Metaphor Of Slavery Research Articles

The Knife is Still in Our Backs: Reparations Washing and the Limits of Reparatory Justice Campaigns

ABSTRACTThe Black Lives Matter movement of 2020 has placed reparations firmly on the international agenda. This article discusses the concept of ‘reparations washing’ with reference to the measures of two British businesses, Greene King and Lloyd's of London, in acknowledgement of their historical roots in the slave trade, and the Government of the Netherlands’ public apology for the country's history of slavery. Reparations washing occurs when corporations or governments give a token nod to reparatory justice to enhance their image and to absolve them of institutional guilt. The article employs Malcolm X's metaphor of slavery, as sticking a knife into the back of the enslaved, to argue that in order to repair the harm caused, the knife needs to be removed and the wound healed. It then analyses the reparations demands contained in CARICOM's Ten Point Plan for Reparatory Justice which exposes the limits of reparatory justice campaigns. The paradox of reparations campaigns is that they ultimately leave intact a system founded on White supremacy and the exploitation of the Global South. It is therefore impossible for reparations to be realized without bringing an end to the current political and economic system. The article concludes that, ultimately, the value of reparations campaigns lies in their highlighting the need for revolution.

The Black American Revolution: The American Revolution as Experienced by African Americans

This paper focuses on how the American Revolution mobilized the enslaved and free black population in a way that constitutes a "Black American Revolution." In particular, the enslaved population engaged in multiple efforts for freedom, ranging from fighting in the Revolutionary War to writing petitions to state legislatures. First, I present how the "slavery metaphor" propagated by white Loyalists indicates the inherent differences in how the white and black populations experienced the Revolution. There is an overall discussion of the various methods the enslaved used in their attempts to gain freedom: military service, slave petitions, freedom suits, and escape. I also examine the surge of free black communities as a result of the Revolution, helped by white abolitionist allies. Additionally, the impact the Revolution had on slavery as an institution is assessed in both the North and South. Finally, the overall success of the Black American Revolution is determined.

A contradiction so marked of principles: the disputes for the independence of Brazil in the Cisplatine province and the metaphor of slavery (1821-1824)

Resumo: Este artigo discute os usos e significados da metáfora política da escravidão durante o processo de independência do Brasil. Enfatiza os diferentes projetos políticos e os conflitos que surgiram em função da separação entre Brasil e Portugal e a pluralidade de jornais e panfletos que surgiram nessa nova conjuntura. Relaciona essa perspectiva com os debates nesses impressos da província Cisplatina e os questionamentos sobre os pactos políticos firmados no Rio da Prata e sua validade ou não através da presença brasileira. Sublinha que a escravidão, em seus sentidos políticos e sociais, foi elemento fundamental para a construção da oposição ao Império do Brasil nos conflitos pela independência na região.

Author Response

Author Response

Slavery, Redemption, and Manumission as Structural Metaphors in Augustine’s Theology

Across his corpus, Augustine strikingly and recurrently deploys the three cognate metaphors of slavery to sin, redemption from sin, and slavery to God. I argue that Augustine’s use of these theological metaphors is thoroughly contoured by the legal and social strictures governing slavery and freedom in the later Roman empire. To develop this argument, I pay close attention to the economic and legal connotations of some key terms in Augustine’s lexicon of salvation—like manumissio, redemptio, and libertas—and seek to tease out the social, legal, and economic logic they encapsulate. As I show, the concept of dominium underwrites Augustine’s description of the prelapsarian ordo naturalis as a chain of hierarchical relationships: between God and man, soul and body, male and female. The notion that human beings are enslaved to sin, subject to the condicio servitutis from birth, evokes the situation of laboring tenants (coloni) bound to the land through their origo. Moreover, the bishop of Hippo’s descriptions of captivity to the devil and liberation through the interpellation (interpellatio) of God the Redeemer are informed by the contemporary reality of barbarian captivity and liberales causae, so richly described in Augustine’s Letter 10*. Finally, Augustine’s characterization of Christian service in terms of a state of simultaneous freedom and servitude implicitly draws upon the legal norms governing the relationship of freed captives to their redeemers, as well as the obligations of obsequium and gratia which freedmen owed to their former masters.

Searching for a Soul Mate

Searching for a Soul Mate Elizabeth H. Pleck (bio) Carol Faulkner, Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. 224 pp. Bibliography and index $49.95 Carol Faulkner, Unfaithful: Love, Adultery, and Marriage Reform in Nineteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2019. 224 pp. Bibliography and index $49.95 The prize for the most famous metaphor in literature goes to Shakespeare, either for "All the world's a stage" or "But soft! What light through window breaks? It is the East, and Juliet is the sun." The world is decidedly not a stage and Juliet was a teenage female character in a play (that was on a stage), not a centrally placed star consisting of blazing hot gasses. But the mind delights in finding correspondences between wildly different things. Metaphors comparing marriage to something else are centuries old because the wedded state is known by all and significant almost everywhere. Marriage could be the caboose or the engine of comparison. The marriage could be the unqualifiedly favorable term, as in postrevolutionary America where the bonds of citizens to the new republic were likened to the lifelong and affectionate ties of husband to wife. Or marriage could be the clearly unassailable term, as for defenders of slavery, who argued that the peculiar institution resembled marriage since both were based on "natural hierarchy." Since the seventeenth century, intellectuals and reformers have employed the metaphor of marriage as a form of slavery to critique the unequal, even unsavory aspects of marriage. Madeleine de Scudery, the French saloniste and novelist, originated the metaphor. She had in mind ancient bondage, not transatlantic slavery, and was especially animated by the unfreedom of arranged marriage. The English advocate of woman's rights Mary Astell picked up the metaphor about a half century later because she believed that in marriage the wife was subjected to the arbitrary will of her husband, a condition she thought morally wrong. Later on, U.S. abolitionists and "feministabolitionists" (the term of Blanche Glassman Hersh) amplified and made more concrete the marriage metaphor, naming runaway wives as "fugitive slaves." Utopian socialists in the early nineteenth century originated the comparison of marriage with prostitution, not quite as popular as the slavery metaphor, and communitarians and advocates of woman's rights followed their lead.1 A third metaphor—that marriage was a form of adultery—seems counterintuitive [End Page 569] and was considerably less popular, although it was often employed by the same reformers who used the slavery and prostitution metaphors. It, too, originated with European intellectuals; it surfaced in the American press when sex radicals in the U.S. in the 1850s began to refer to the unwholesome nature of sex within a loveless marriage. Historians have noted but not paid much attention to the use of the adultery metaphor because it was less commonly employed than the other two and because historians, like most nineteenthcentury Americans, dismissed those making use of it as cranks. Carol Faulkner, more respectful and appreciative of such rhetoric and the mavericks who employed it, traces the use of the adultery metaphor among critics of marriage between the 1830s and 1880. Her geographic focus is New York state—the newspaper capital of the nation, the home of many spiritualists and of several of the most important intentional communities whose members practiced their own version of freedom within and from marriage. Her cast of characters includes familiar figures—for example, John Humphrey Noyes and Victoria Woodhull—and some colorful unknowns she learned about from the records of communes, newspapers, published memoirs, and personal papers. The lesser-knowns and unknowns are a fairly heterogeneous group of white Anglo-Saxon men and women, some of whom were legally married couples. With the exception of Paschal Bradley Randolph, a biracial spiritualist who sometimes identified himself as Indian, sometimes as Black, the group is entirely white. Randolph, who was decidedly more on the moderate side of the movement, confronted the racism of one of his fellow reformers several times. The one member of the working class was Marie Howland, a former Lowell mill girl whose novel, Papa's Own Girl (1874), expressed her twinned...

The Slave Metaphor and Gendered Enslavement in Early Christian Discourse: Double Trouble Embodied by Marianne Bjelland Kartzow

Reviewed by: The Slave Metaphor and Gendered Enslavement in Early Christian Discourse: Double Trouble Embodied by Marianne Bjelland Kartzow Mary Ann Beavis marianne bjelland kartzow, The Slave Metaphor and Gendered Enslavement in Early Christian Discourse: Double Trouble Embodied (Routedge Studies in the Early Christian World; New York: Routledge, 2018). Pp. xiii + 167. $140. This study sets out to explore the slave metaphor, which is ubiquitous in early Christian discourse, using perspectives from metaphor, intersectionality, and embodiment theory. [End Page 149] The “double trouble” of the subtitle refers to the fact that the metaphor of slavery to God/Christ is not “merely a manner of speaking—it is a way of using some people’s vulnerable bodies and lives as source material to talk about abstract and concrete realties in God’s world” (p. 146). Marianne Bjelland Kartzow uses the device of “imaginary scenes” (following Carolyn Osiek and Margaret Y. MacDonald, A Woman’s Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006] 18–19) to reconstruct the experience of the enslaved in the ancient ecclesia. Kartzow’s analysis ranges from well-known NT passages to the underinterpreted Shepherd of Hermas (chap. 5) and the explicit portrayal of Jesus as a slave trader in the Acts of Thomas (chap. 6). For example, in chap. 2, “Embodying the Slavery Metaphor: Female Characters and Slavery Language,” K. points out that Mary’s self-designation as “female slave of the Lord” (Luke 1:38) resonates with scriptural accounts of the slave girls Hagar, Bilhah, and Zilpah, who served as surrogate mothers for their barren mistresses, and in the interests of patriarchal lineages (pp. 50–51): “When used on a young girl such as Mary, . . . being a woman in reproductive age who is asked to give birth to her master’s son, the metaphor is ‘made real’” (p. 54). K. places the enslaved girl with a python spirit (Acts 16:16–19), dismissed by the text (and by most interpreters) as a nuisance, at the center of attention. By “freeing” the girl from spirit possession, K. notes, Paul causes her to lose her economic value to her owner(s), thus leaving her vulnerable to an uncertain, and likely worse, future (pp. 54–57). In both cases, Paul the “slave of Christ” and his free male com-patriots have very little in common with the metaphorical and real slave women of these narratives. Chapter 3 (“Metaphor and Masculinity”) examines the “no longer slave” formulations of John 15:15 and Gal 4:7, noting that this discourse assumes changes in relationships that are available only to males, whether slave or free: “Women rarely become acknowledged as friends or sons or heirs” (p. 83). Moreover, as chap. 4 argues, if all believers are slaves of the Lord, some (the actually enslaved) are more slaves than others. Chapter 5, on the Shepherd of Hermas, explores a text where a formerly enslaved church leader, the freedman and prophet Hermas, negotiates his transformation from slave of a female owner to metaphorical slave of God—Hermas’s favorite designation for believers. K. pays special attention to the striking parable of the slave and the son (Sim. 5.2), where a faithful slave is not only manumitted but adopted as son and co-heir with his master’s biological son. She speculates, “Perhaps he [Hermas] moved from being a slave of his owner to being a slave of God because he, like the slave in the parable, showed himself worthy of being a freed man and an heir” (p. 113). Paradoxically, K. observes, although metaphorical slavery pervades the Shepherd, actual slaves—apart from the putative author—are invisible, Hermas’s concern for the poor and marginalized notwithstanding (pp. 115–18). For Hermas, especially, the bodily experience of male enslavement and manumission intersects with the metaphorical usage. The last main chapter (“Jesus, the Slave Trader: Metaphor Made Real in The Acts of Thomas”) considers a fictive narrative in which a metaphorical slave of Christ is transformed into a “real” slave when Jesus sells the apostle Thomas to a merchant from India. K. ably unpacks the many ways in which the slave metaphor operates in the text, and how it works with respect not only...

Enslaved Leadership in Early Christianity by Katherine A. Shaner

Reviewed by: Enslaved Leadership in Early Christianity by Katherine A. Shaner Mary Ann Beavis katherine a. shaner, Enslaved Leadership in Early Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2018). Pp. xxviii + 207. $99. This volume is a revision of the author's doctoral dissertation (Harvard Divinity School, 2012; supervised by Laura S. Nasrallah). Although the topic of slavery in early Christianity has been studied from a variety of angles, Shaner's contribution is distinctive in focusing on the role of slaves as religious actors in and around Ephesos. S. uses archaeological and textual evidence to make her case that enslaved persons were "at the center of first- and second-century struggles to define power and authority in both Roman and early Christian communities" (p. 111). In endeavoring to reconstruct the religious involvement of early Christian slaves, S. has affinities with recent trends in the study of ancient slavery that attempt to discern the experience of the enslaved (e.g., Keith Bradley, Slavery and Rebellion in the Roman World, 140 BC–70 BC [Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989]; Stephen Hodkinson and Dick Geary, eds., Slaves and Religions in Graeco-Roman Antiquity and Modern Brazil [Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars, 2012]; Sandra R. Joshel, Slavery in The Roman World [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000]; Sandra R. Joshel and Lauren Hack-worth Petersen, The Material World of Roman Slaves [Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2014]). S. is also indebted to feminist rhetorical criticism, which has uncovered the ways in which the rhetorical perspective of ancient texts and materials "often constructs (rather than describes) gender, slave/free status, economic means, and social status along traditional kyriarchal lines" (p. xv). Thus, although slaves were ubiquitous in antiquity, they are hidden by material that is dominated by the perspectives of slaveholders, which have often been accepted uncritically by scholars. The five main chapters in the book alternate between examinations of evidence that portrays slaves as religious actors in non-Christian and Christian settings in Roman Ephesos. In chap. 1, "Power in Perspectives: Interpreting Enslaved Presence in Archaeological Materials," S. examines how slave presence is marked by spaces, images, texts, and other archaeological remains in the harbor, the agora, and a luxury housing complex. In chap. 2, [End Page 344] "Power Plays: Roman Policies, Public Slaves, and Social Status," S. interrogates the implications of an imperial decree by Paullus Fabius Persicus regulating the role of slaves in the cult of the civic goddess Artemis, which implies that public slaves were buying priesthoods, a practice that Persicus wanted to stop. S. investigates in chap. 3, "Voices of Power: Onesimos, Paul, and the Ambiguity of the Enslaved 'in Christ,'" the ambiguous status of the slave Onesimos, who seems to have held a position of honor in the ekklēsia, perhaps as a deacon (Phlm 1:13). Chapter 4, "Shifting Power: Ambiguous Status, Visual Rhetoric, and the Enslaved in Imperial Sacrificial Practices," contrasts the Parthian Reliefs, which "idealize images of sacrifice, reinforce imperial authority, and erase the role of slaves" (p. xxvi) with inscriptional evidence that enslaved ritual specialists taught elite men holding honorific priesthoods how to perform sacrifices. In chap. 5, "Power in the Ekklēsia: Contesting Enslaved Leadership in 1 Timothy and Ignatius," S. questions these documents' guidelines for various functionaries (bishops, deacons, widows) that attempt to circumscribe the ability of the enslaved, especially, to fill such roles. S. suggests that, in view of the evidence of slave participation in Christian and non-Christian ritual activity uncovered in the previous chapters, slave involvement in these functions likely figured in their contestation by Pseudo-Paul and Ignatius. Shaner's slave-centered approach steers between two viewpoints that have dominated the study of early Christian slavery: the argument that, since slavery could serve as a metaphor for salvation, slavery must have stood for more than abjection—even as a means of upward mobility (e.g., Dale B. Martin, Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity [New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990]); or, conversely, that slavery was a degrading and exploitive institution that allowed the enslaved limited ability to participate in the ekklēsia (e.g., Jennifer A. Glancy, Slavery in Early Christianity [Minneapolis: Fortress, 2005] 50-52, 111). S...

Dale Martin, Slavery as Salvation: The Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity

Summary This article portrays Dale Martin’s Slavery as Salvation (1990) as a ‘key text’. In his landmark study Martin characterises the Pauline metaphorical expression δοῦλος Χριστοῦ (slave of Christ) as a designation for salvation and leadership. A short survey of previous scholarship on this phrase will illuminate the challenging character of Martin’s work. The presentation of Martin’s book will be followed by a short evaluation in which the arguments of his most prominent critic John Byron (2003) will be outlined. The article closes with a brief problematisation of both Martin’s and Byron’s work.

God as Father and Master

Summary Every year during Passover Jews commemorate the liberation of their ancestors from Egypt. It was God who ‘broke the bars of their yoke’ and who ‘made them walk erect’ (Lev 26:13). Elsewhere, however, the Torah seems to suggest that the redemption from Egypt’s service was not so much a release from slavery, as it was a change of master (cf. Ex 4:23 and Lev 25:42). This paradoxical way of thinking about slavery is perpetuated by the early rabbis in the midrashic and halakhic literature of the first centuries C.E. By means of a close reading of a parable from Sifre Numbers (chapter 115) I will clarify the early rabbinic perspective on slavery: becoming a slave of God was the ultimate purpose of the people of Israel, while being a slave of Egypt’s ruler formed its ultimate degradation. We will also see that in Sifre Numbers, as in other early rabbinic and early Christian writings, the metaphor of slavery competes with the metaphor of sonship. In Sifre Numbers the metaphor of slavery is preferred over that of sonship, due to the absolute obedience that God expects from his people, an aspect that cannot be sufficiently expressed by the relation between a father and his son. Finally, this paper will also contribute to the way we understand slavery metaphors in the New Testament, especially in Romans 6.

Food for thought: interpreting the parable of the loyal and wise slave in Q 12:42-44

The parable of the loyal and wise slave appears in Q 12:42-46 (Matt. 24:45-51; Luke 12:42-46). I have argued elsewhere that verses 45-46 were added to verses 42-44 by Q’s main redactor. If so, only Q 12:42-44 originally appeared in Kloppenborg’s formative stratum, or Q 1 . The purpose of the present article is to ascertain the parable’s meaning as it seemingly appeared on the level of Q’s formative stratum. The latter is mainly achieved by taking seriously the parable’s application of the slavery metaphor. It should not come as a surprise that the parable in Q 12:42-44 is all about feeding God’s people.

The Shape of Morality in the Gospel of Mark: An Experiment in Hermeneutics

The following work draws from the philosophical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer to form an inquiry into the moral vision of the Gospel of Mark. The metaphor of slavery is identified as a central component of the moral instruction of Jesus to his disciples. Following a brief analysis of the metaphor in Greco-Roman literature to identify its basic import in Mark’s Gospel, a dialogue is developed between the second Gospel and the moral philosophy of Zygmunt Bauman. Three lines of thought are isolated in the work of Bauman and utilized to illuminate and elaborate the moral vision of Mark that emerges from the metaphor of slavery: the conceptualization of morality as responsibility for others; the rooting of moral action in emotion; and the location of morality at the center of what it means to be human.

Wilson, Ivy G., ed., Whitman Noir: Black America and the Good Gray Poet

Ivy G. Wilson, ed. Noir: Black America and Good Gray Poet. Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2014. xx + 210 pp.Halfway through Ivy G. Wilson's Noir: Black America and Good Gray Poet, Christopher Freeburg writes: Whitman was a racist, and he did subscribe to white supremacist ideas and (90). Freeburg's assessment here intuits, I think, contradiction sometimes complicates this necessary and often thrilling collection of essays. For many, remains democratic poet of America, and so confusion easily abounds when Whitman's racist politics are unearthed. This is a pertinent issue cropped up last year at Northwestern University-where Wilson works-when M.A. music student Timothy McNair protested vaunting of as a democrat by refusing to perform a musical setting of his poetry, which led to a failing course grade. Instead of definitively sorting out Whitman's attitudes toward Afro Americans, Noir productively engages his conflicted inheritance, paying homage to an underappreciated and longstanding tradition of black authors embracing rather than rejecting Whitman's poetry. Natasha Trethewey exemplifies this collection's wide-ranging engagement with on race when she writes, From where I stand, it's easy to feel kinds of contradictions evident in Whitman's work, those things he revealed both intentionally and inadvertently (171). Indeed, Whitman's specters of blackness, and our own haunting by his white supremacy, offer another valence to noir of this collection's title, all more striking for its understatement.Whitman Noir is divided into two parts, first comprised of scholarly essays on relation of to blackness and of subsequent black writers to by-aside from Wilson and Freeburg-Ed Folsom, Amina Gautier, Matt Sandler, and Jacob Wilkenfeld. The second part of book reprints previously published personal and political reflections on by Trethewey and June Jordan, as well as publishes for first time short pieces by Rowan Ricardo Phillips (on Garcia Lorca and Whitman) and George Hutchinson (on visiting Whitman's home and grave in Camden). C. L. R. James, Paul Laurence Dunbar, Langston Hughes, Ralph Ellison, Martin Delany, James Weldon Johnson, and Yusef Komunyakaa, along with many of book's own contributors, provide testament to diverse ways black writers have invoked Whitman. This is a reckoning is consistently laudatory and skeptical, if not downright aghast, of Whitman. One can appreciate, for instance, Jordan's deep alienation from her New Critical schooling while being confounded by her lament over the peculiar North American vendetta against Walt Whitman-which, thankfully, seems dated today (157). It is hard not to love, though, her earnest and playful pronouncement: Listen to this white father; he is so weird (158).The first three essays of this collection-by Folsom, Gautier, and Sandler-are most striking. Folsom shows how Whitman's temporary persona as mash'd in Song of Myself is based upon-both historically and in poet's drafts-a black fireman (unmentioned in published poem) for whom white faces become visible: White and beautiful are faces around me, heads are bared of their fire-caps (5). Whitman, we learn, erases blackness in legible ways, inscribing through development of his corpus formative presence as well as increasing absence of slaves and freedmen. In following essay, Gautier mines Whitman's 1842 temperance novel Franklin Evans, or The Inebriate with dogged singularity, emerging with sterling conclusion Evans' storied self-possession is only won through his ownership of Louis-the brother of creole slave Margaret to whom Evans is briefly married. Whitman shows, writes Gautier, that Evans' own self-mastership is ultimately dependent upon his ownership of Louis (47). thereby unravels intemperance is slavery metaphor animated Washingtonian temperance reformers of time, showing how temperance here literally means mastery over another. …

From Slaves of Sin to Slaves of God: Reconsidering the Origin of Paul's Slavery Metaphor in Romans 6

Abstract The origin of Paul's δοῦλος metaphors has long captured the attention of NT interpreters. While many scholars maintain that these images were principally influenced by one of the modes of physical slavery practiced in the Greco-Roman world, others propose that the metaphors derive exclusively from the servant/slave of God motif enlisted throughout Jewish literature. Concentrating on Romans 6, this article provides a detailed survey of three recent contributions to the Jewish-only position (those by Richard Horsley, John Byron, and Tom Holland, respectively) before responding critically to them at three points. The article ultimately seeks to assert that Paul's δοῦλος metaphor in Romans 6 (and elsewhere), while functioning as an extension of a Jewish theological motif, was significantly influenced by Greco-Roman notions of domestic slavery.

Les immigrants boliviens à São Paulo : métaphore de l'esclavage et figuration de l'altérité

The metaphor of slavery used by Brazilians to describe the working conditions of Bolivian workers in the textile workshops of Sao Paulo gives access to the political dimension of Brazil’s ethno-racial structure and the dilemmas it encounters in a democratic framework. Examining the figure of the slave allows one to show how this category, which serves to classify social relations, draws its meaning from the social world that was created by European migrations and the establishment of a limited form of social citizenship. In this respect, simple comparison allows Bolivian workers to evaluate social relations in Brazil by contrasting them with those familiar to them from Bolivia and Argentina. Bolivian immigration in Sao Paulo lends particular salience to matters of ethnicity, underscoring the tensions that underlie the country’s ethnically hybrid self-image.

Common Bondage: Slavery as Metaphor in Revolutionary America (review)

Reviewed by: Common Bondage: Slavery as Metaphor in Revolutionary America François Furstenberg (bio) Keywords Slavery, Revolutionary War, Abolition Common Bondage: Slavery as Metaphor in Revolutionary America. By Peter Dorsey. (Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 2009. Pp. xviii + 276. Cloth, $43.95.) Eighteenth-century British North Americans, who benefited from some of the highest standards of living and greatest political and religious freedoms [End Page 708] in the Atlantic world, found themselves, in the 1770s, sitting in coffee houses, sipping tea infused with sugar, smoking pipes of tobacco, wearing indigo-dyed clothes—and denouncing “slavery.” By that term they did not mean the real slavery of some half-million people of African descent on the North American mainland, but rather a metaphoric slavery that, in their fevered imaginations, threatened the political liberties of people of European descent. The spectacle has long fascinated and repelled observers. From Samuel Johnson’s famous quip in the 1770s to the great scholarship in the late 1960s and 1970s by Edmund Morgan, David Brion Davis, Winthrop Jordan, and others, these slave drivers yelping for liberty have generated penetrating commentary. The literary scholar Peter Dorsey now launches himself into the mix with a stimulating and frustrating study, the most detailed exploration to date of what he calls “the slavery metaphor” in British North America. Dorsey makes a strong case for a venerable historical interpretation: that the Revolution undermined slavery. The slavery metaphor—by its own internal logic—pulled down the barriers between political and chattel slavery, between slavery as figure of speech and slavery as coerced labor, and led, almost inevitably, to abolition in the North and a wave of emancipation in the South. Dorsey shows how this process worked, in part, through the operation of language itself. Drawing on theories of metaphor, he recruits an array of thinkers—from Hobbes and Locke in seventeenth century to Wayne Booth, Jacques Derrida, George Lakoff, Paul Ricoeur, Toni Morrison, Richard Rorty, and Hayden White (among others) in the twentieth—to argue that metaphor can “bring about a semantic change or a redescription of reality” (24). Which is precisely what the slavery metaphor accomplished: It “altered the reality of eighteenth-century white Americans,” provoking them “to imagine themselves as slaves” (25). It thus “merged revolutionary goals and antislavery activism,” and “altered the way patriots spoke about slavery” (28, 111). Anchored in the rhetoric of colonial resistance, the slavery metaphor made Whigs vulnerable to charges of “hypocrisy” (85, passim). Loyalists, pushing full-bore into the ideological breach, adopted an increasingly antislavery position to highlight their opponents’ liability. In response, Whigs had no choice but to embrace the cause. Abolitionists then jumped through this “rhetorical opening,” using the Whigs’ metaphoric language against the institution of slavery (156). “White abolitionists, African Americans, as well as Royalists, repeatedly and forcefully [End Page 709] challenged Whig writers to live up to their words” (108). It all resulted in “growing antislavery convictions” across the colonies (110). “Patriots,” Dorsey argues, “increasingly believed that eliminating slavery was the price they were going to have to pay for independence” (113). So far did antislavery sentiment go, it gave rise to the terrifying specter of total race war—a 180–degree turn of Fortune’s wheel—leading black writers like Phillis Wheatley to “assuage the widespread racial fears ignited by the Revolution” and its militant live-free-or-die language by emphasizing benevolent, Christian virtues that ultimately undermined the struggle for abolition itself (173). Despite this turn, however, “the patriots’ antislavery sentiments continued to shape the consciences of American,” and, in the long run, “would continue to remind white Americans that chattel slavery self-evidently conflicted with their founding ideals” (217–18). But Dorsey is not content with a simple linear account; his book pushes in many directions along the way. The slavery metaphor was, as Dorsey shows, “ever flexible,” employed by a variety of actors to a variety of ends (72). Even as it drove white Americans toward antislavery, it also promoted “contempt” for slaves and stimulated “great racial differentiation . . . [by] suggesting that those who have already submitted to slavery were unworthy of freedom” (30). The slavery metaphor also “altered the era’s understanding of gender” by opposing...

A "Daughter of the Occident" Travels to the "Orient": Ida von Hahn-Hahn's The Countess Faustina and Letters From the Orient

This article analyzes the relationship between feminist content and racializing discourse in two works by Ida von Hahn-Hahn (1805-80). Susanne Zantop's exploration of race and gender in Germany's "colonial fantasies" provides an important point of departure. However, this article argues that the masculinist boundaries of such fantasies must be reexamined to include an author such as Hahn-Hahn. In Countess Faustina (Gräfin Faustine , 1841), Hahn-Hahn connects female development with the Orient through the metaphor of slavery and a fictional trip to the Orient that appropriates the site for her heroine. In Letters From the Orient (Orientalische Briefe , 1844), the author-traveler continues to advocate female development, but her racially charged descriptions of the people she encounters leave no doubt that they are not included in her progressive worldview. Her works serve as a reminder that relationships of domination and notions of power are not limited to men or masculine fantasies. (TSO)

The Economics of Salvation in El esclavo del demonio

Mira de Amescua's 1605 play El esclavo del demonio represents the passage of a male sinner, Gil, from extreme sin to sainthood, creatively articulating Catholic doctrine regarding free will via the metaphor of slavery. This study traces the text's alliance of the good woman with the slave, the one who lacks her own will, whereas the perfect man realizes his. Gil's companion in transgression is the violative character Lisarda, who ultimately sells herself into slavery and then dies of sorrow. In her progression to the perfect slave, Lisarda pays not only for her original sin of disobedience, but the multiple transgressions of Gil as well, and for those payments she is rewarded not with sanctity, but with death. This unbalanced formula for salvation reflects early seventeenth-century versions of the vita of Mary Magdalen. El esclavo del demonio thus constructs the good woman as inherently slavish and thereby highly functional as the expiator of sin, particularly the sins of the men she is understood to have drawn into transgression. (ER)

Slavery Metaphors in Early Judaism and Pauline Christianity (review)

Wissenschaftliche Untersuchungen zum Neuen Testament, 2nd Series, No. 162. Tubingen: Mohr Siebeck, 2003. 304 pp. Euro49. This volume, slightly revised (p. v) doctoral thesis in theology (University of Durham), is an attempt to establish Jewish background, as opposed to Greco-Roman background, of slavery metaphors in the New Testament. main question concerns the precise meaning of the phrase of in Paul's letters. As Byron puts the problem, The contrast between the Jewish and Greco-Roman backgrounds can easily lead toward two opposite conclusions about the Pauline metaphor (p. 3). purpose of the exegesis is to show that Paul's self-designation does not need to be interpreted exclusively against the background of secular institutional slavery in order to discover Jewish self-understanding (p. 17), theological goal. Readers unfamiliar with New Testament studies should be aware that Byron's book is reply to Dale B. Martin, Slavery as Salvation: Metaphor of Slavery in Pauline Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1990), which argues that Paul's self-designation functions as form of status-by-association, analogous to that for in Greco-Roman society who were agents of the aristocratic elite, one important example of which are the and freedmen of the Roman emperor (slaves of Caesar) who held posts in imperial administration. book is divided into two parts. Part One surveys in piecemeal fashion the of motif in Early Judaism, identified with the Hebrew Bible and ancient Israelite religion. analysis rarely rises above straightforward word study, concordance-style inventory of various terms in corpus of literature. word study finds slave of God to occur in royal and religious contexts as a form of polite language with little relationship to the actual institution of slavery (p. 29), except to evoke the Exodus or the Joseph cycle. Byron argues that the slave of God metaphor points to an overarching pattern of humiliation-obedience-exaltation, uniformly present in Early Judaism. Even Josephus and Philo exhibit this pattern, Jewish of slavery to God (pp. 76-142); their metaphors of slavery must refer to the biblical Joseph as the paradigmatic enslaved figure. Yet Byron himself admits that notion of slavery to God is not present in any of the material examined (p. 138), weakness of his thesis. Part Two turns to the main issue of the book, the of self-designation in Paul's letters. Philippians contains nothing that indicates implicitly or explicitly that Paul has institutional imagery in mind when he identifies himself, Timothy and Christ as slaves (p. …

Gore, Gibson, and Goldsmith: The Evolution of Internet Metaphors in Law and Commentary

This paper addresses the evolution of metaphors for the Internet and shows how they have constrained and determined the development of cyberlaw. Within the law, metaphors mold the framework of discourse, determining the scope of appropriate questions about and answers to various social and legal problems. Courts and commentators employ metaphors as heuristics to generate hypotheses about the application of law to novel, unexplored domains. Metaphors structure the way lawyers conceptualize legal events, as they infiltrate, consciously and unconsciously, legal discourse. Under the classic formalist view of common law analogy as syllogism, analogical reasoning from precedent begins with the establishment of a rule behind a case or group of similar cases. Judges then apply the rule fairly mechanically to the case at hand to yield a result that is understood through the background of precedent. In contrast to figurative literary metaphors, highly structured analogical, metaphorical mappings may be used to make persuasive, logical arguments. Like all metaphors, however, legal metaphors possess a paradoxical quality, embodied in the constant tension between the legal metaphor's literal incongruence and metaphorical congruence with reality. Metaphors whose metaphorical congruence with reality is perceived as dominant, such as the marketplace of ideas metaphor in First Amendment jurisprudence and the bundle of sticks metaphor in Takings clause jurisprudence, will continue to have analogical value and will be perpetuated through judicial opinion and scholarly commentary. Conversely, legal metaphors erceived as having greater literal incongruence with reality, such as the slavery metaphor of African Americans as chattels, will lose their value and be discarded. While metaphors aid humans in comprehending abstract concepts and legal doctrines, they also may limit human understanding by selectively highlighting various aspects of an issue while suppressing and marginalizing others. Unreflective use of metaphors can lead lawyers to take for granted the realities that metaphors enable. A bad metaphor can also simply lead to bad decision making. For example, Cass Sunstein argues that the marketplace of ideas metaphor has turned the right to free expression into a degraded form of commerce. This paper seeks to explore the evolution of metaphorical inferences as applied to the Internet within legal commentary and judicial opinions. Three metaphors in particular will be examined: the information superhighway, cyberspace, and the Internet as real space. Given the Internet's ongoing evolution as an unstable and ever-changing technology, courts and commentators have faced perpetual difficulty in mapping metaphors to it. Changing social constructions of the Internet as necessitated by its evolving underlying technological architecture have supported, or conversely eroded, a particular metaphor's literal congruence with reality. The purpose of this paper to make transparent the different conceptions of the Internet courts and commentators are sub silentio employing, and the various sociological, technological, and ideological conceptions of the world that support them.