History Of Slavery Research Articles

Regimes of Bondage: The Encounter between Early Modern European and Asian Slaveries

AbstractThis special issue focuses on the broader context and interconnectedness of different slave regimes in early modern Asia. Various transnational commercial and imperial projects influenced the waxing and waning of individual slave regimes, while internal and interpersonal conditions within polities also played important roles. The well-known European seaborne empires of Spain, Portugal, the Netherlands, and England were major drivers of this early modern slavery, but they coexisted and competed with other groups of trader-raiders. These included merchants from the Islamicate world and Chinese coastal regions, which connected Southeast Asia, Japan, Korea, and other regions. These extensive markets linked different regions together, such as the Malabar Coast with East Africa, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Red Sea. While the focus is on the Iberian expansion and its impact on the slave trade, this special issue acknowledges that slavery in Asia should be understood as a result of multiple overlapping and interacting regimes. Each article examines a particular regime while emphasizing its interactions with neighboring regions during the early modern period. The main focus is on the encounters between different slave regimes facilitated by early modern commercial networks. The history of slavery in early modern Asia involved clashes and cross-pollination between disparate slave systems. A further contribution relates to the terminology used to define and understand slavery in non-European contexts, which is still a subject of debate. The concept of “regimes of bondage” is adopted as an umbrella term to encompass the various forms of coerced, subaltern, and dependent labor in Asia during this period. Finally, by using local categories and sources, including European and non-European language materials, the special issue aims to recover marginalized perspectives and highlight the complexity and challenges of studying slavery in Asia.

Infrastructural Reparations

Infrastructure has an inherently uneven capacity to connect and to provide for some people certain goods and particular flows of information, while at the same time disenfranchising and dehumanizing other people through the very processes of (dis)connecting elements of the urban condition. Infrastructural injustices shape times, time horizons and life cycles. There is a lack of synchronicity in the time horizons of durability, materiality, engineering and financialization of infrastructure versus the immediate needs of living people and communities – but there is also need for a longer time horizon that acknowledges the demand for historical reparations in addition to immediate needs. Reparative infrastructural justice insists on overturning the violence of the infrastructural dispositions that have long upheld White supremacy by dehumanizing Black, Brown and Indigenous people, and other people of colour. Those with no claims upon the state to provide the basics of life must go beyond repair or maintenance, to seek instead infrastructural reparations and reparative justice as material conditions for living in the wake of the racialized infrastructural colour line built upon histories of slavery, colonialism and climate disaster. This text reflects on some of the tactics of flexible, provisional, infrastructural reparations that have emerged in Haiti and Puerto Rico, where public infrastructure systems have drastically failed. In Haiti tactics of appropriation involved communities (and gangs) patching into fractured systems where there is little state provision. In Puerto Rico, disaster led to grassroots organizations calling for just recovery, but also blockchain entrepreneurs taking advantage of offshore opportunities to escape the state. Both cases demonstrate the precarity, power, opportunities and dangers hidden within decentralized systems in the face of splintered infrastructural systems.

Exploring the deep layers of black motherhood in Beloved by Toni Morrison and The Long Song by Andrea Levy

This article aims to explore the deep layers of motherhood in the literary masterpieces Beloved by Toni Morrison and The Long Song by Andrea Levy. It is a comparative analysis of the selected novels that share a common background; the history of slavery. The trauma of slavery has an impact both on the literature and on the transfer of cultural memory. African American and Black British women's writings are connected to the malfunctioning results of slavery in their past which also haunts their present. Using certain narrative forms, their neo-slave narratives reflect the trauma of slavery and cultural memory. It uncovers the centrality of motherhood to cultural memory in African American and Black British women’s neo-slave narratives. This article engages with the transfer of cultural memory in black women’s neo-slave narratives through motherhood. It aims to encapsulate the relationships between colonization, historical injustices, slavery, and gender discrimination to investigate motherhood. Black women are recognized as bearers of cultural memory; therefore, the relationship between a mother and a daughter is used to analyze cultural memory and the trauma of slavery. Morrison and Levy’s neo-slave narratives are seen as a means of struggle against forgetting. Despite sharing some features, African American and Black British women’s neo-slave narratives have differences. Reading these two neo-slave narratives in a comparative approach, this study presents a renewed point of view for cultural memory studies in literature through black mothering. It will contribute to debates about the importance of maternal ancestry upon black women to construct cultural memory.

Slavery in Bethlehem: Difference and Indifference in Northampton County’s Moravian Settlements

ABSTRACT This article offers a new history of slavery in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania: how enslaved men and women were brought to Bethlehem, who owned these enslaved men and women, how some became free, and whether the lives of enslaved Moravians differed from those of free Moravians. The prevailing account states that the Moravian congregation itself purchased enslaved men and women soon after Bethlehem was settled to augment its labor force. But most Afro-Moravians got to Bethlehem, this article shows, through a haphazard process that the congregation did not manage: enslavers (Moravians elsewhere) sent men, women, and children to Bethlehem or brought them when they moved to the backcountry community. Moravian authorities claimed that there was “no difference” in Bethlehem between these enslaved people and White Moravians. The archive that the congregation produced tends to reinforce that view: church registers, membership catalogs, diaries, and memoirs are mostly silent, for instance, about individuals’ legal status. But amplifying voices that have been overlooked of enslaved and free Afro-Moravians, as well as exploring the neglected 1780 Register of enslaved persons in Northampton County, reveals that differences based on race shaped the lives of people of African descent in Bethlehem and Northampton County’s other Moravian communities.

The Samarra Mutiny of 256/869

ABSTRACT In 256 AH/869 CE, the rank-and-file of the Turkic-Central Asian military in Samarra, the Abbasid imperial centre, rose against their commanders and the caliphal court. This is according to al-Ṭabarī's third/ ninth-century Taʾrīkh (History). The present article discusses two related elements of the mutiny: the rise to influence and authority of members of the Samarran military command, and the resentment of the rank-and-file troops. The main topic, however, is collective action on the part of the troops. The issue is social (re)formation and solidarity on the part of enslaved and freed persons brought together by the circumstances of enslavement in a particular time and place, in this case third/ninth-century Abbasid Iraq. In treating the rebellion, the article draws briefly, in a comparative manner, on the work of scholars of imperial Rome, early medieval Europe, and the antebellum U.S. South. Drawing on what al-Ṭabarī tells us of the mutiny, the article also considers the history of enslavement and unfreedom in early Islamic-era society more broadly. The mutiny serves in this sense as a case study in the history of slavery in early Islamic society.

Race-Based Medicine Is Racist.

Race is a social construct and cannot be used as a biological proxy, inherently making race-based medicine racist. Given the history of slavery in the United States, there are deep-rooted racist laws and policies that have impacted the health of families and children of color for centuries. The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) has come to acknowledge its racist past and promised a more equitable future for children and its organization. White physicians from the days of slavery created false myths regarding biological differences between races to strengthen their argument for keeping the institution of slavery - some of which are still in use today. It is vital to the health of future generations of this country that there be a shift to practicing race-conscious medicine and addressing the social determinants of health that are responsible for inequitable care. Pediatricians can play a significant role in ensuring health care equity for children now and in the future. [Pediatr Ann. 2023;52(10):e365-e367.].

Languaging as refusal

How are we refusing to be the bridge in ‘diversity’ responses in academia? What processes open up when we refuse the word and the singular language of ‘borders’ circulating in border studies and gender studies in the Netherlands? Where are we refusing from? Who is the subject-object of refusal? What is the language of refusal? How to speak from our burning guts that refuse to refuse in a language that doesn’t speak to our daily lives and struggles? How are we refusing the violence of research processes promoting the individual ‘trophy’ academic/artist in academic and cultural institutions while holding one’s own and each other’s bodies and power asymmetries shaping our writing processes for healing? How does one listen to the silences in histories of slavery, war, patriarchy, colonial trauma, and gender violence passing through our bodies while writing? In this essay we reflect on these questions by interspersing pieces of texts, experiences, excerpts (from thesis/thesis-related events), visuals, and poetry, by entangling biographies, traumas and memories situated in our everyday contexts and processes of teaching, writing for healing and for a living. Languaging becomes a location where we speak from, inspired and yet in tension with Anzaldúa (Hamzah 2020). Languaging (Kramsch et al. 2015) is our practice of refusal to refuse in one dominant language. We language a call for a poetics of refusal. We intentionally make the fleeting process known to each other and open it up to the reader, in holding each other’s bodies as they are collapsing and healing. In doing so we invite the reader to struggle with us in the process of naming our struggles that emerge from refusing to refuse singularly in English, refusing to write by partitioning our guts and everyday battles with patriarchy, refusing the writing subject as fully knowing what one is refusing.

David Silkenat, Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South

David Silkenat, Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South

Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South by David Silkenat (review)

Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South by David Silkenat (review)

Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South by David Silkenat (review)

Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South by David Silkenat (review)

SOLVING THE PROBLEM OF THE WHITENESS OF WEALTH

Peggy McIntosh details “white privilege” 1as including: being in the company of people of her own race; renting or purchasing affordable housing in a desirable area; having pleasant neighbors; shopping alone without being harassed or followed; and turning on the TV or opening the newspaper to see heavy representation of people of her own race. 2 The history of slavery is one major source of wealth disparity: four generations ago, African-Americans were a form of wealth as slaves and even before that, Africans in Africa were seen as primitive. The socioeconomic disadvantages to African-Americans and finding solutions to this problem, especially solutions through funding HBCU’s, targeted debt relief, and increased Black representation in the media, are the aims of this paper on the black-white wealth gap. The average per capita wealth of White Americans was $338,093 in 2019 but only $60,126 for Black Americans. 3 On average between 1950 and 2010, Black households held about 7 percent of their wealth in stock equity; among White households, it was 18 percent. According to the 2016 General Social Survey, a 55% majority of white Republicans agree with the statement that black Americans are worse off financially “because most just don’t have the motivation or willpower to pull themselves up out of poverty.” 4 42% of white Republicans thought black Americans were lazier than white Americans and 26% rated black Americans as less intelligent. 5 The history of the black-white wealth gap is entrenched in slavery and its after-effects. These effects include the Jim Crow rules, the sharecropping landownership system, discrimination, Congress passing unfair tax laws, the tenfold wealth gap, and attempts to fix it with affirmative action. One solution is the benefit of educating black students at historically black colleges and universities such as Howard, Morehouse, and Spelman: Wealthy philanthropists like Mackenzie Scott, the ex-wife of Jeff Bezos, making massive donations to HBCU’s so that Black universities can offer more scholarships to deserving Black students. Robert Smith, the wealthiest black man in the United States, promised to pay off the debts of the Morehouse College class of 2019. Therefore, enabling black students to afford college and allowing them to face fewer obstacles to graduating college are worthwhile, positive aspects of the HBCUs. The best solution to the black-white wealth gap is targeted debt relief, as opposed to blanket debt relief. Scholars argue for increasing Pell Grants so that they cover tuition, room, board and course materials to help more Blacks graduate debt-free. 6 Black students have less access to generational wealth and are the most likely to rely on debt to finance their educations. In this way, targeted debt relief would dramatically help Black students and college graduates. Another solution is more favorable representation of Blacks in the media. Stuart Hall argued that the solution to negative representations of Blacks were favorable portrayals of Blacks.

Modernity and Counternarrative in Marcelo D’Salete’s Angola Janga and Gayl Jones’s Palmares: Prelude to an Interview with Marcelo D’Salete

ABSTRACT This short article offers some remarks to contextualize the interview that follows with Marcelo D’Salete, a Brazilian graphic novelist known for his works on the history of slavery and Black resistance in Brazil. The article focuses on D’Salete’s great work Angola Janga (2017), about the famous maroon community in seventeenth-century Brazil known to the Portuguese as Palmares, and discusses this work in relation to the six-volume Palmares (2020) by the U.S. writer Gayl Jones.

Capital and World Labor: The Rise and Fall of Slavery in the Nineteenth Century

Objective/context: The boom-and-bust of New World slavery in the nineteenth century has always been a major topic of scholarship. In this essay, I suggest that the literature devoted to this theme, the so-called “capitalism and slavery debate,” has made capital invisible as a category of analysis due to its over-reliance on classical and neoclassical economics. As a result, slavery itself has been poorly historicized. My purpose is to put forth an alternative framework to restore the historicity of capital and slavery. Methodology: The article explores critical value theory to conceptualize capital and capitalism in historically meaningful terms. It argues that value creation is never confined to one country. It requires a historically transnational social formation that turns concrete labor into abstract labor and use-values into commodities through the multi-scale operatives of world money and world markets. The history of slavery should be narrated within this broader globalizing setting. Originality: The article’s claim is that the global value relations of industrial capital redetermined spatial relations between town and country, capital and labor, and production and consumption, engendering overlapping layers of a world geography of accumulation that both stimulated and challenged slavery. Conclusions: While most scholars present the relation between slavery and capitalism as constant for the period 1780-1880, I conclude that New World slavery went through two moments of boom-and-bust (c.1780-c.1820 and c.1830-1880), which were formed through, respectively, the global value relations of cotton production and coal-and-iron industrialism.

:Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South

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Slavery in an Authoritarian Republic: The Policing of Dissent and the Rise of State Slavery in Paraguay (1821–1840)

ABSTRACT Paraguay was one of the last states to abolish slavery in the Americas. Yet the history of slavery in this landlocked republic remains understudied. Through a systematic examination of judicial evidence, this article analyzes the unique political relationship that enslaved servants built with dictator José Gaspar Rodríguez de Francia. The article foregrounds enslaved people’s role in denouncing an elite conspiracy to overthrow the government in 1821 and later expressions of discontent coming from enslavers. This collaboration with the government impacted master-slave relations, as enslaved people increasingly sought the dictator’s personal intervention to confront slaveholders and spread rumours that the dictator supported them. Meanwhile, confiscations of dissidents’ properties led to the expansion of state slavery, which reverberated inside households as enslaved people appealed to this institution to deny enslavers’ property rights over them. Through these diverse strategies, enslaved people made the government’s power visible in everyday life within elite households. At the same time, by upholding Francia’s rule, they gained leverage to contest slaveholders’ authority. By illuminating the unique mechanisms through which slavery produced obedience to the government in Paraguay, this article proposes new ways to understand the uses of slavery for governance and state-building in the Atlantic world.

Liberty's Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York by David N. Gellman (review)

Reviewed by: Liberty's Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York by David N. Gellman M. Scott Heerman (bio) Keywords Slavery, Abolition, Jay family, John Jay, John Jay II, William Jay Liberty's Chain: Slavery, Abolition, and the Jay Family of New York. By David N. Gellman. (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2022. Pp. 519. Cloth, $36.95.) David Gellman's Liberty's Chain is an elegantly written study of slavery across several generations of the Jay family of New York, which offers an important intervention into several literatures on race and slavery in U.S. history. The book is divided into three parts, each focusing on one generation of the Jay family from the 1770s to the 1870s. Its main subjects are John Jay (1745–1829), William Jay (1789–1858), and John Jay II (1817–1894), allowing Gellman to focus on the history of slavery in the founding generation, through the era of gradual emancipation in the U.S. North, and [End Page 337] ultimately into the Civil War era. Across this long arc Gellman "shed[s] new light on the transitions from the practice of gradual emancipation to the demand for immediate abolition, from the commitment to peace to the embrace of war, and on the waxing and waning of nationalism as a force for liberation" (4). Each of the three sections is a masterful study in its own right, and by putting them together Gellman narrates the history of slavery and emancipation between U.S. independence and its Civil War like only a skilled scholar can, probing complex dimensions of gradual emancipation, immediate abolitionism, and the meaning of race in the nation at large. Gellman opens with the observation that "the enslavement of millions of human beings and the founding of the nation are inextricably bound" (2). He builds on a generation of scholarship on slavery in the founding generation and in the North, but charts new territory by foregrounding both the lives of the Jays and of the Black workers, free and enslaved, in their New York households. Using this framework he shows how relationships across race and gender lines in the domestic sphere shaped, or clashed with, the wider political landscape. His model approaches the history of slavery in the Jay family as a series of "concentric circles" and the "personal relationships with actual slaves and former slaves formed the core," followed by the regional conditions, national policy, and then international forces and intellectual and cultural trends (74). This approach shows that the great national paradoxes were also personal ones, and it reveals how enslaved, indentured, and formerly enslaved African Americans shaped the wider political landscape across generations. Gellman opens his analysis in earnest in the Age of Revolutions, where John Jay stood out as one of the leaders of the Revolutionary generation. He charts both Jay's marriage into the Livingston family, affording him access to a powerful family network, and his rise in New York politics. Jay was an enslaver in these years, and enslaved people helped propel his upward mobility. Gellman foregrounds a paradox between "the moral incompatibility of slavery with the nation's founding ideals" stressing they clashed in ways that "the Jays found impossible to ignore" (5). Readers follow Jay to Paris where he helped broker the Treaty of Paris (1783), which required British agents to return enslaved people to their owners, or to provide compensation. During these critical years, Jay's father died, leaving him an inheritance of enslaved people, which only heightened the tensions between liberty and slavery (51). [End Page 338] That kind of political and personal paradox is not all that remarkable, except for the fact that Jay was a committed abolitionist. Jay was at the leading edge of gradual emancipation, and Gellman unpacks how the war years gave him the language to contemplate and articulate and alternative to a slaveholding world (29). In 1785 Jay became the president of the newly minted New York Manumission Society and supported the eventual passage of the 1799 Gradual Emancipation Law, which freed children of enslaved women after they served a twenty-eight-year indenture. In these chapters, Gellman gives us a picture of how northern...

The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South by Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh (review)

Reviewed by: The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South by Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh Katharine Gerbner (bio) Keywords Slavery, Religion, Culture of dismemberment, Re/membrance, Protestantism, Christianity The Souls of Womenfolk: The Religious Cultures of Enslaved Women in the Lower South. By Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2021. Pp. 320. Cloth, $95.00, paper, $27.95). Enslaved women in the antebellum south inhabited a "triple consciousness," writes Alexis Wells-Oghoghomeh in her groundbreaking new book, The Souls of Womenfolk. Wells-Oghoghomeh shows how bondwomen's intersectional [End Page 334] experiences as enslaved Black women with (re)productive demands led to "ontological ramifications and moral dilemmas" (2). Their triple consciousness should be recognized as the source of enslaved religious and ethical culture, with the "psyches of enslaved men and children" flowing from the bedrock of women's triple consciousness. In The Souls of Womenfolk, Wells-Oghoghomeh introduces several powerful interlocking concepts that help to narrate both the history of slavery and the history of religion in new, distinctive, and important ways. One foundational concept is the "culture of dismemberment," which serves as shorthand for the collective experiences of dislocation, familial separation, rape, and other forms of physical violence that formed the core of the transatlantic system of slavery. The culture of dismemberment also encompassed the system of capitalism that reduced people to profit, and fundamentally shaped the ways in which bodies were viewed and treated. For enslaved women, the culture of dismemberment had distinctive features, most notably the "resignification of the womb." Enslaved women recognized that their wombs were commodified in a transatlantic economic system that relied on their powers of reproduction. This resignifying process in the service of human capital forced women to wrestle with different existential questions than enslaved men, and their experiences formed the core of enslaved religious cultures. They asked existential and moral questions about how to respond to injustice and violation, how to protect themselves and their families, and how to build a life together and in community with others to mitigate the culture of dismemberment. Bondpeople's answer to dismemberment was "re/membrance," a creative and adaptable orientation that drew on West African precedents and responded to the challenges of the Americas (2). Re/membrance came in many forms, and each chapter in The Souls of Womenfolk elucidates varieties of re/membering practices, orientations, and beliefs. As mothers, enslaved women recognized that their wombs had become the producers of human capital, and this knowledge shaped the ways that they understood the cosmos, defined ethical priorities, and engaged existential questions. They also shaped child-rearing, as Black women aimed to protect themselves and their children from the violating effects of slavery and the culture of dismemberment. The orientation toward "re/membrance," and the values that flowed from it, are part of what Wells-Oghoghomeh calls "womb ethics," another [End Page 335] key theoretical formulation (71). Womb ethics encompassed enslaved women's definitions of what was good, just, right, and necessary, and they were flexible and adaptable. Womb ethics had no universalizing notions of what was correct or moral; they were oriented toward re/membrance, mitigation of violence and trauma, and improving the quality of life for oneself and one's kin. Womb ethics could encompass filicide as well as marronage or parental surrogacy. Crucially, the category of "re/membrance" helps to orient the narration of sexual violence and rape, a topic that Wells-Oghoghomeh attends to most directly in Chapter 3. Here, Wells-Oghoghomeh describes the distinctive and devastating culture of sexual dismemberment that enslaved women were born into, and into which they bore children. Justified by logics that impugned the morality of Black women, Wells-Oghoghomeh shows how the idea of "sense," or "common sense," offered enslaved women a "mode of perception" that was "pragmatic and adaptable" (96). Sense could include dissembling, disremembering, and strategic silences that helped to preserve psychosocial survival in a dismembering culture. Wells-Oghoghomeh also shows how sexual choice became a sacred value, as did privacy and pleasure. Perhaps more than any other topic, the framework of re/membrance and womb ethics offers a way to write about the culture...

Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery ed. by Sean Morey Smith and Christopher D. E. Willoughby

Reviewed by: Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery ed. by Sean Morey Smith and Christopher D. E. Willoughby Nora Doyle (bio) Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery. Edited by Sean Morey Smith and Christopher D. E. Willoughby. (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2021. Pp. 240. Cloth, $45.00.) Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery continues the conversations begun during a symposium on medicine and healing in the age of slavery that took place at Rice University in 2018. The essays in this collection center the knowledge and experiences of enslaved people in a range of Atlantic world contexts, while also revealing how state and medical authorities used medical knowledge and practice to shape ideas about race and to assert control over enslaved bodies. Spanning the early sixteenth century to the late nineteenth century and considering such locations as West Africa, Brazil, the Caribbean, and the United States, the essays offer an exciting glimpse into new directions in the history of slavery and medicine. Inspired by the work of such scholars as Sharla Fett, whose epilogue concludes the volume, this collection decenters Western medical traditions [End Page 243] and emphasizes the ways in which healing practices were embedded in the social dynamics of slave societies and communities of enslaved people. There were many traditions of health and healing that defined the Atlantic world between 1500 and 1900, and often these traditions contained unexpected similarities. The transmission and exchange of knowledge and practice created new contexts of cooperation and contestation, contributed to the formation of new identities and new concepts of race, and allowed enslaved people to develop creative strategies of self-healing. The volume is organized thematically around the concepts of knowledge, experience, and profession, further reinforcing the ways in which histories of healing traverse more traditional boundaries of geography and periodization. The three essays that constitute the first section, on knowledge, explore healing traditions that were indigenous to Africa and the Americas and the ways these traditions persisted and evolved in the face of colonization and slavery. These essays highlight the roles that Africans and Native Americans played as healers and purveyors of knowledge. Mary E. Hicks’s essay centers the practices of Black barbers and Brazilian sangradores, who drew on West African healing traditions to develop “adaptive strategies of bodily restoration” (64). The practice of bloodletting was particularly significant in that it drew on West African traditions, but also shared important similarities with European healing practices, giving the practitioners significant credibility in the eyes of European colonial and medical authorities. This relationship changed over time, however, and by the late eighteenth century, European physicians began to insist on the superiority of their medical knowledge and to minimize other healing traditions as superstition rather than science. The essays in this section highlight the diverse traditions of knowledge that sometimes converged and sometimes competed in the Atlantic world, giving rise to distinctive practices and social relations of healing. The three essays in the second part of the volume focus on enslaved people’s experiences of illness and healing and highlight the contested nature of the medical archive. Beginning with a meditation on methodology by Deirdre Cooper Owens, the essays point to new interpretations and new approaches that recover the lived experiences of enslaved people and the strategies they used to control their own health and medical care. Elise A. Mitchell’s essay reexamines cases of feigned illness among enslaved women to recover their very real experiences of illness and injury. While previous scholars have interpreted accusations of feigned illness as instances of resistance, Mitchell argues that enslaved women in particular were often falsely accused of feigning illness because of slaveholders’ [End Page 244] racialized and gendered beliefs about deception and suffering. She suggests that these cases were defined by real suffering (and sometimes healing), and she calls on scholars to focus on “the crucial quotidian work of survival, self-reliance, and self-advocacy that happened in the thick of slavery” (112). The essays in this section emphasize the emotional and physical experiences of enslaved people and, as Brandi M. Waters writes, explore the many strategies enslaved people used to “pursue healing on their own...

Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States by Erin Austin Dwyer

Reviewed by: Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States by Erin Austin Dwyer Laura McCoy (bio) Mastering Emotions: Feelings, Power, and Slavery in the United States. By Erin Austin Dwyer. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021. Pp. 320. Cloth, $39.95.) Erin Austin Dwyer’s intriguing new book brings together the histories of slavery and emotions to illuminate how Black and white southerners alike deployed emotions as “a currency of power” (3). Dwyer reads slave narratives alongside and against documents of enslavers to reconstruct people’s emotional lives. While it is never possible to know how other people truly felt, Dwyer analyzes the rhetoric used to discuss emotions, what emotions were expected of whom, motives for feigning or hiding specific emotions, and differences between emotional norms and actual emotional practices. In doing so, she uncovers “what people thought emotions could actually accomplish” (13)—in short, how power operated through emotions in both slavery and Emancipation. From the outset, Dwyer makes clear that the stakes of these affective politics were not even. For enslavers, deviating from emotional norms most commonly risked public scrutiny and potential loss of capital, while enslaved people “risked the whip, the auction block, or even death” (3). While historians of slavery have separately explored affective relations among the slaveholding class or enslaved communities, Dwyer considers affective relations between the two groups. This approach enables her to interrogate how individuals navigated power hierarchies through emotional expression and to convincingly contend that attending to emotions sharpens our understanding of how white southerners perpetuated and Black southerners resisted the politics of white supremacy during the years before and after the Civil War. The first chapter broadly explores how enslavers constructed their emotional lives and social identities through enslaved people and, in turn, how enslaved people could manipulate slave owners’ feelings and relationships to survive and resist enslavement. The second chapter explains how southerners learned the emotional politics of a society organized around slavery. Slaveholding parents actively taught their children how to master their own emotions and those of the people they enslaved. From enslaved adults, trickster tales, and the process of play, enslaved children learned how to mask sadness, read slaveholders’ emotions, and identify emotional allies—all affective strategies that could mean the difference between life and death. Together, these chapters emphasize that the emotional politics of slavery were socially constructed and thus intentionally reinforced or resisted. [End Page 246] The third and fourth chapters consider the rhetorical importance and literal commodification of emotions in a society dominated by market forces. For instance, members of the planter class linked the appearance of contentment to profitability, worrying that “sulky” slaves were poor workers and that crying or lashing out on the auction block depreciated an enslaved person’s value. Because trustworthiness had market value, enslaved people could strategically display honesty and loyalty to gain benefits like greater mobility. These chapters demonstrate how the market values of happiness and trust constrained enslaved people’s freedom of emotional expression while simultaneously providing opportunities for enslavers and enslaved people to negotiate their daily lives and material conditions. Chapters 5 and 6 explore the contours and consequences of affective discipline as a means of social control. Enslavers assumed the authority to coerce displays of desired emotions from enslaved people and punish them for expressing an emotion deemed inappropriate or threatening, such as grief or anger. The goal of affective discipline was not just to control enslaved people’s emotional expressions, but also to punish them for how they had made slaveholders feel. The final chapter examines Emancipation as “a seismic shift in the emotional terrain of the South” (162), in part because the planter class fretted over losing the power to affectively discipline Black people. Formerly enslaved people made clear that they believed being free meant the ability to pursue happiness and freely express emotions that had been restricted in bondage. Members of the planter class felt threatened by this emotional liberation and employed both legal and extralegal tactics to reassert the emotional hierarchies of slavery, especially the authority to control Black people’s emotions. The power of Mastering Emotions rests on Dwyer’s patient and nuanced readings of conflicting perspectives and...

Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South by David Silkenat

Reviewed by: Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South by David Silkenat Kevin Grove Scars on the Land: An Environmental History of Slavery in the American South David Silkenat. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022. I and 260 pp., figs, notes, bibliog, index. $35.00 hardcover (ISBN 9780197564226) The field of environmental history has often played an influential role in the development of geographic research on human–environment relations. William Cronon’s Nature’s Metropolis and Changes in the Land, for example, helped contour geographic debates on socio-ecological hybridity and the ontological politics of nature during the tumultuous “science wars” of the 1990s and early 2000s. David Silkenat’s Scars on the Land holds similar promise today. Silkenat’s text excavates the environmental impacts of slavery on landscapes and ecologies of the US South, and offers an unwavering emphasis on the need to link environmental destruction to the dehumanizing horrors of chattel slavery, white supremacist ideologies, and opaque practices and landscapes of Black and Indigenous resistance. Much like Cronon’s work three decades earlier, Scars on the Land comes along at a crucial conjuncture in geography — a moment where the broader impact, utility and value of social science and humanities research is being contested and reconfigured. As is well known, calls for a new social contract between science and society have proliferated since the early 2000s, with the demand that science contribute solutions to emergent and pressing social needs. Geography is not immune to these debates. As recent efforts to reorganize the National Science Foundation’s Human-Environment and Geographical Directorate illustrate, some disciplinary colleagues are all too ready to dismiss qualitative and critical geographic research as “unfit” for NSF support on grounds that it does not contribute to solutions-oriented interdisciplinary collaborations (see Grove and Rickards 2022). Given how these directorate changes come on the heels of long overdue interest in Black and Indigenous geographies, the current moment presents geography with a unique problem. Rather than demonstrating the interconnections between nature and society, the challenge is now to excavate how the social production of nature works through the production of racialized difference; and to do so in a way that can speak to novel demands for the social utility of science. Scars on the Land illustrates how interdisciplinary collaborations across environmental history and geography can address both problems. [End Page 215] To be clear, Scars on the Land is primarily written for an audience of historians. As Silkenat explains in the introductory chapter, the text aims to bridge disconnected debates on the social and environmental histories of the American South within the field of southern US history. While the text admirably succeeds in this regard, it perhaps bypasses some opportunities to build bridges with work in other disciplines, particularly research in Black geographies and the geography of the US South (both of which feature prominently in this journal). Its core arguments on the environmental impacts of slavery will resonate strongly with scholars working in fields such as Black ecology and Black geographies, which situate socio-ecological problems in the long history of anti-Black racism and the life-destroying landscapes it produces (Pulido 2002, Wright 2018, Moulton and Salo 2022). Nonetheless, there is much to be gained from a close engagement with Silkenat’s arguments. One major contribution Scars on the Land offers is the robust array of archival materials and secondary sources Silkenat draws on to develop an environmental history of slavery in the US South. Each chapter focuses on a specific environmental attribute, and deftly draws on troves of historical documents to bring to life fragile southern environments, the violent logic of plantation ecology — specifically, its treatment of land and enslaved labor as dispensable and given to free, instrumental use — and its contradictions that created opaque niches of Black resistance and alternative forms of life. Chapter 1 starts from the ground up, focusing on soil. Here, Silkenat introduces the key dynamic between racialized extraction and resistance. On one hand, soil clearly illustrates the plantation system’s compulsive drive to total objectification and consumption of non-white and non-human life. Plantation agriculture cleared forests and overworked fragile soils, creating denuded...