Experience Of Slavery Research Articles

Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers by Matthew J. Clavin

Reviewed by: Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers by Matthew J. Clavin Kathleen Duval (bio) Aiming for Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves on the Atlantic and Southern Frontiers Matthew J. Clavin Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2015 252 pp. In 1770, a man in his midtwenties ran away from enslavement in the British colony of North Carolina. He found refuge in an Indian town [End Page 218] before continuing on to Pensacola, the capital of another British colony, West Florida. On his way, he may have passed a man going the opposite direction who had been born in Angola and was running from Pensacola to Creek Indian country. These two men were hardly alone. As Matthew J. Clavin notes in his excellent new book, for more than a century, Pensacola was “both a launch and a landing for runaway slaves” (1). While the antebellum Underground Railroad has commanded most of the historiography and almost all of the popular memory of escaping slavery, fugitives traveled North America’s paths and waterways long before there was an active abolition movement, and most did not head for the northern British colonies or states. The North was no safer than the South before the American Revolution. In the antebellum era, the majority of enslaved people lived in the Deep South, from which the free North was unreachable. If you ran away from Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama, or Florida, you would not seek freedom a thousand miles away. You would aim closer, and you would probably consider Pensacola, unless that was where you were running from. Clavin builds on the pathbreaking work of historian Jane Landers (1999), who uncovered the history of runaways from the British Carolinas to Spanish St. Augustine, and the ongoing work of historians Linda Rupert and Simon Newman on fugitives crossing imperial borders throughout the Atlantic world. Clavin’s book proves that Pensacola deserves a prominent place in this history. Finding massive evidence in British, Spanish, and US archives and newspapers, Clavin demonstrates that thousands of men and a much smaller number of women passed through Pensacola as they chose “to walk, run, swim, and sail toward freedom, often with free people providing a variety of assistance” (145). From the late 1600s through the early 1800s, Pensacola and the other port cities of the Gulf Coast belonged to variously France, Spain, Britain, and the United States, while the vast inland belonged to multiple native nations. When slaves ran away, they picked destinations based on international politics and their own calculations of likely success. Fugitive slaves were internationalists, and Pensacola was a cosmopolitan place. Startlingly well for a book whose central subject is people who not only for the most part did not write but who intentionally tried to avoid the people and institutions likely to record their existence, Aiming for Pensacola takes readers into the lives of individuals. In 1767, Harry and John, a [End Page 219] New York−born enslaved “mulatto” shoemaker and an English-born indentured servant, fled Pensacola together. Two Pensacola dockworkers named Harry and Abraham helped found “Negro Fort” north of the city and later became military leaders among the Seminoles. In the 1820s, a man fled his plantation on the US side of the Alabama River and made his living ferrying passengers from Spanish Florida to Alabama. Wearing a fur hat, blue coat, and Scotch plaid pants, Billy fled his forced march south from Maryland to the new cotton states and made his way to Pensacola. In 1850, a Pensacola blacksmith stowed away in a ship bound for New Hampshire. For most of these people, Clavin can tell us far less than we would like to know, but the stories are vivid and individual, and together they teach us not only about experiences of slavery and freedom but also the human diversity of people held in bondage. Clavin also reveals the lack of unanimity of free people—white, native, and black—about the institution of slavery and the property rights of slaveholders. Just as not all slaves headed north, not all people who helped them were northern abolitionists, or working out of abolitionist motivations at all. A skilled runaway’s offer of useful service...

Baltojo žmogaus teisės prieš magiškas juodąsias moteris: raganavimo rasės ir lyties sąsajos Rumunijoje

This study focuses on structural discrimination in Romania, based on gender and racial logics. The article analyzes social policies directed at a historically marginalized ethnic group, the Rroma. Racial logics have often been used in colonial encounters or experiences of slavery, where a “witch-enemy” was created to differentiate the white from the non-white, the educated from the uneducated (Perkinson 2004). In investigating important changes in the role of spirituality in Romania, this paper follows the intersections of religion, belief and the secular in public life, legislation and everyday practices. In 2007, Romania completed its accession to the European Union. The EU made demands for more efficient measures against racial discrimination1 (Bale 2013; Schiek, Chege 2008), one of the biggest socio-economic issues of the country. Romania carries a burden of five centuries of Rroma slavery (Kaplan 2016) and the largest WWII Rroma genocide (Gheorghe 2013), equaled only by the silence of the Romanian state surrounding past and present anti-Rroma racial violence. To track historical patterns, the article analyzes contemporary cases of Romanian politicians developing what seems to be racist policies, aimed at a historically marginalized group in Europe. Witchcraft is a productive category to think through global, political and economic insecurities. Panics around the occult symbolize larger cultural anxieties regarding socio-economic changes and indicate a move to challenge an existing order (Mantz 2007).

Spiralist Testifying in Jean-Claude Fignolé’s Aube tranquille: Reading the Victim-Perpetrator Dialectic in Haitian Literature

Jean-Claude Fignolé’s Spiralist novel Aube tranquille (1990) addresses in a unique way trauma theory’s problematics, including the identification of the positions of victim and perpetrator, as well as the hazards of testifying. By using Spiralist esthetics to depict the experience of slavery, the author offers an original reading of the stakes at play in the process of testifying to traumatic events. This article examines how Spiralist literary devices (disordered temporality, absence of punctuation, spatial incoherence) contribute to questioning how the floating identities of the victim and perpetrator impact the testimonial narrative.

Pensions and Protest: Former Slaves and the Reconstructed American State

Pensions and ProtestFormer Slaves and the Reconstructed American State Dale Kretz (bio) A chilling wind tore through central Georgia in the winter of 1865. Huddled in tents near Atlanta was the 138th U.S. Colored Troops, organized nearby just months before. One of the last black regiments formed in the Civil War, it drew its numbers from the formerly enslaved populations fleeing plantations in the wake of Sherman's March. One unhappy night, the icy current ripped a tent away from its stakes, leaving exposed a man who would endure the consequences for sixty-five years. As a slave, he had been known as Anderson Odom. Now he was Anderson Freeman. After escaping Jack Odom's plantation at age twenty, Freeman had made the one-hundred-mile journey northward through Georgia from Columbus to Atlanta, where he enlisted in the 138th USCT in July 1865. Following the winter storm, he could not walk for nearly a month. He spent that time in his quarters, treated by the regimental surgeon. He would walk again but would always be left with rheumatism, a broad nineteenth-century term for a range of arthritic symptoms. When Freeman was forty-four, he applied for a pension from the U.S. government, alleging he was "still suffering from the effects" and "cannot perform the labor of an able bodied man caused by my exposure in the service of the U.S. Army." A board of federally deputized physicians measured every part of the former slave's body, concluding rheumatism had disabled him 4/18ths for the performance of manual labor and therefore merited a pension.1 Anderson Freeman was one of hundreds of thousands of freedpeople who came into contact with the federal government in the four decades after the Civil War.2 They did so by actively pursuing military pensions through the U.S. Pension Bureau. In the past two decades, historians have used USCT pension files as an invaluable window into African American experiences of slavery, war, and freedom. Most notably, they have used them to explore social and work relations in slavery; the experiences of soldiers and veterans; and the politics of sex, family, and citizenship.3 This article attempts to situate the pension struggles of former slaves within [End Page 425] the larger project of state building embodied by the U.S. Pension Bureau.4 Indeed, the pension files of former slaves allow us to reconceptualize fundamental assumptions about the federal government and the aftermath of emancipation in America. The post-Reconstruction era is conventionally narrated in terms of exclusion. The federal government, betraying the revolutionary promise of wartime abolition, soon abandoned the cause of freedpeople, essentially leaving them to their own devices in the sharecropping South without meaningful access to or support from the federal state. Widespread disenfranchisement, Black Codes, and the rise of Jim Crow all negated the constitutional rights of African Americans. And so, though not without good reason, even as scholars uncover extraordinary grassroots movements in the rural South, African Americans are still largely painted as outsiders to the state building projects of postwar America. This article challenges the conventional narrative by detailing the extensive interactions that formerly enslaved veterans had with federal officials of the Pension Bureau.5 Freeborn veterans of black state regiments and the USCT, as well as their widows, had always been officially included in the application process for federal pensions. For a decade, however, formerly enslaved veterans of the USCT faced legal prohibition. Yet on March 3, 1873, Congress passed a vitally important act consolidating procedures and increasing pension rates. One provision of that bill stipulated that every pensioner listed as a slave on his regiment's rolls "shall be on the same footing as to bounty and pension as though they had not been slaves at the date of their enlistment."6 On the surface, the Consolidation Act of 1873 was one of great generosity, finally securing the extension of justly earned benefits to the most dispossessed of veterans and widows. In the words of the bill's spokesman in Congress, "if any one class of our soldiers deserve more at our hands than any other, it is that class which...

Breaking Historical Silence: Emotional Wealth in Joan Anim-Addo's "Daughter and His Housekeeper" and Andrea Levy' The Long Song

Breaking Historical SilenceEmotional Wealth in Joan Anim-Addo's "Daughter and His Housekeeper" and Andrea Levy' The Long Song Irene Pérez-Fernández (bio) "Epilogue"I have crossed an oceanI have lost my tonguefrom the root of the oldonea new one has sprung. —Grace Nichols, I Is a Long Memoried Woman "Echoes"Voiceless? Less?The spirits mocked.Youcannotaffordto be voiceless.Voice more or lessvoice more voiceamplifiedthroughterminal stumpsof seventy five millionmutilated tonguesforever everamplifiedincluding yours yours yours yours. —Joan Anim-Addo, Haunted by History [End Page 113] Fiction has often proved a fruitful means of bringing to life words persistently left unrecorded in official historical accounts. In the specific context of Black British literature, recovering lost stories has been a main thematic concern. As Paul Gilroy argues in his seminal work The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness, the telling and retelling of stories of loss, exile, and migration have been central elements in the memory of black people that have served to "invent, maintain and renew identity" and, therefore, constitute a collective, shared cultural identity (198). Moreover, for Gilroy, returning to slavery through the imaginative possibilities of fiction has offered black authors "a means to restage confrontations between rational, scientific and enlightened Euro-American thought and the supposedly primitive outlook of prehistorical, cultureless and bestial African slaves" (220). This article examines Joan Anim-Addo's short story "Daughter and His Housekeeper" and Andrea Levy's novel The Long Song as nuanced representations of female experiences of slavery which highlight the above-mentioned confrontations. These two works by contemporary Black British women writers put an emphasis on emotional wealth and, therefore, question orthodox notions of wealth and riches, as well as political, philosophical, and anthropological accounts that justified slavery through a rhetoric of dehumanization and constructed slaves as mere objects of commercial exchange. Levy's The Long Song and Anim-Addo's "Daughter and His Housekeeper" present alternative portrayals of the social fabric of slavery by foregrounding the experiences of female slaves and highlighting the importance of emotional wealth. The characters' emotional wealth is directly connected to their abilities to open alternative emotional spaces in order to counter the devastating real spaces surrounding them. In this respect, I argue that the space opened up through maternal love becomes the driving force behind their heroic deeds of survival. These literary works reveal an alternative conception of wealth to the notion favored in capitalism and the discourse of Enlightenment through which "slavery, in its many guises, was the expectation, and racialized persons categorized as 'Indians' and 'Africans' or colonized 'others' were targeted for life-long experiences within it" (Beckles 779). Adam Smith's theories had a great impact on the economic discourses of the time and though he had published against the institution of slavery in Theory of Moral Sentiments, he did so "not on moral grounds, but as just one more artificial restraint on individual self-interest" (Gosh 3681). Therefore, "Daughter and His Housekeeper" and The Long Song appeal for a consideration of wealth in a light which does not pivot around the idea of individuals engaging in enterprises with the purpose of advancing their self-interest or around the validation of the mere accumulation of material possessions. By contrast, the short story and novel under analysis underline slavery as a dehumanizing experience and endorse an alternative conception of wealth, whereby wealth becomes paramount to what makes us human: emotions. This second consideration, much more fruitful, allows for the de/ construction—in the Derridean sense of making visible and extinguishing a power struggle by uprooting significations from a binary logic—of this double conception of wealth intrinsically present in discourses of slavery which constructed slaves as emotionless. Joan Anim-Addo, both a writer and an academic, has argued in her critical work Touching the Body: History, Language and African-Caribbean Women's Writing that "slaves were perceived as chattel property equated in law with 'removable personal property' such as domestic or dumb animals. In contrast to the European constructed as 'master,' the [End Page 114] status of the African of the period was enshrined in...

Ethnicity and labour in Mauritius: assessing a cinematic account

We assess the sole substantial film documenting the history of socio-economic relations in Mauritius, a history stamped by long experiences of slavery and bonded labour. We argue that it represents an important crystallisation of a triumphalist ethnic interpretation of Mauritian history. We show the filmic devices used to underline the ethnic narrative and the marginalisation of slave descendants’ voices. We demonstrate that the film ignores the early and strong development of values of equity across racial groups. It obscures the linked creation of a significant labour movement and its contribution to Mauritian society in securing the degree of equitable success which the film makers celebrate.

In Tune: Charley Patton, Jimmie Rodgers, and the Roots of American Music by Ben Wynne (review)

In Tune: Charley Patton, Jimmie Rodgers, and the Roots of American Music. By Ben Wynne. Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2014. [xi, 270 p. ISBN 9780807157800. $38.] Illustrations, chronology, discography, bibliography, index.Ben Wynne's broad and engaging In Tune is a study of two giants of American popular music: blues legend Charley Patton, and the father of Jimmie Rodgers. For two musicians with such similar biographies, it is surprising they are not compared more often. Both were born in the closing years of the nineteenth century into abject poverty, taking up the mantle of the itinerant but versatile musician in order to survive and avoid the drudgery of exploitative manual labor. Neither Patton nor Rodgers lived long- both were dead by the summer of 1934- but their surviving recordings are now widely regarded as foundational for blues and music.Despite these commonalities, Patton and Rodgers make surprising bedfellows. Each man is still ensconced to some extent on one side of the color line that was present during their emergence in the early decades of the twentieth century. Blues originated as African American folk music, born of its exponents' experiences of slavery, reconstruction, and the segregated South. Country, on the other hand, is coded broadly as white, developing its down-home authenticity from the ballad and fiddling traditions of Old World settlers. Admittedly, Patton and Rodgers's claims to fame were somewhat distinct: Patton was largely unknown outside of the African American communities that he performed for and that bought his records. Rodgers, in contrast, saw considerable commercial success during his lifetime, and helped form the mold that future generations of hillbilly and country musicians would later inhabit through both his records and radio broadcasting (p. 12).Yet what makes both musicians so interesting, and what makes it so apt for them to be woven together in a single study, is that their careers are underpinned by the almost continual overlap between and musical cultures. Each musician's constant quest for mobility and appetite for musical eclecticism distinguished them in a segregated world where everything was designed to remain the same (p. 2). Their early musical development and later commercial recordings indicate patterns of interracial cultural exchange that were hidden beneath the surface of segregation, patterns that have only recently attracted scholarly attention (e.g., Karl Hag strom Miller, Segregating Sound: Inventing Folk and Pop Music in the Age of Jim Crow [Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010]).For Wynne, perhaps the deepest foundation for cultural exchange between whites and African Americans in the South was a broader class consciousness, cutting across the racial divide. In the decades following the Civil War and into the twentieth century, states in the former Confederacy enshrined African Americans' subjugation into law. Vagrancy laws, voting eligibility restrictions, and the of public spaces confined African Americans to a life little better than slavery itself (pp. 19-21). The need to maintain white supremacy was totalizing, drawing attention away from the needs of poor whites. Racial between whites and blacks was matched with segregation between whites themselves (pp. 25-26).Both white and black poor were thereby drawn together through their common experiences of economic oppression by wealthy landowners. Although this rarely- if ever-translated into actual cooperation against their masters, Wynne hears the common need to survive as the source of the many common elements and in both blues and music (p. 26). Both were based on a thriving network of oral dissemination, while themes of struggle, hope and redemption show the proximity of secular and sacred traditions in both cultures (pp. 38-39, 48).These class commonalities set the stage for Patton and Rodgers's formative years. …

Sacred Slaves: Tchamba Vodu in Southern Togo

Abstract This article ethnographically documents beliefs and practices surrounding Tchamba vodu among Anlo-Ewe vodu adepts in southern Togo. Mama Tchamba, or Grandmother Slave, is a religious order devoted to the veneration of the spirits of slaves purchased by the ancestors of Tchamba adepts and sold or kept in the community as wives and mothers. This article documents Tchamba vodu through the authors' interviews and observations in the community and situates these beliefs and practices in the larger cultural context of slavery and ritual among the Anlo Ewe. Drawing on mimetic theory, we argue that Tchamba ceremonial practices represent performed memorializations of the cultural experiences of slavery along the coast of the Bight of Benin and open culturally productive spaces and identities through mimetic bodily performance.

Narrating Trauma: Distance and Proximity in the Haitian Earthquake of 2010

At 4.53pm on Tuesday 12 January 2010 a devastating earthquake measuring 7.3 on the Richter scale hit the Caribbean island of Haiti. The sheer magnitude of its destruction put Haiti on the world map in an unprecedented manner as the horror of the earthquake and its aftermath was watched around the world and generated a huge relief effort. In contrast to aspects of the country’s past such as the experience of slavery, which left little written trace of its effects, this contemporary event was recorded in minute detail in both written and visual forms. This article examines how contemporary Haitian writers Dany Laferriere and Rodney Saint-Eloi have used their craft to narrate, and thereby attempt to come to terms with, this trauma. It also explores the way in which both distance and proximity are necessary in order to come to terms with trauma and how the narrative process helps forge a path towards healing.

Tyrannicide: Forging an American Law of Slavery in Revolutionary South Carolina and Massachusetts

Tyrannicide uses a captivating narrative to unpack the experiences of slavery and slave law in South Carolina and Massachusetts during the Revolutionary Era. In 1779, during the midst of the American Revolution, thirtyfour South Carolina slaves escaped aboard a British privateer and survived several naval battles until the Massachusetts brig Tyrannicide led them to Massachusetts. Over the next four years, the slaves became the center of a legal dispute between the two states. The case affected slave law and highlighted the profound differences between how the terrible institution was practiced in the North and the South, in ways that would foreground issues eventually leading to the Civil War. Emily Blanck uses the Tyrannicide affair and the slaves involved as a lens through which to view contrasting slaveholding cultures and ideas of African American democracy. Blanck's examination of the debate analyses crucial questions: How could the colonies unify when they viewed one of America's foundational institutions in fundamentally different ways? How would fugitive slaves be handled legally and ethically? Blanck shows how the legal and political battles that resulted from the affair reveal much about revolutionary ideals and states' rights at a time when notions of the New Republic--and philosophies about the unity of American states--were being created.

Slaves and Englishmen: Human Bondage in the Early Modern Atlantic World. By Michael Guasco (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014) 315 pp. $45.00 cloth and e-book

Guasco’s study reframes the history of English slaveholding by placing it in the context of human bondage in the early modern English world. Bondage and slavery were, he argues, familiar as ideas and experiences to Englishmen of the period: The early development of slavery does not represent a radical shift but an adaptation of existing models and experiences.Guasco builds his argument across six chapters. The first chapter maintains that the English were familiar with slavery through the Bible and Protestant theology, through the history and laws of Rome as taught in England’s grammar schools and universities, and through narratives of English history that identified conquerors—Danes or Normans—as enslaving the English. Furthermore, serfdom continued to limit the freedom of a significant number of English men and women during the sixteenth century, and penal slavery was a governmental experiment during the mid-Tudor period.The second chapter explores English encounters with slavery around the world, particularly in the Mediterranean: The English (however disingenuously) prided themselves on their freedom, but enslavement, particularly of war captives, was familiar. In the third chapter, Guasco turns to the ways in which English privateers attempted to use alliances with Africans against the Spaniards in the Americas. The Africans, however, did not see the English as natural allies; they used them strategically to gain freedom from Spain. The fourth chapter examines the experience of, and narratives about, the “thousands” of English sailors enslaved in the early modern Mediterranean. Guasco suggests that far more of them died than returned; those who managed to return were often treated as apostates, having converted to Islam rather than embrace martyrdom.The final two chapters look at how slavery was transplanted into English America, from the earliest days onward. Guasco emphasizes the multiple models of slavery available to colonists, its practice in the Spanish colonies, debates about the enslavement of Indians, and the ways in which early colonies adapted bondage to control behavior. When the early colonists began to acquire African slaves, they treated them as slaves before they had legal structures to do so, and only gradually moved away from Spanish models of slavery, with their high levels of manumission. The book thus demonstrates both that English men and women were familiar with slavery and that the ultimate structure of plantation slavery was not a foregone conclusion.Guasco also examines slavery and freedom in the English imagination. The English had a concept of slavery regardless of any actual practice. He points to the hypocrisy behind the English view of its brand of freedom as uniquely humane. Guasco has read widely, and produced a rich account of the English cultural experience of slavery during the sixteenth and early seventeenth century. However, there are blind spots in his coverage. His search for forms of bondage and slavery is not always true to their wider context, particularly their intersection with other historical developments in English society. What is more important, the attempts to enforce villeinage during the sixteenth century or the broad resistance to them from all levels of English society? How were ideas about slavery connected to ideas about gender and sexuality? More importantly, given the political resonance of the concept of slavery in England, what was the political use of such language? Since this book is primarily a cultural history, with an episodic structure, change over time on the English side is not always visible in it, but few historians of England would move as seamlessly as Guasco from the 1540s to the 1640s. Guasco is not, in general, reflective about his methods, or his sources. A bibliography would have helped.Such caveats, however, do not detract from the significance of Guasco’s work. Slaves and Englishmen provides a persuasive account of bondage in English experience that will challenge historians of both colonial America and early modern Britain.

Review of Dea Boster's African American Slavery and Disability

In African American Slavery and Disability: Bodies, Property, and Power in the Antebellum South, Dea Boster looks at how disability shaped the lived experience of slavery. Boster argues that while all slaves were objectified, disabled bondspeople were particularly oppressed by the social, economic, legal, and medical systems that perpetuated the institution of slavery in the nineteenth century American South.

COLONIAL LEGACY AND THE REFRACTED STATE: AFRICA IN MOTIONLESS MOTION

The concern of this paper shall be to explore with modicum of profundity the “tragic” experience of slavery and colonization in Africa as a continent and the attendant challenges of subjugation-psychological, social, economic and political conquest by the colonizers. The poignant level of development in most of the African states has been a subject of intense scholarly concern as the debate has led to externalists and internalists schools of thoughts (Ayittey, 2005) on the cause(s) of Africa’s supine position which Joseph Conrad derogatorily referred in his book Heart of Darkness published in 1899. The history of African continent has been that of pristine aesthetics, cultural independence, composite values and communalistic disposition. Regrettably, the compelling impact of colonization has refracted the states of Africa and the effect has been monumental as the African states have not recovered from the overwhelming impact of colonization even after independence.

La influencia de la esclavitud en la estructura doméstica y la familia en Jamaica, Cuba y Brasil

Durante mediados de la década de 1970, los académicos impugnaron, respecto a Estados Unidos y las Antillas, el planteamiento que relacionaba la actual desorganización de las familias negras con la experiencia de la esclavitud. En contraste con el énfasis anterior —basado casi exclusivamente— en las restricciones que oprimieron a los esclavos, la autora examina y compara, en el caso de Jamaica, Cuba y Brasil, los efectos que la sexualidad y los patrones de formación de pareja tuvieron dentro de las opciones disponibles para que los negros desarrollaran conductas de familia e ideales propios. Durante la esclavitud y desde entonces, en los distintos patrones de formación de pareja y estructuras de composición del hogar, el punto crítico es la jerarquía de género que invistió a los hombres con el papel activo, dominante. La autora concluye que la sexualidad, los patrones de formación de pareja y los tipos de hogar son el resultado de la interacción entre las jerarquías racial-clasistas, los ideales familiares dominantes y la ideología de género.

Thematic Trends in Claude Mckay’s Selected Poems of the Harlem Era

Black American Literature is a microcosm of the history of the black people’s presence on the American continent as it is known today. The literature of the Black Americans cannot be fully separated from the experience of Slavery and Racism which characterized their lives as a community of people whose social, economic and political privileges are tied up with the evils of race and color. In the latter part of the eighteen century, most black slaves started developing interest in written literature but before this time, they were more interested in the struggle for survival than to spare the time for literary art. This paper reveals the traumatic experiences of the Blacks in the plantations in the hands of their White masters in America through some of the poems of Claude McKay bringing out some themes in such poems to reveal the traumatized life of the Africans.

“A Fixed Melancholy”: Migration, Memory, and the Middle Passage

Given the high mortality rates aboard slave ships, the Middle Passage was known as a “voyage of death.” Disease and death, sickness and mortality, profoundly characterized the lives of Africans during the Atlantic crossing. This essay examines the subjective experience of dispossession, focusing in particular on a psychosomatic disease that was thought to be endemic to Africans forcibly migrated from home: “fixed melancholy.” Drawing on tracts on nautical medicine, slave ship captains’ journals, and evidence generated by the Parliamentary Committee’s testimonies, I argue that “fixed melancholy” is best understood as a form of nostalgia, an affective attempt at return that is simultaneously a symptom of the emotional distress produced by dislocation and a mechanism for slaves to resist their conditions of servitude. Via a brief reading of the opening chapters of Olaudah Equiano’s Interesting Narrative, I also show how nostalgia—or the memory of place—continued to exert a residual influence on the emancipatory imagination in black diaspora.

“These things took the shape of mystery”: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl as American Romance

This article argues that, in addition to being a trustworthy personal history, Harriet Jacobs’s autobiographical slave narrative, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, may be read alongside some of America’s well-known fiction writers as working within the Romance tradition. Jacobs’s narrative goes far beyond a strict retelling of events, and incorporates important literary techniques, as an effort to articulate not only the objective horrors of historical American slavery, but also to provide readers with a profound and transcendent “inner” view of the lived experience of slavery.

Visual Legacies of Slavery and Emancipation

Visual Legacies of Slavery and Emancipation Cheryl Finley (bio) The history and memory of slavery and emancipation endured in the bodies and lived experiences of both former slaves and the generations of black Americans born in slavery’s wake. The extent and meanings of black people’s freedom, in their daily lives and on the national stage, took shape unevenly, haltingly, and often incompletely. —Deborah Willis and Barbara Krauthamer The 150th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation provides an occasion to reflect on the ways visual artists have responded to and envisioned the impact of that life-changing declaration on the experience of slavery and the meaning of freedom. Signed into law by President Abraham Lincoln in the midst of the Civil War on January 1, 1863, the Emancipation Proclamation declared, “All persons held as slaves are, and henceforward shall be free.” But what did it mean to be free? How would freedom take shape? The careful wording and conditions of the Emancipation Proclamation and its timing in relationship to the Civil War is worth noting if we consider how a range of period and contemporary artworks selected for the exhibition We Hold These Truths … chronicle and reflect on its significance over the years.1 For, although the Emancipation Proclamation gave slaves who sought refuge behind Union lines a legal claim to freedom, the freedom it promised required the Union to win the war. Absent from the proclamation were any instructions or provisions on how formerly enslaved people could make their way into a free world. Questions remained about how newly freed slaves would support themselves or build economic self-sufficiency. How might families torn apart by slavery become reunited with loved ones or imagine new communities of their own? When would formerly enslaved people enjoy the full rights of citizenship or at least witness a shift in local and national power relations, so that they might participate in the political system? In We Hold These Truths … both the promise and lack of clarity surrounding these issues inspired artists of the day and today to question and consider—to enter into a conversation about the meaning of slavery and emancipation. These conversations, presented as a sort of visual call and response, are reflected in the pairings of works from the past and present and related works on similar themes. A conversation that probes how we make sense of the legacy of emancipation in historic documents and the artistic imagination is one worth having on the occasion of the sesquicentennial of the Emancipation Proclamation. [End Page 1023] Cause for Celebration Some of the earliest artistic responses to the Emancipation Proclamation were celebratory, if not cautiously optimistic about the future. Some chronicled the unfolding meaning of emancipation in popular prints and widely circulated publications, such as the engravings of Thomas Nast for Harper’s Weekly, while others sought to capture the moment for perpetuity in works of memorial sculpture, as in the works of John Quincy Adams Ward and Daniel Chester French. In John Quincy Adams Ward’s bronze The Freedman, a bare-chested man wearing only a loincloth reflects on the moment of freedom. Completed in 1862, Ward’s The Freedman, unshackled and looking upward to a brighter future, perhaps anticipates the signing of the Emancipation Proclamation. Thomas Nast portrays the tenacity and triumph of A Negro Regiment in Action in a wood engraving published in the March 14, 1863, issue of Harper’s Weekly. Lincoln added a declaration to the final Emancipation Proclamation stating that liberated slaves would “be received into the armed services of the United States,” which led to the creation of regiments of US Colored Troops. Another engraving by Nast published in the same issue of Harper’s Weekly, Colored Troops, under Colonel Wild, Liberating Slaves in North Carolina, expanded on the subject depicting the liberated as liberators. A noted observer of American life, especially during the Civil War, Thomas Nast was known for his vivid historical tableaux and sweeping narrative vignettes pitting past against present, good over evil, and triumph over tragedy. Such is the case in his celebratory wood engraving The Emancipation of the Negros, January, 1863 – the Past and the Future, published in Harper’s...

Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia by William D. Phillips (review)

Reviewed by: Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia by William D. Phillips Heather Dalton Phillips, William D., Jr, Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia (Middle Ages), Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014; cloth, pp. 272, R.R.P. US$65.00, £42.50; ISBN 9780812244915. This study encapsulates the complexity of slavery in Spain and Portugal during the medieval and early modern periods. The first recorded slaveholders on the Iberian Peninsula, the Romans and the Visigoths, shared the view that those who were part of the dominant group should not be enslaved. When the Muslims conquered the Peninsula early in the eighth century, citizens of towns that had resisted them were enslaved. Although the situation was reversed during and after the re-conquest, it varied across regions. While most slaves in Castile were Muslim, those in the maritime areas of the Crown of Aragon were generally from the southern and eastern Mediterranean and beyond the Black Sea. Although there were Muslim slaves in Portugal, little is known about slavery here prior to the 1440s, when the trade in Sub-Saharan slaves began. By the end of the fifteenth century, the Portuguese were bringing African slaves to the Iberian Peninsula directly from Africa’s west coast. By the beginning of the sixteenth century, these slaves were joined in Spain by enslaved captives from the war in the Canary Islands. William Phillips points out that although there were often large numbers of slaves in Spain and Portugal, they could not be called slave societies. Indeed, during the sixteenth century slaves probably made up only 10 per cent of the population of the city with the largest number of slaves, namely Seville. Phillips emphasises that the Iberian experience of slavery varied enormously. Christians, Muslims, and Jews alike could be slaves, slave owners, or traders. One could be born into slavery, kidnapped and enslaved, or captured and enslaved as a result of conflict. Moreover, slaves could find themselves ‘at any number of points between full slavery and full freedom’. Phillips brings his survey of slavery to life with examples taken from notarial documents. This means that he is able to provide rather more examples of the Spanish owner/slave relationship than the Portuguese. He does so in the full knowledge that such documents were almost always drawn up at the instigation of the owner rather than the slave. Indeed, when it comes to documents that promise or grant manumission, Phillips rightly points out that the majority of slaves freed in this way actually bought their freedom while others were freed once they became too old and frail to work. In the latter case, manumission was likely to result in destitution and starvation. While the Roman tradition of having domestic slaves continued on the Iberian Peninsula into the early modern period, their practice of maintaining slave gangs did not. By the medieval period, slaves who worked outside the home did so alongside free workers. Even those who manned the galleys toiled with convicts and free labourers. However, things were very different beyond the Peninsula. The trade in African slaves expanded as the demand [End Page 202] for labour grew in the American settlements. During the first two centuries of the colonial period, the medieval Mediterranean style of domestic slavery and plantation slavery coexisted. However, slavery on the Peninsula declined during Portugal’s war with Spain, which lasted until 1668. The death knell came in the 1760s when Carlos III established diplomatic relations with Morocco. Laws were passed in Portugal in 1773, and in the early nineteenth century in Spain, freeing the last slaves. As slavery declined and died out on the Iberian Peninsula, it flourished in the empires, lasting until the late nineteenth century in Brazil. Slavery in Medieval and Early Modern Iberia provides a richly textured overview of the development of slavery in Spain and Portugal. It is aimed at those interested in slavery in the Americas, as well those concerned with the Iberian Peninsula, illustrating why the experience of slavery came to vary so much across South America, North America, and the Caribbean. Heather Dalton The University of Melbourne Copyright © 2014 Heather Dalton

Early American Literature and Its Exclusions

James Allen, the author of an “epic poem” entitled “Bunker Hill,” of which but a few fragments have been published, lived in the same period. The world lost nothing by “his neglect of fame.”—Rufus Griswold, The Poets and Poetry of AmericaAcross several of his influential anthologies of american literature, rufus griswold—nineteenth-century anthologist, poet, and erstwhile editor of Edgar Allan Poe—offers conflicting measures of what we now call early American literature. In The Prose Writers of America, for example, which first appeared in 1847 and later went into multiple editions, Griswold offers a familiar and currently derided set of parameters for this corpus of writing. In his prefatory remarks, dated May 1847, he explains that he has chosen not to include “the merely successful writers” who precede him. Although success might appear a high enough bar to warrant inclusion, he emphasizes that he has focused on writers who “have evinced unusual powers in controlling the national mind, or in forming the national character …” (5). This emphasis on what has been nationally consequential echoes other moments in Prose Writers, as well as paratextual material in his earlier The Poets and Poetry of America (1842) and his Female Poets of America (1848). In his several miniature screeds condemning the lack of international copyright, as well as the consequent flooding of the American market with cheap reprints, Griswold explains the “difficulties and dangers” this lack poses to “American literature”: “Injurious as it is to the foreign author, it is more so to the American [people,] whom it deprives of that nationality of feeling which is among the first and most powerful incentives to every feat of greatness” (Prose Writers 6). In The Poets and Poetry of America, he similarly complains that America's “national tastes and feelings are fashioned by the subject of kings; and they will continue so to be, until [there is] an honest and political system of reciprocalcopyright …” (v). Even in The Female Poets of America, the subject of which one might think would change the nature of this conversation, Griswold returns to the national project, examining the significance of women writers for it. He cites the fact that several of the poets included in this volume have written from lives that were “no holydays of leisure” but defined rather by everything from “practical duties” to the experience of slavery. He also responds to those carping “foreign critics” who propose that “our citizens are too much devoted to business and politics to feel interest in pursuits which adorn but do not profit”; these home-laboring women writers, he argues, may end up being the source of that which is most genuinely American and most correctly poetic: “Those who cherish a belief that the progress of society in this country is destined to develop a school of art, original and special, will perhaps find more decided indications of the infusion of our domestic spirit and temper in literature, in the poetry of our female authors, than in that of our men” (8). As it turns out, even women poets are held to the standard of national self-expression and national self-realization; the surprise lies only in the fact that they live up to this standard.