to theorize on the question. French historian Pierre Nora's ambitious project, which resulted in the publication of his seven-volume Lieux de mémoire between 1984 and 1992, initiated a profusion of works aimed at understanding the differences between history and memory, at the notion of public memory, and at delineating the blurred contours of memory in contemporary western societies. Although Nora eluded the question of slavery in his monumental project, many historians followed his lead by writing about memory—but, unlike him, by writing about memory and slavery—and produced a large corpus of works on the topic.2 This intense reflection on the memory of slavery was spurred by the memory boom that marked the end of the past century. In the last two decades of the twentieth century, indeed, all of the former slave societies of the Americas, most of their former colonial powers, and many of the African countries that provided slaves to the American continent, initiated a significant movement acknowledging the horrors of slavery and the role of slavery in building the New World. From Africa to Europe and the Americas, most societies of the Atlantic world began memorializing their slave-ridden pasts. The United States followed the global trend towards a more nuanced representation of its past. That movement spread, to varying degrees and in diverse forms, to the American South, including some rural parts of Louisiana. For many years, however, New Orleans resisted the general movement and opted for a memorialization that staged solely the city's Creole past. The city highlighted the cultural repercussions of a unique encounter of ethnic and racial groups, only very incidentally mentioning, through...

Black Writing, Culture, and the State in Latin America ed. by Jerome C. Branche

Reviewed by: Black Writing, Culture, and the State in Latin America ed. by Jerome C. Branche Matthew Richey Branche, Jerome C. (ed.). Black Writing, Culture, and the State in Latin America. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2015. 280 pp. ISBN: 978-08-2652-063-0. Each of the twelve rigorously researched chapters in Black Writing, Culture, and the State in Latin America is a reaffirmation of the volume's critical contribution to the fields of Latin American, African, postcolonial, and cultural studies. While Branche and his co-contributors bring much-needed attention to Afro-Hispanic cultural production since the nineteenth century, they also push for an expanded conceptualization of writing that accounts for the realities of the racialized processes of nation-formation throughout the region. Moving beyond more traditional forms of belles-lettres, the thematically and geographically diverse research presented in Black Writing offers a comprehensive and exceptionally revealing analysis of the complex relationship between Afro-descendants and the State. The authors successfully demonstrate the ways in which Afro-Latinos, through writing and rites, have both contributed to and resisted the State from within, while also maintaining transnational black solidarity through collective memory and oral traditions. While the initial three chapters – which each examines black agency in relation to distinct sociohistorical moments in Cuba – approach questions of State formation more directly, they also present a more diversified delineation of writing itself, clearly establishing the critical framework that underlies this project. Matthew Pettaway's brilliant opening chapter on loyalty oaths administered by a mulatto sacristan executed for his involvement in the 1844 Movement offers a critical counter-narrative that challenges the Spanish government's official accounts of the events. In considering Catholic rituals, the Cuban sociopolitical climate in the 1840s, and Yoruba religious traditions, Pettaway points to a crucial transcultural moment on the island, framing the oath as "a spiritual and political covenant among brethren of African descent unified in a resistance movement with revolutionary potential" (25). In Chapter 2, Marveta Ryan's study of Afro-Cuban poetry and the black press during the 1880s highlights the relationship between cultural production and pre-independence sociopolitical discourse on race and nation, arguing that such production "presents Afro-Cubans as able to channel their feelings toward bettering Cuba" (59). Odette Casamayor-Cisneros' keen analysis of the Revolution-era films of Sara Gómez and Nicolás Guillén Landrián reveals the tensions between the utopic Guevarean concept of the New Man as a raceless constituent of the Revolution and the persistent realities of racial marginalization in Cuba. Her assertion that Gómez and Guillén Landrián shift away from representations of the anonymous masses and inquire instead "as to the individual, always within the revolution" (73) could also be read as a subtext for the volume as a whole. The duality of the individual as part of a community is further examined in Chapters 4 and 5, which focus on history and collective memory in Afro-Hispanic drama. In her study of contemporary works from Uruguay, Costa Rica, and Equatorial Guinea, Elisa Rizo convincingly argues that Afro-Hispanic realist dramas offer alternative solutions to state narratives and adopt a transnational perspective "rooted in the oral and written traditions of the African diaspora" (83). Calling attention to [End Page 195] the increased victimization of Afro-Colombian communities at the hands of profit-seeking armed groups along the Pacific coast, María Mercedes Jaramillo's chapter on Kilele (2004) is a particularly enlightening analysis of the 2002 massacre in Bojayá, the tragic event upon which the work is based. The author's attention to African death rituals allows for a reading of the play as both a memorial to the victims and a call to resistance. Turning to black female subjectivity and narrative production, Chapters 6 and 7 reinforce the importance of collective memory for black solidarity, drawing particular attention to the intersections between the present and the past. In her study of representations of slavery and the slave past in Afro-Latina works from Cuba, Ecuador, and Puerto Rico, Lesley Feracho emphasizes the role of migration and of a collective memory of slavery in asserting citizenship. In his comparative analysis of works based on...

Introduction: “A Crime Against Humanity”: Slavery and The Boundaries of Legality, Past and Present

Nowhere in legal history has the nexus between past and present received more attention in recent years than in the study of slavery. The memory of slavery has become a field of study in itself, and competing histories of slavery have animated contemporary legal and political debates. Today, new histories of capitalism have further illuminated the central role of slavery and the slave trade in building the modern Atlantic world. Across Europe, the United Kingdom, Africa, the Caribbean, and the United States, new memorials, museums, and commemorations of slavery and abolition have brought new kinds of public engagement to the slave past. In the era of Black Lives Matter, understanding the connections between that past and the present day has never seemed more important, and historians are struggling with the question of how to engage the present in a historically nuanced way. One kind of engagement between past and present, among historians, lawyers, and activists, has been to draw connections between slavery in the past and in the present.

Children of the Enslaved

Children of the Enslaved Johnny Bernard Hill The African American struggle for freedom today, centered on the rise of the #BlackLivesMatter movement, might be best understood as an awakening of the children of the enslaved. The visceral and prophetic indignation of millions across the nation, standing up and challenging systems of police brutality, massive poverty and urban decay, and the crushing feet of poverty, is a form of reaching out to the past in striding toward the future. As a theologian teaching at a historically black college in the Deep South, just miles from the tragic massacre of nine black folk at the Emmanuel A.M.E. Church in Charleston, SC, what I see on the horizon is a quickening of the children of the enslaved. I see a growing awareness of a generation of black and brown souls, part of the post‐civil rights generation, who are calling into question the legitimacy of American democracy and its systems. I see a generation becoming much more aware of the brutality of the slave past and what it means in the present moment. There is an awakening. This generation is beginning to see that they are the children of the enslaved, ready to claim the full weight of freedom, justice, and human dignity. The recent 150th anniversary of Abraham Lincoln's assassination by the actor John Wilkes Booth at the Ford Theatre on April 14th, 1865, provides an occasion to reflect on Lincoln's presidency and what it meant for the millions of enslaved Africans in the shadows of America's Civil War, and also on the deeper matrix of violence associated with his death and suffered by unfolding generations, a violence that continues to be felt today, even in places like Ferguson, Missouri. The death of Lincoln, one of the most contentious figures in American history, exposes the great perils and conflicts within the American political narrative as it relates to black lives in America. While it is true that Lincoln may have opposed slavery on moral grounds and made constant appeals to the Declaration of Independence as the ideal corrective for one day dismantling the evil of slavery, it was ultimately the preservation of the union and stabilization of visions of imperial conquest that legitimated a slow and necessary continuance of the slave system in some form. And like those of his age, Lincoln was never in favor of granting full citizenship rights to Africans on America's shores. In addition to the preservation of the Union, Lincoln also upheld the constitutional ideal of self‐government. While the South may have been forced to dismantle slavery in its legal and political form, Lincoln and the Republicans were content with the establishment of the black codes of Reconstruction, and later, the more permanent establishment of the system of segregation across the south solidified in the Plessy v. Ferguson decision. In substance, what becomes clear in the brutal death of Lincoln in the literal and figurative theater of American politics is a nation deeply divided against itself, torn between two realities and tormented by its own sins, while faced with its own demise. The negation of blackness and the terrible systematic subjugation and exploitation of enslaved Africans and their children form a terrifying foil for the stabilization of empire (in the broader sense) and notions of whiteness in particular. Lincoln's legacy endures because it continually points us to the great struggles for freedom, justice, and human dignity, reaching out to future generations yet unborn. On the anniversary of Lincoln's assassination, we also celebrated the 50th anniversary of the courageous Selma March across the Edmund Pettus Bridge, captivated by the fearless and courageous leader, Martin Luther King Jr., as he was flanked by persons of different races, genders, ethnicities, religious traditions, and orientations, casting a new and powerful vision of what America could be and would be with the determined hopes of a people who refuse to acquiesce to imperial systems, and who rise to the occasion of freedom in their time—echoing to future generations. It was a turning point because it offered up a new, expansive, and inclusive vision of what America could be, and the ways in...

Se correr o bicho pega, se ficar o bicho come – Cidade de Deus e a identidade brasileira de inferioridade

DAMNED IF YOU DO, DAMNED IF YOU DON’T – "CITY OF GOD" AND THE BRAZILIAN IDENTITY OF INFERIORITY This article proposes a reflection on contemporary Brazilian identity under the framework of the multidisciplinary studies of ‘cultural trauma’ (Alexander, 2004), that revises and expands the original concept of psychic trauma to reflect on identity and social changes, and their representations such as cinema and literature. The opening of “City of God” (2002), film by Fernando Meirelles and Kátia Lund, adaptation of Paulo Lins’ homonymous novel (1997), is seen here as a synthetic representation of a Brazilian identity of precariousness and inferiority, an outcome of the traumatic colonial slave past.

On the Novel and Civic Myth

On the Novel and Civic Myth

Come and Gone

Huey Copeland's Bound to Appear: Art, Slavery, and the Site of Blackness in Multicultural America can be categorized as the most recent in a long line of scholarly investigations into what has come to be called “the afterlife of slavery”—the general preoccupation with establishing the authority of the slave past in contemporary black life—and the first to explore that subject in the field of contemporary art. Best notes that when we reverse the thesis of slavery's afterlife and reconceptualize it as the basis for a historiography of slavery, we can tend also to hypostatize aspects of the slave past as missing from the visual field and in need of recovery—as, in one way of phrasing it, bound to appear. Best contends that this last entailment is not always tenable or justified by the historical record, and he invites us to consider other ways of predicating of loss.

Ana Lucia Araujo. Shadows of the Slave Past: Memory, Heritage, and Slavery.

This book offers a whirlwind tour of the public memory of slavery around the Atlantic Basin, from Gorée Island in Senegal, to the African Burial Ground in New York City, to the Church of Our Lady of the Rosary of Black Men in Salvador, Brazil, to name only a few of its many stopping points. New information and powerful insights abound on nearly every page. The book examines diverse representations of slavery and finds most of them wanting in the complexity and provocation historians might wish for. As Ana Lucia Araujo argues, the conflicting interests and perspectives of the various social actors behind monuments, museums, and other heritage sites often push the representations toward fulfilling particular political or emotional agendas and away from the goals of historical accuracy and accountability. Following on her earlier book, Public Memory of Slavery: Victims and Perpetrators in the South Atlantic (2010), and several edited volumes on related subjects, Shadows of the Slave Past: Memory, Heritage, and Slavery confirms Araujo as a leading scholar of the memory of slavery, and one with a distinctively (perhaps uniquely) broad perspective on this important subject.

Youth Dispossession, Volcanoes and Diaspora: Recent Developments in Francophone Caribbean Film

THE PAST DECADE HAS WITNESSED SEVERAL EXCITING DEVELOPMENTS in Francophone Caribbean cinematic production, and this article presents a survey of the current landscape of Caribbean cinema in French, focusing on work by Martiniquan and Guadeloupean filmmakers.1 The distinct history of the French islands has given rise to the development of strong literary and theoretical traditions, from Negritude and Antillanite to Creolite, which seek to explore the parameters of Francophone Caribbean identity, questioning how this identity relates to the wider Caribbean and problematising the ongoing relationship with France.This complicated history famously finds expression in the work of the late Martiniquan theorist, novelist and poet Edouard Glissant, particularly in the extended essay Caribbean Discourse, in which Glissant laments the fact that in the Caribbean, colonisation has divided into English, French, Dutch, Spanish territories a region where the majority of the population is African: making strangers out of people who are not.2 Despite this call for a greater racial and diasporic solidarity in the early 1980s, literary proclamations of Francophone Caribbean identity are inevitably shaped by references to metropolitan French poets, philosophers and novelists, and must first be translated and contextualised in order to reach non-French-speaking audiences. In contrast, film offers a more immediate manner of crafting cultural works which, through their use of setting and characterisation, can create bridges with a regional Caribbean audience. The visual and audible appeal of landscape, soundtrack and emotion can, then, combine to overcome the obstacle of language.Neg maronJean-Claude Flamand-Barnys Neg maron (2005) demonstrates a pronounced desire to connect with a local Caribbean audience. Just three years prior to its release, the Brazilian film Cidade de Deus (City of God, 2002) by Fernando Meirelles had achieved global success, marking a new boom in neo-naturalist fictional narratives and images that focus on marginal characters, urban violence, poverty and extreme experiences.? Neg maron deals with these same themes, initiating the public to a poor area of an unnamed Caribbean island by following the violent everyday lives of marginalised young men.Neg maroris director Jean-Claude Flamand-Barny, who now works under the name of Jean-Claude Barny,4 co-wrote the script with Alain Agat, a Martiniquan,? and the film was produced by Mathieu Kassovitz and Richard Maignan. Barny had gained experience of the film industry by working with the acclaimed French director Kassovitz, and he was a casting director for Kassovitz's 1995 global hit La Haine (Hate), a film which also explores the theme of youth dispossession, and which examines the violent and chaotic lives of young French men from highrise estates on the outskirts of Paris.Barny began work on Neg maron in 1999, and moved back to Guadeloupe, where he had spent his childhood, to complete the project. The film skilfully blends the present-day era with references to the slave past - the title alone forges this connection - by passing comment on the ways in which this past continues to inflect the present. In 1998, the figure of the negmaron (maroon) played a central role in commemorations of the 150th anniversary of the 1848 abolition of slavery in the French DOMs, and in Guadeloupe a flame honouring the memory of the neg mawon passed from town to town during the entire year preceding the events.6 Barny's film must, then, be understood as part of an ongoing cultural reworking of the memory of the Neg maron in the French Caribbean consciousness.Moreover, Neg maron can be viewed as part of a Francophone tradition of using film as a means of examining the economic legacy of colonialism and its impact on contemporary economic structures: in a very different context, the African film Bamako (2006), set in the Malian capital and directed by Abderrahmane Sissako, also addresses these themes. …

A orelha de Van Gogh: Rosie e a alternativa ciborgue em “Os Jetsons”

Devoid of its history, and seeing her be redeemed only from the second half of the twentieth because of the growth of the movement of minority rights, both women and african American (and other minorities schematically untreated here) still difficult and demand understanding of efforts to act and are situated politically active mode in postmodernity. When something or someone focuses exclusion of those memorials (female and black) plus a non-humanity, can be considered exemplary “another” extreme. Rosie incarnate, so a US unconscious creator of the Third World migrants: an “other” no text, no speech, no history or culture. In this sense, its ontology is closely linked to its political insertion relative to that society – subordinate (SPIVAK, 1988), peripheral and alternative. At the same time symbolically sting a slave past and a present of latent prejudices [image Black Mammy (KOWALSKI, 2009) is symptomatic of this trend and will also be treated here] and the social unpaid debts, points to a possible future convergences alternatives, both racial and ethical as (bio) policies. His power and his weakness share the same space. As the literature understood as peripheral or border constantly generate excesses in that geography melts and runs counter to the ontology, with the subjectivities put in check, and the historical development as background, we can understand that Rosie figure as a kind anti-Barbie mechatronics. Thus, from the Rosie character, the domestic robot television series The Jetsons, the paper reflects on the struggles of the peripheral subject (because non-male, non-white, non-religious and non-human) inserted in modernity. By articulating concepts such as cyborg and subordination, and stereotypes like the black Mammy, will seek to glimpse the presence of a hegemonic contradiscursivity embodied by Rosie, biotipicamente identified with the standard negroid and understood as devoid of the right to national history, a myth founder and a way of narrating the past itself. From this point of view, Rosie emerges as representative of alternative modernities present within the project of modernity.

Book Review: Shadows of the Slave Past: Memory, Heritage, and Slavery

Book Review: Shadows of the Slave Past: Memory, Heritage, and Slavery

Public Memory of Slavery: Victims and Perpetrators in the South Atlantic

In this work, Ana Lucia Araujo documents multiple and conflicting memorializations of slavery among descendants of both slaves and slave traders in Brazil and the Republic of Benin. Araujo chooses these sites particularly because of the well-documented historic ties between Brazil (especially Bahia) and Benin (then Dahomey) during the period of the slave trade and after. In both countries, relatively recent initiatives have begun to acknowledge and commemorate the legacies of those connections in often contradictory ways.When Brazilian president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva visited Gorée Island in 2005, he made an ambivalent apology. “I do not have any responsibility for what happened during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries,” Lula asserted, “but I think it is a good policy to apologize to the people of Senegal and Africa for what we have done” (p. 63). The following year in Ouidah, Lula made a much stronger statement: “Our people are marked by Africa. Brazil owes a lot to the African people. Many were torn from Africa to build what Brazil is today. [ . . . ] Brazil will never turn its back on Africa” (p. 64).For Araujo, Lula’s ambivalence reflects Brazil’s own continuing, profound ambivalence about slavery. Black political organization increased in Brazil throughout the twentieth century, eventually resulting in a movement for affirmative action programs for people of African descent. Partly in response to such mobilization and presumably as a means of co-opting it, the Brazilian state has sponsored a growing number of memorializations of the slave past, such as several Afro-Brazilian-oriented museums, statues to Zumbi throughout the country, and a national park named after Palmares (pp. 252–66). Araujo leaves the impression that these efforts have had minimal impact on popular consciousness and that, to a great extent, the myth of racial democracy continues to hold sway. Indeed, Araujo’s major example of the commemoration of Africa among Afro-Brazilians deals with the images of the continent presented by samba schools during Carnival (pp. 232–52). Interviews with Afro-Brazilians about their impressions of these monuments and commemorations would have contributed another dimension to this chapter.Araujo devotes the bulk of the book to detailed discussion of memorializations of slavery in the Republic of Benin, based on extensive fieldwork. In contrast to Brazilian ones, Beninese memorializations have largely responded to international initiatives, above all the UNESCO Slave Route Project, rather than to any bottom-up popular initiatives. Concentrated in the major slave trading port of Ouidah, these commemorations convey contradictory and confusing messages. They have included the Ouidah 92 festival, which commemorated Vodun as much as the legacies of slavery; the “slaves’ route,” which begins at one of the city’s central plazas and proceeds to the sea, mixing symbols of slavery, Vodun, and the Dahomean royal family along the way; and the Gate of No Return representing the embarkation of the captives on the beach, now bookended, and its impact diluted by, monuments to the Catholic Church in Benin and the Gate of Return (chapter 4). As important as the public monuments are private memorials. The most prominent Afro-Luso-Brazilian Aguda family, the de Souzas, descend from the infamous Brazilian slave trader Francisco Félix de Souza (Chacha I), which makes their connections to the slave past problematic, to say the least. The descendants of de Souza now choose to emphasize his entrepreneurship and putative status as the founder of the Aguda community, making slight mention of the nefarious enterprise in which he engaged (chapter 6). Araujo’s own close readings of these monuments and the ways in which they are presented by Beninese elites are well done, but she includes no material on how the monuments are interpreted by ordinary Beninese (such as those pictured on the book’s cover) or the African American cultural tourists who visit them.Much of Araujo’s original research is fascinating, but several chapters rely almost exclusively on secondary sources and sometimes digress into material tangential to the author’s arguments and easily available elsewhere. Examples include the overview of the scholarship on the volume of the slave trade that makes up chapter 1, a summary history of the US civil rights movement (pp. 52–55), and a cursory discussion of “slavery and the slave trade in Brazil” (pp. 93–98). Araujo often seems compelled to include every finding of her research, such as a complete list of the heads of state who attended the 1993 African African-American Summit in Gabon (p. 71), for example, or a lengthy description of the unexpected identification of a wealthy Aguda with US country music legend Jimmie Rodgers (pp. 388–90). Scholars will sympathize with Araujo’s reluctance to part with hard-won material, but not every reader will be interested in such details.

Moving Memories of Slavery among West African Migrants in Urban Contexts (Bamako, Paris)

“Moving memories of slavery” are those memories of internal African slavery that move with West African migrants to urban areas. Different types of mobility towards and within urban contexts can be considered as non-discursive, embodied forms of ‘memory work’ of slavery. The focus is on how Fulɓe (and Soninke) migrants in Bamako and Paris ‘move with’ or ‘move back into’ slave status on specific moments in space and time. Even though cities offer opportunities to silence memories about their slave past, this can be only temporal and necessarily intersects with age, class, gender, etc. The data presented demonstrate that under specific conditions, urban contexts can also reproduce – even if temporarily – stigma, labour divisions and hierarchical inequalities related to the memory of slavery.

Slavery and Collective Memory in the French Caribbean

Claims to Memory: Beyond Slavery and Emancipation in the French Caribbean. By Catherine A. Reinhardt. New York, Berghahn Books, 2006. The importance of the slave past for the formation of Caribbean...

The Tambú of Curaçao: Historical Projections and the Ritual Map of Experience

Tuma boka i hende Tambu [Tambu takes the mouth of the people] Afro-Curacaoan parable Tambu is an African-inspired music and dance ritual that developed during slavery on the island of Curacao (largest of the Netherlands Antilles). (1) As a defined space for Afro-Curacaoan activity, Tambu has interconnected different cultural and ethnic groups, establishing varying senses of individual and collective belonging. Yet Tambu is not a melting pot of assorted traditions; the diverse cultural influences have not melded into one another. Rather, the varied cultural elements from Curacao's slave past have been integrated by layers within Tambu. To peel away those layers is to shake apart an intricate jigsaw puzzle into its individual pieces, each a separate, though interlocking, fraction of Afro-Curacao's complex colonial past. Yet, however fascinating these individual pieces may appear on their own, their true form and meaning become apparent only when considered within the context of the whole, namely Tambu itself. Carved out of the constraints of a dominant colonial history, Tambu changed to accommodate Curacao's shifting social and cultural realities; yet, in its continued transformation, Tambu has served as a source of further change. From this perspective, the ritual upsets--in form and content--the linearity of the island's dominant history, in the end become a worthwhile tool for examining some of the complexities and social implications of Curacao's colonial past and present. The ritual seems to dodge description. It intertwines the sacred and the secular, it follows both private and public cultural pathways, and it comprises a multifaceted repertoire of traditions, collectively evoking both Africa and the New World, able to recall imagined pasts while articulating perceived realities. As a result, Tambu permits divergent readings, placing it alongside other, often misunderstood, Black Atlantic performance traditions, including Rara from Haiti and Jankunu from Jamaica and the Bahamas. Like these cultural complexes, Tambu has appeared to dominant powers as a secular celebration, but, in fact, has served as a religious ceremony as well, using an African-inspired approach to performance. An analysis of Tambu provides a powerful opportunity to examine some of the ways Afro-Caribbean rituals may emerge between the sacred and secular, enabling participants with multiple and even overlapping senses of New World belonging. This essay extends current research (de Jong 2007, 2008) by connecting contemporary Tambu to an analysis of Curacao's history. Central to this research has been a collection of interviews (taped and/or transcribed) stored in Curacao's Centraal Historisch Archief. This diverse interview collection comprises the work of several dedicated individuals, notably Elis Juliana, a writer and visual artist, Paul Brenneker, a Catholic priest, and Rene Rosalia, an anthropologist, currently serving as Curacao's Minister of Culture. With many of these interviews conducted during the early- and mid-twentieth century, some with former enslaved Afro-Curacaoans, this collection provides invaluable insights into Tambu's perceived evolution and transformation, and allows for the creation of a marked timeline. Most important to this essay, however, has been my own field research, conducted over a period of thirteen years (1995-2008), in the course of which I attended numerous Tambu events. I gathered data from a variety of individuals ranging from ardent followers to impassioned opponents. Because Tambu participants may face social and religious retribution for their involvement, those who still dare participation do so only in great secrecy. Even those who acknowledge Tambu only as folklore remain skeptical or judgmental toward inquiries into the ritual. As a result, contacts between ethnologists and the Curacaoan people are neither quickly made nor easily maintained. …

Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture

Reviewed by: Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture Michael A. Chaney (bio) Woolfork, Lisa . Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture. Urbana: U of Illinois P, 2009. Argumentatively compact yet refreshingly eclectic in its use of evidence, Embodying American Slavery in Contemporary Culture offers an original contribution to scholarship on the cultural legacies of slavery. As a whole, Woolfork's six chapters argue that representations of bodily responses to the trauma of slavery in African American popular culture reveal a type of knowledge, a corporeal knowledge of traumatic experience that runs counter to the elusive trauma of much literary theory on trauma. Rather than the predominantly psychic domain of Freudian trauma, which is available only through oblique reference, the texts investigated here propose a distinctly diasporic trauma that is imaginatively available to bodily experience. Through fictional and performative devices of time travel, contemporary black bodies return to the slave past in the novels, films, and tourist sites [End Page 578] that Woolfork cogently describes. As explained by the anecdotal refrain from the introduction, they "go there to know there." The value of Woolfork's study comes in the variety of texts that encode such time-traveling journeys back to the knowable "there" of slavery—Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979), Haile Gerima's film Sankofa (1993), Phyllis Perry's Stigmata (1989), the reformatory films Brother Future (1991) and The Quest for Freedom: The Harriet Tubman Story (1992), debates surrounding Colonial Williamsburg's 1994 slave auction, the ritual reenactment of the Middle Passage The Maafa Suite: A Healing Journey, and comedic representations of slavery in Chappelle's Show. If there is a weakness in Woolfork's selective staging of conventional notions of trauma, it is made up for by the book's rich description and insightful re-situating of such texts as bodily types of epistemology. The result is an expanded understanding of vernacular theories of memory and traumatic knowledge. The introduction does a fine job of articulating the scope and purpose of the book: to consider bodily epistemology—a "representational strategy that uses the body of a present-day protagonist to register the traumatic slave past" (2)—as a means to challenge the principle of latency in much trauma theory. Referencing the work of Cathy Caruth, Walter Benn Michaels, Claude Lanzmann, Michael Rothberg, and others, Woolfork makes the case that most theories of trauma are anti-representational. They posit an essentially elusive trauma that prefers psychic registration over physical or corporeal responses and an indirect rather than direct experience of the originary trauma. In Woolfork's view, a contrary theory underwrites such works as Butler's Kindred, one of the primary subject texts of chapter one, as the novel imagines the protagonist not allegorically engaging with the traumatic past as Freudian theory would have it, but directly engaging with the past and as a result critiquing the implicitly racist mind-body split espoused by current invocations of trauma in literary theory. Still, Woolfork's positioning of a heterogeneous array of contemporary trauma theory into the role of the straw-man (so unvarying that a whole paragraph from the introduction on this trend in trauma theory is repeated verbatim in the first chapter) may leave some readers disenchanted. Nevertheless, the force of Woolfork's argument centers less on bodily epistemology's difference from Freudian trauma than on the differences (often gendered) between one textual deployment of it and another. A comparative methodology, in fact, appears as an organizational strategy within each chapter. Thus, whereas Butler's novel produces not only a supernatural opportunity for the present-day Dana to experience slavery directly, but also an intellectual remove from the collapse of past and present in which Dana is able to contextualize her experience using knowledge derived from historical texts, Mona, the protagonist of Gerima's Sankofa, is forced to lose her pre-time travel consciousness, becoming the vessel of the actual slave whose consciousness overtakes her body. Characterizing this difference as dual approaches to empathy, Woolfork embarks in the second chapter to consider the novel Stigmata as a reconciliation of the two. According to Woolfork, the bodily referents and quilting aesthetics in Perry's novel "open up a space to rethink the antirepresentational...

The middle passages of black migration

In characterizing the desperate journeys undertaken by African and Haitian refugees as today's “middle passages,” Caryl Phillips's A Distant Shore and Edwidge Danticat's “Children of the Sea” complicate the idea of a single origin to a transatlantic black Diaspora. If, during an era of black power and nation building, the middle passage signified a fundamental connection with Africa, the term is more recently used to describe multiple crossings that transform the meaning of Diaspora into a vital and ongoing process. These crossings do not coalesce into a single narrative of black migration in which the trauma of slavery has been overcome. Rather, the temporal simultaneity of past and present suggests a narrative of history as repetition. Both works of fiction transform received images from a slave past in order to critique the present treatment of black asylum seekers. A Distant Shore deploys the stalled temporality of the middle passage for staging the impossibility of diasporic community in post 9/11 Britain. However, even as this novel redraws the oceanic map of the transatlantic slave trade to include continental Europe and Great Britain, Africa exists outside of that imperial history and geography. “Children of the Sea” uses the simultaneity of past and present and the symbolic value of the middle passage as a space of death to critique an oppressive Haitian regime and the treatment of Haitian boat people by their Caribbean and American neighbors. It also interrupts a stalled temporality with the prophetic time of vodou beliefs for shifting the meaning of the middle passage from death to life in a Haitian Diaspora that stretches across the Caribbean Sea.

THE CHANGING POLITICS OF SLAVE HERITAGE IN THE WESTERN CAPE, SOUTH AFRICA

ABSTRACTChanges that have taken place in the ways in which the slave past has been remembered and commemorated in the Western Cape region of South Africa provide insight into the politics of identity in this locality. During most of the twentieth century, public awareness of slave heritage was well buried, but the ending of apartheid provided a new impetus to acknowledge and memorialize the slave past. This engagement in public history has been a vexed process, reflecting contested concepts of knowledge and the use of heritage as both a resource and a weapon in contemporary South African identity struggles.