Period Of Slavery Research Articles

Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation

Troubling Freedom: Antigua and the Aftermath of British Emancipation

INDUSTRIALISASI VAGINA: POTRET KEBIJAKAN PELACURAN

The issue of prostitution has long existed before, which is believed to have begun since the period of slavery. Even prostitution as a work is often referred to as one of the oldest types of work in the World. Although some Feminist groups before the 1980s convincingly said that prostitution is a sign and a subordinate example of women that will not exist anymore when women get the equation (Jefrey 2009). As Millett puts it, the old form of 'living fossils' of slave relations still exists today (Millet 1975). Even Jeffrey (2009) says that what is most important today is that the current ideology and new economic practice, "Neo-liberalism," in which the tolerance of 'sexual liberty' has been combined with free market ideology to reconstruct prostitution as 'work' law that could be the basis of the national and international sex industry. Therefore, the development of this sector needs to be understood as the commercialization of the subordination of women, and shows how the return of the global sex industry can begin.

Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World 1780–1840 by Rana A. Hogarth

Reviewed by: Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World 1780–1840 by Rana A. Hogarth Tara Inniss (bio) Hogarth, Rana A. Medicalizing Blackness: Making Racial Difference in the Atlantic World 1780–1840. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2017, 290 pp. 6.125 x 9.25, 12 halftones, notes, bibl., index. US$90.00, hardcover. ISBN: 9781469632865. Also Paperback and eBook. The circulation of medical knowledge, particularly during the colonial period, is a vast field of potential study for the Caribbean historian of medicine. Given the number of publications in various languages across the region over the period, it is regrettable that more of the region’s scholarship has not been dedicated to knowledge formation and exchange among physicians in the region and beyond. Rana Hogarth’s comparative study of the racialization of medicine and the African body provides careful insight into the medical construction of race in Jamaica and South Carolina during the period of slavery. Organized into three parts, Hogarth demonstrates how physicians, and planters, in Jamaica and South Carolina were engaged in an iterative process to construct not only medical definitions of race, but also to racialize the African body, particularly the enslaved body, and ailments “peculiar” to black bodies in the tropics. Another useful comparison is her evolution of public institutions, such as hospitals and workhouses, for the surveillance and control of sick black bodies in both Jamaica and the Antebellum South—or what she terms as the “Greater Caribbean”. In Part I, Making Difference: Race and Yellow Fever, Hogarth traces some widely accepted views on the perceived race-based immunity of enslaved Africans to yellow fever. Even in the midst of dissenting views on the widely accepted notion that enslaved Africans were immune to the lethal effects of mosquito-borne yellow fever epidemics that swept the Greater Caribbean, leaving thousands dead, there was a consensus on the inalienable issue of racial difference between how disease afflicted the black versus the white body. Part II, In Sickness and Slavery: Black Pathologies, Hogarth examines [End Page 221] the perplexing racialized discourse around the disease Cachexia Africana (also known as dirt-eating, mal d’estomac, geophagy and pica). This was a well-known illness affecting enslaved African populations in the Caribbean, and described by enslavers/physicians. There have been many explanations for the descriptions and interventions that physicians have made about the disease. But Hogarth goes beyond these to establish that the very construction of the disease was one based on racial difference, helping to consolidate the medical authority of white men over other practitioners, including Obeah men and women, even though African practitioners were constantly contesting that authority. Part of the knowledge exchange among Jamaican and Antebellum Southern practitioners was over the diagnosis and treatment of the disease. There was a deepening sense that Africans were engaging in resistance to white authority over their own health and bodies. Therefore, there was less of an effort to “treat” the illness, and more to control and discipline the black body. One of Hogarth’s most convincing discussions of the racialization of enslaved health is in Part III, Disciplining Blackness: Hospitals. Hogarth frames the evolution of public institutions for the treatment of black bodies within a continuing discourse of surveillance and control in slavery, even as the care and treatment of enslaved workers shifted from private estate-based plantation medicine to state/public intervention. This discussion is particularly useful in providing more insight into the systemic place of race in medical institutions. Hogarth layers racialization of the black body from observation to pathologization to its ultimate surveillance and control, so at no point is the enslaved “patient” “object” “subject” ever free from the gaze of the white male physician conducting his research. Her examination of race-making in medicine in the Greater Caribbean provides fertile ground for further explorations of medical knowledge exchange both within and beyond the region. It is interesting that she pulls the Antebellum South into the ambit of influence of Caribbean-based physicians publishing on common diseases affecting enslaved populations. Contrary to our twenty-first-century notions of globalized medicine that often depict the balance of power in medical research weighed in favour...

Entre Senhores, Sambas e Cervejas: a construção discursiva da mulata fácil no Brasil

Resumo: O artigo tem por objetivo empreender uma leitura dos discursos que versam sobre o imaginário da mulata fácil no Brasil (Freyre, 2006 [1933]) considerando sua densidade histórica. O intuito é partir dos enunciados que irrompem no período escravocrata sobre essa mulata, discutir a forma como ela é colocada à prova no decorrer do século XX e, por fim, analisar as atualizações e apropriações dessa memória na atualidade. Para tanto, parte-se de uma Análise do Discurso derivada de Michel Pêcheux, mas que incorpora as atuais discussões empreendidas por Jean-Jacques Courtine, principalmente aquelas que dizem respeito à Semiologia Histórica.

Miscegenation in America The White Man's Burden in the Slavery Period

Miscegenation in America The White Man's Burden in the Slavery Period

„Blaski Miltonowskiego utraconego raju”. Obraz przeszłości w pisarstwie Henryka Sienkiewicza

The article deals with the analysis of the artistic and the ideological assumptions of the constructing the literary image of the past in point of view of Henryk Sienkiewicz in connection with his polemic against Wlodzimierz Spasowicz in the context of the discussion of the 19th-century about the values of historical novel. In the theoretical declarations the author pays major attention to the hypnotic charm of the past which he named „the brilliane of Milton’s paradise lost” and references to the great poetry of romanticism. In the writer;s programme intentions the literary works should presented the ideological versions of the myth of the Polish past during the period of national slavery. Sienkiewicz focuses on subjective experiences of his fictional heroes, connects existential and historical dimensions of human life, looking for semantic mechanisms of history. The analysis of the writer’s outlook on life concentrating on the universal questions like the sense of life, the essence of world, the human’s nature and the hierarchy of values. The article attempts to show that the absolute values existence depends on the memory of the past.

Maternal struggles and the politics of childlessness under pronatalist Caribbean slavery

ABSTRACTThis article considers the relationship of enslaved and apprenticed women in the Anglophone Caribbean to the embodied experience of childbearing, motherhood, and childlessness. It places this analysis in the context of a discussion of the development and implementation of pronatalist policies in the Anglophone Caribbean during the late period of slavery. It examines the experience of pronatalist policies by enslaved women, using as a case study a microhistory from Jamaica during the apprenticeship period (1834–1848). Although the existence of pronatalist policies gave some women (mothers with large numbers of children) a position from which to claim reduced workloads and other ‘rights’, they made the situation of childless women more difficult. In historians' attention to the struggles of mothers, we have sometimes paid insufficient attention to the perspective of childless and bereaved women.

奴隷制末期におけるジャマイカ社会の変化 : 職能的・人種的秩序の形成と「自由人化」

奴隷制末期におけるジャマイカ社会の変化 : 職能的・人種的秩序の形成と「自由人化」

Genetics of the great migration

Human Genetics![Figure][1] Slavery shaped the genetic diversity of African Americans. CREDIT: “THE GOOBER-GATHERERS,” 1890 (ENGRAVING), BRADLEY, HORACE (FL. 1890)/PRIVATE COLLECTION/PETER NEWARK AMERICAN PICTURES/BRIDGEMAN IMAGES The African American population is underrepresented in genetic studies, and their history of slavery, systemic discrimination, and migration probably shaped their genetic diversity. To better understand this, Baharian et al. analyzed the genetic variation in 3736 individuals from three cohorts representing the diversity of African Americans across the United States. These data identified historical events in the movement and admixture (interbreeding of isolated groups) of African Americans, including the fact that about 1.2% of their ancestry is Native American, which probably traces back to the early period of slavery. Overall, the data illustrate how differences in social opportunity over centuries can shape the genetic diversity of a population. PLOS Genet. 12 , e1006059 (2016). [1]: pending:yes

A fertilidade ancestral em "Ponciá Vivêncio"

The literature of Conceicao Evaristo presents in its characters a rescue and a sort of re­writing of Brazilian historical records, mainly experienced by the black skinned people. Therefore, a literature work as such goes beyond the intentions and canonical places to be destined, because it is a fictional production that acts interposing the discourse of literary authoritarianism. Conceicao Evaristo is an author who symbolizes this multiplicity of inherited experiences of the slavery period and post-colonialism in Brazil. Whence, the purpose of this study is to explore the reflections on the historical memory in the novel Poncia Vicencio, as well as the issues of ancestrally and how it is con­figured in the maternity of two feminine characters in the novel: the protagonist Poncia Vicencio and the wise Nengua Kainda. Therefore, the considerations of Verena Alberti (2004) on memory and orality; and Reginaldo Prandi (2001) on the representation of mythology of deities in this narrative, it will be used as theoretical framework.

ARISTOTEL U SVETLU AMERIČKE ISTORIJE ROBOVLASNIŠTVA

Tema rada je Aristotelovo poimanje građanina i roba u antičkom kontekstu u odnosu na njegovo recipiranje u teoriji modernog američko–robovlasničkog perioda. Identitet ovog pojma u Antici je oblikovan kroz višeslojno istorijsko iskustvo Aristotela. Njegova višeznačnost određena je Aristotelovim poimanjem čoveka kao političkog i logosnog bića, ali i pojma prirode. Sa Aristotelovim definisanjem građanina u neraskidivoj su vezi pojmovi: slobodnjaka, gospodara, varvara, robova, žena, dece, zanatlija, stranaca, životinja, vlasništva, domaćinstva i polisa. To podrazumeva živu višedimenzionalnu relaciju ovih pojmova s pojmom građanina kroz presek, preplitanje i protivrečnosti u samoj Aristotelovoj filozofiji, bez kojih je nemoguće bliže odrediti ovaj pojam i vice versa. Iako je Aristotel zadužio savremenu filozofiju dragocenim filozofskim stavovima, takođe je u amanet ostavio i učenje o gospodstvu i ropstvu koje je utemeljio u antički shvaćenom prirodnom pravu. Ovo nasleđe igraće značajnu društveno–političku ulogu od 17. do 19. veka, prvenstveno u južnjačkom robovlasničkom delu Sjedinjenih Država. Aristotelova ideja prirodne hijerarhije pružala je legitimitet postojećoj hijerarhiji i obračunu sa modernom idejom prirodnog prava koju su zastupali abolicionisti. Iako moderni robovlasnički sistem poseduje kapitalističku dimenziju i vremenski pripada Moderni, on ontološki pripada pred–modernom svetu. Takođe, njegovu osobenost čini to što sopstvenu hijerarhiju supstancijalizuje u pojmu rasne razlike. Sa tim u vezi biće preispitane osobenosti ove recepcije Aristotela, kao i to da li Aristotelovo učenje o gospodaru i robu postavlja fundus za rasizam.

A travessia do rio mudando identidades culturais causando des-locamentos – um estudo sobre a obra de Carys Phillips

The aim of this paper is to demonstrate, through the novel Crossing the River by Caryl Phillips, situations of (not) belonging and fragmentation of the subject caused by the diaspora in the period of slavery. This is an effort to examine the diasporic identity formation of the central characters of the novel and its social and cultural consequences in the ways of the Atlantic. From the perspective of the diaspora and postcolonialism, the analysis is divided into four main authors: Stuart Hall, in which one can understand the meaning of the African Diaspora, Avtar Brah, which focuses on the diasporic movement through the prism of the idea of home and belonging, Paul Gilroy, highlighting black identity formed in-between, in transit through the paths of the Atlantic, and Frantz Fanon, who analyzes the fragmentation of the African subject due to the forced diaspora. The result are the voices of African culture that the diasporic movement, still echo all over the Atlantic.

Biography and the Black Atlantic. Edited by Lisa A. Lindsay and John Wood Sweet (Philadelphia, University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013). 370 pp. $55.00

This exceptional set of essays explores the “Black Atlantic” through biography. The volume is organized around particular life stories that illustrate the implications for interpreting the interconnected histories of Atlantic societies. Generally, these fine contributions raise issues of how to reconstruct biographies to determine their significance as individualized glimpses into patterns of history; responses to enslavement; and the quest for liberty, dignity, and meaning. Implicitly, biography is interdisciplinary because it draws on written and sometimes oral texts that have to be examined through the lens of literary criticism while explaining the context in terms of historical methodology. This volume addresses this dual orientation carefully and thoroughly. Suitably critiqued, it can help to propel the genre even further as a historical tool of analysis. The book is divided into twelve chapters and an afterword. A number of contributions summarize or extend earlier studies of individuals.One of the great achievements in this volume is the focus on the biographies of women, who are seldom seen or heard in the history of slavery, particularly those women who were enslaved in Africa. Jon Sensbach discusses the lives of Rebecca Rotten and Maria, the “Mooress,” both of whom were Moravians. Cassandra Pybus looks at Jane Thompson, who escaped to British forces in Virginia and ultimately found her way to Sierra Leone in 1791. Rebecca Scott and Jean-Michel Hébrard follow the path of Rosalie of the “Poulard Nation,” identified as Fulbe, during the era of the Haitian Revolution.Martin A. Klein provides a marvelous overview of African biographical studies, as well as an introduction to the problem of finding the voices of the enslaved; he gives particular attention to scholarship about slaves born in Africa that has often been overlooked. Sheryl Kroen uncovers the ideological underpinnings of Atlantic history through the British animated character “Robinson Charley,” who personified the “North Atlantic” community during World War II and the subsequent Cold War. João José Reis reconstructs the story of Manoel Joaquim Ricardo, who left Hausaland in 1806/7 and, after gaining his freedom in Brazil, became a wealthy merchant and slaveholder who traded in West Africa. Lloyd S. Kramer follows the path of David Dorr who traveled from North America to Europe during the 1850s. Similarly, Roquinaldo Ferreira studies Francisco Gomes, a merchant and colonial official in the Angolan seaport of Benguela, who in the early 1820s was accused of plotting a rebellion to free the colony from Portuguese rule. Gomes was born in Rio de Janeiro, possibly as a slave; in 1800, he was exiled to Benguela as a criminal.Inevitably, a few caveats are warranted in measuring the success of this volume. Vincent Carretta repeats his well-known arguments about the methodological issues concerning the reconstruction of the life of Gustavus Vassa, whom he prefers to call Olaudah Equiano without exploring whether the individual in question was known, or preferred to be known, by that name at the time. Unfortunately, his methodology does not take into account either recent research of others or previous criticisms of his own work. Lisa Lindsay examines the mythology of “tribal marks” in her investigation of James C. Vaughan’s Yoruba background without raising questions about the meaning of facial and body scarification and the inappropriate use of the term tribal in discussing its significance. Nor does Lindsay question the application of the ethnic name Yoruba in the context of Egba history and its relationship to the collapse of Oyo.Jane Landers applies ethnic terminology from the Americas, specifically Mandinga, to ethnicity in West Africa, where the term was not used, without fully comprehending the antiquity and centrality of Islam in the Senegambia region of West Africa. She does not explain who the “Muslim converts” were in the Gambia; in the early eighteenth century, Muslim identity in Senegambia had more to do with the emerging age of jihad than with matters involving conversion to Islam per se.Reis is incorrect in claiming that kola was made into a drink when it was chewed. He also overlooks the practice of murgu in West Africa in the “hiring out” of slaves in Bahia. His subject of study was not “probably” enslaved during jihad; no other explanation is even plausible. Like Landers and Scott/Hébrard, he fails to place jihad in its proper context. Hence, on the one hand, these explorations in life histories reveal interconnections within the trans-Atlantic world, but, on the other, they sometimes betray weaknesses in comprehending the historiography of Africa during the period of Atlantic slavery.

The Jamaican Theatre: Highlights of the Performing Arts in the Twentieth Century by Wycliffe Bennett, and Hazel Bennett

Reviewed by: The Jamaican Theatre: Highlights of the Performing Arts in the Twentieth Century by Wycliffe Bennett, and Hazel Bennett Nicosia Shakes (bio) Bennett, Wycliffe, and Hazel Bennett. The Jamaican Theatre: Highlights of the Performing Arts in the Twentieth Century. Kingston: U of the West Indies P, 2011. Since Errol Hill’s groundbreaking text, The Jamaican Stage 1655–1900: Profile of a Colonial Theatre (1992), there has been a serious need for a monograph that assesses Jamaican theater in the modern period. Wycliffe Bennett and Hazel Bennett’s The Jamaican Theatre: Highlights of the Performing Arts in the Twentieth Century is important because it goes a considerable way towards filling the dearth of information that exists on theater in that country. It outlines the development of Jamaican theater from the early-twentieth century to the present, highlighting various achievements, influences, important landmark institutions, and events as well as individuals and groups who have contributed to the national development of theater. The book is divided into eighteen chapters categorized into four “Acts” or sections. Act I: “Setting the Scene” provides a historiographical overview of Jamaican theater from the seventeenth century to the mid-twentieth century. Much of it focuses on business and management and less on technique and aesthetic influences on form. In the first chapter, the authors examine the development of theater juxtaposed with significant phases in Jamaican [End Page 1194] history. The various periods are delineated as such: the period up to the First World War (pre-1914), the period between the First and Second World Wars (1914–1945), the period between the Second World War and Independence (1945–1962), and the post-Independence period (post-1962). There is a brief discussion of the process of “creolization,” particularly as regards the blending of African and European cultures that impacted the formation of theatrical and other performance arts. Notably, the authors conduct a succinct analysis of the predominance of African culture and its denial and suppression during and after the period of slavery. Other chapters delve into the institutions and landmark productions that came to define and influence Jamaican theater in the pre-Independence era, as well as the importance of patronage. One chapter that stands out amongst the rest focuses on the significant production, Jamaica Triumphant, staged in 1937 under the direction of Father Daniel Lord. Jamaica Triumphant was a landmark historical pageant that told the story of the country’s history from the pre-Columbian Taino era up to the twentieth century. Featuring a cast of four hundred, and attended by twenty thousand people over the course of four performances, Jamaica Triumphant was the largest theatrical production in the country’s history, and one that harnessed the creative talents of many Jamaicans. According to Bennett and Bennett, “the production required overseas help in only two departments,” and “Many practitioners have dated their important beginnings in the theatre from this show” (45). This chapter also provides an important commentary regarding the formation of a national theater. It is one of the few instances in which Bennett and Bennett present a critical opinion on theater and society in Jamaica. The country does not currently have a national theater per se, and though the commentary is brief it is worth quoting: … a national theatre—that theatre that is most characteristic of a country at a particular time—will derive its shape and substance from psychological dispositions that predominate the national life. If men of vision as distinct from mere copyists take the lead, the national theatre may even go further and be somewhat ahead of current thinking. The national theatre will be among the first groups to perceive ultimate directions and help the society realize its ideal. (46) Act II: “The Jamaican Stage” covers the period after the Second World War to the formation of theater institutions in the latter part of the twentieth century. Here, the focus is on the development of a distinctly Jamaican theater industry. Most of the section is dedicated to the chapter on the annual national Pantomime, and the Pantomime Company, arguably one of the most well-known, well-patronized fixtures in the country’s theater scene. Chapter 8 chronicles the dramatic institutions developed at the...

Kanonizacja nowomęczenników okresu niewoli tureckiej w Kościele prawosławnym i ich znaczenie

Article is devoted to the issue of the canonization of the so-called new-martyrs of the Balkans in the Orthodox Church, the issue that has not been in the Polish language studied yet. It concerns the saints who died for Christ after the conquest of Constantinople by the Turks in 1453. The considerations on the subject is preceded by a short introduction on the role of the martyrs in the Church. Article also refers to the issue of nomenclature, i.e. the definition of the term “new-martyr”, and its appearance in Christianity. Nearly 300 of the new-martyrs of the period of Ottoman slavery are known by the name. This group includes people of different social groups: the hierarchy, the rulers, the monks, married priests and lay people. It is probably only a small part of people who have suffered the death during this period in defense of Orthodoxy. The researchers divided them into four groups, which, the author presents. Their cult for centuries was limited because of the fear of consequences from the Turkish authorities. Only part of them was canonized after 1821, when as a result of uprising the independence of the Greece was proclaimed. The article also contains a part in which the importance of the new-martyrs of the Ottoman period for the Orthodox Church and its faithful is explained. Their importance was emphasized already by their contemporaries. This importance is multi-faceted and refers to the role of the Church plays from its beginning by the martyrs.

Toys with Professions: Racialized Black Dolls, 1850-1940

Debates on the character of the old and new South in the USA developed during the late 1800s, leading to creation of restrictive Jim Crow laws and reconceptualizations of the Civil War. A shifting racial ideology included a nostalgic fiction of an antebellum period in which all were happy and accepted their places in life. Such ideological developments also entailed transference of prejudices and stereotypes from a period of slavery to a context of emancipated African Americans. Racialized toys were created and deployed as part of this social discourse. Social constructs such as class, gender, race, and nationalism were structured early in life through the use of toys. I compare an array of dolls with Black and White design themes, sold in the period 1850-1940, and the facets of racialization unfolding in the hands of children and adults. These dolls said more than just “play with me,” and radiated racial messages of social construction.

The Summer of the Multitude

The year 2013 marked a turning point for Brazil. On one hand, it gave voice to a crisis involving the notion of development as a technocratic tool for achieving economic growth—in a “heated economy” at that. On the other hand, it signaled the rise of the Brazilian multitude and the paroxysm of a revolt that started at least as early as 2010 but that in reality can be traced to much more distant periods: the dictatorship that lasted from the sixties to the eighties back through to the core of Brazil’s racism and inequality, that is, the slavery period. In this sense, struggling against the country’s present and past, the multitude has needed to face the fact that there are not many tools available for understanding the moment in which we live. Thus, combining a lot of creativity and courage, poor people, who have experienced a newfound social mobility and who have affirmed themselves in the last decade, and an increasingly precarious middle class took over the streets in demonstrations that piggybacked on the subject of the World Cup to protest some of the most iniquitous conditions in contemporary Brazilian society (some of them aggravated by preparation for the mega-event). This article presents a brief genealogy of the amazing period known as the “June Days” in Brazil—but which has lasted even until now—and outlines some of the issues and problems it has brought to the surface.

Black Catholicism

Black Catholicism

Who are Black Americans? A Primer for Educators <em>(Editor’s Commentary)</em>

Persons of Black African ancestry live as citizens, foreign nationals, and indigenous populations on every continent as a result of immigration, colonialism and slave trading. Today, most Black people in the Americas are the progeny of victims of the transatlantic slave trade. From 1619 to 1863, millions of Africans were involuntarily relocated from various regions of West Africa to newly established European colonies in the Americas. Many different African ethnic groups, including the Congo, Yoruba, Wolof, and Ibo, were casualties of the transatlantic slave trade. The Black American population is the aggregate of these groups, consolidated into one race, bound by a common struggle against racial oppression and distinguished by cultural dualism (Toldson, 1999).Importantly, the historic legacy of Black people in the Western Hemisphere is not limited to slavery. The Olmec heads found along the Mexican Gulf Coast is evidence of African colonies in the Americas centuries before Columbus arrived in the Caribbean (Van Sertima, 2003). Black people were also responsible for establishing the world's first free Black republic, and only the second independent nation in the Western Hemisphere, with the Haitian Revolution (Geggus, 2001). In the United States, almost 500,000 African Americans were free prior to the Civil War and were immensely instrumental in shaping U.S. policy throughout abolition and beyond. Post-Civil War, African Americans influenced U.S. arts, agriculture, foods, textile, language, and invented technological necessities such as the traffic light and elevators, and parts necessary to build the automobile and personal computer. All of these contributions were necessary for the U.S. to become a world power by the 20th century.Racism and oppression are forces that have shaped the experiences and development of Black people worldwide. Although European colonialists initially enslaved Black people because of their agricultural expertise and genetic resistance to diseases, they used racist propaganda to justify their inhumane practices. During periods of slavery and the Scramble for Africa, European institutions used pseudoscience and religion (e.g., the Hamitic myth) to dehumanize Black people (Toldson, 2008). The vestiges of racism and oppression survived centuries after propaganda campaigns ended and influence all human interactions today.Currently, racism is perpetuated most profoundly through the educational system (Loewen, 1996). Black students are taught to revere historians such as Columbus, who nearly committed genocide against the native population of the Dominican Republic; and Woodrow Wilson who openly praised the Ku Klux Klan. Although many of these facts are not well known and purposefully disguised in history texts, children often leave traditional elementary and secondary education with the sense that aside from a few isolated figures (e.g., Martin Luther King and Harriet Tubman) Black people had a relatively small role in the development of modem nations (May, Willis, & Loewen, 2003).Survey data often indicate that African Americans have the highest incidence and mortality of any given mental or physical disorder, are more deeply impacted by social ills, and generally have the lowest economic standing. …

Coming to terms with the past? The controversial issue of slavery in contemporary Mauritian fiction

Among the innovative aesthetic, thematic and poetic perspectives that can be observed, since the early 1990s, in a young generation of Francophone writers on Mauritius, one can find investments in the multiple and conflicting pasts of the island. Yet a look at recent literary production reveals that the period of slavery and the figure of the slave are almost absent, apart from one text – Terre d’orages (2003) by Serge Ng Tat Chung. Clearly, the paradigm of slavery has less ‘symbolic capital’ in literary representation (and society as a whole) than other Mauritian pasts, notably indenture. Conferring on literature a crucial role in portraying and negotiating this issue, this article interrogates this absence/presence of slavery in recent Mauritian prose fiction. With regard to the island’s complex constructions and performances of memory, it will discuss the veiled longue duree of this ‘foundational violence’ and lay particular emphasis on the merits and pitfalls of Tat Chung’s novel.