Atlantic Trade Research Articles

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)

Textimony: The Grammar of Atrocity

Abstract This essay seeks to understand the complexity of a post-Holocaust discourse of comparative suffering in law and literature, focusing on the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade. The essay traces a history of post-1945 discourse about the Holocaust, as the place of Jewish suffering under the Nazis swerves between comparability and incomparability, ineffability and analogy, in legal and literary representations. Focusing on M. NourbeSe Philip’s poetry in her work Zong!, which features an entanglement between the articulative capacity of Holocaust analogies for articulating the suffering of the transatlantic slave trade and the simultaneous tendency for such comparisons to occlude the very subject that such a comparison seeks to articulate, the argument identifies the tensions that inevitably emerge out of a discourse of comparative memory. Moving outside of Zong!, the essay shows how this problem is embedded, with significant impact on the history and the future of the legal recognition of suffering produced by the transatlantic slave trade, opening up new lines of inquiry about the efficacy, and the consequences, of comparison on the terrain of post-Holocaust human rights.

Robert Burns's Black Neighbours in Ayrshire

Robert Burns's decision to emigrate to Jamaica in 1786 as a slave-driver is well known, and is increasingly debated as Scotland develops its understanding of its direct and indirect roles in the transatlantic slave trade and Black chattel slavery. The stories, and even the names, of the Black people of that period (servants and tradesmen) are typically more ephemeral than those of Burns and his friends and patrons, but it would be wrong to assume that there were no Black people living and working in Ayr and its environs in Burns's day. While the Black population across Scotland was small (commentators suggest around seventy individuals against some fifteen thousand in England & Wales), contemporary records show that over a dozen lived and worked in Ayrshire. While there is no concrete evidence in the Poet's writings, this study shows that it is highly likely that Burns saw some of these people on the streets, that he met the biracial children of the manumitted Black man Scipio Kennedy, and that he was present at the baptism of a Black man, John Cartwright, in Mauchline Kirk in 1784.

Modernity's Antillean ecologies: Dispossession, disasters, justice, and repair across the Caribbean archipelago

The Caribbean region has been (re)shaped by colonial transformations of Amerindian ecologies, enslavement of Africans, and Indenture of Asians on plantations designed for European profit. Yet longstanding practices of resistance to human­–environmental domination and ecocidal violence have enabled Caribbean people to (re)create and sustain affirmative socio-ecologies. This report reflects on four axes characterizing the contestations over Caribbean environmental geographies: resistance to extractivism and dispossession, denaturalization of disaster, theorizing global ecological justice, and pursuit of repair. The article suggests how Caribbean environmental philosophy and ecocriticism offer analytics for mapping relational geographies beyond Western epistemes of progress and spatial imaginaries that peripheralize the region.

Possessed: Understanding the Lives of Enslaved Americans

Abstract: Enslaved people in the US South lived in a system designed to exploit their labor in pursuit of profit. This historiographical essay considers key questions about labor and power raised in the previous two decades of scholarship on antebellum slavery. What were the forms and meanings of enslaved people’s politics, and how can we track them through the archive? How was slavery connected to other phenomena including empire and capitalism in the early United States? In pursuing these questions, scholars have illuminated the history of slavery at different scales, ranging from the lived experiences of bound workers to transatlantic networks of commerce and credit through which the products of enslaved labor moved. This essay considers some of the different ways recent historians have worked to understand the institution of slavery, with a particular focus on the question of how closely their approaches bring us to understanding the shape of enslaved humanity.

Black Bibliography as Biographical Method: The Publication History of The Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery, 1837–1849

Black Bibliography as Biographical Method: The Publication History of <i>The Adventures and Escape of Moses Roper, from American Slavery</i>, 1837–1849

The Haunting Absence of Language: How Toni Morrison’s Spectral Formula Unlocks Marginalized Counter-Narratives in Current Gothic American Literature

Abstract: Is Toni Morrison still here? Rather than exorcising Beloved by ordering that her story not be passed on, it appears that the author and her shade have been embraced and remain firmly rooted in current Gothic American literature. Morrison honed the spectral, liberating undocumented Black American slave counter-narratives and exposing concealed ancestral trauma. The fecundity of her contribution is celebrated in Jesmyn Ward’s Sing, Unburied, Sing and Angela Flournoy’s The Turner House , both of which employ such ghosts to engage with and enlighten their nescient descendants. In this article, I examine the gap in the scholarly conversation on the proliferation of a spectral formula established in Beloved that echoes through current literary works entailing a corporeal ghost, related to the living characters, haunted by a historically invalidated trauma, that is only released by reintegration rather than exorcism.

“Catachresis at the Origin”: Names and Power in Toni Morrison’s Fiction

Abstract: Toni Morrison’s fiction is replete with characters who carry nicknames, who rename themselves, or are renamed by others. Some misnamings carry the stories of histories of marginalization and oppression—as with the “drunken yankee” responsible for the naming of Macon Dead in Song of Solomon . Morrison’s characters also rename themselves to resist the legacy of American slavery and institutionalized racism. What ties Morrison’s namings, misnamings, and renamings together is the sense that there is no path to the recovery of true names for many African American people. The consequence is not powerlessness; rather, the “catachresis at the origin” that Gayatri Spivak refers to is intuited organically by many Morrison characters, who embrace misnaming and rename themselves as a mode of claiming self-ownership. Catachresis may begin as rhetorical violence imposed from without, but in Toni Morrison’s fiction, it can end as an opportunity to assert power, autonomy, and a boundless creativity.

Settler Colonialism and Harte’s Frontier Ecogothic in “Three Vagabonds of Trinidad”

The paper proposes to examine the tangled relationship between race and environment in the nineteenth-century American literary tradition by looking at the gothic representation of the three vagabond characters in relation to the Californian coastal landscape in Bret Harte’s “Three Vagabonds of Trinidad” (1900). Critically seen as a reworking of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884), Harte’s story continues the questioning of the civilization/wilderness dichotomy in Twain’s work, but the story complicates its racialecological dynamics by shifting the focus from a white boy and a black slave to a Chinese orphan, a Native American vagrant, and a dog, and relocating their tramping and foraging from the Mississippi river to the pine forest and marshland at the Pacific coast of a frontier town in California. Harte’s repositioning of racialized (as well as politicized) persecution at the western frontier articulates an ecogothic allegory on a transcontinental (as well as transglobal) scale, in which a seemingly ordinary western settlement is turned from what Leo Marx considers a pastoral-industrial “middle landscape” into a liminal haunting (as well as hunting) ground. 1 The paper examines how Harte’s account of Trinidad topographies reveals a multi-layered ecological space and a haunted Romantic landscape that unsettles environmental as well as social order, reflecting racialized political exclusions during the course of the nineteenth century through legalized policies, such as the 1830 Indian Removal Act, the 1855 Vagrancy Act, and the 1882 Chinese Exclusion Act restricting the spatial mobilities of Native Americans, Chinese immigrants, and other minority groups. The paper will focus on the intersection of orientalism, settler colonialism, and environmentalism, rethinking how the enmeshed race-environment relationship in Harte’s writing, informed by the social and political practices of westward expansionism and racial segregation of his time, might reveal a subtler process of ecological othering, unveiling the parasitical relationship between racial exploitation and environmental destruction.

Current State of Archaeobotanical Research in Ghana: On Diet, Food Resources and Research Perspectives

This review delves into the changes in food consumption patterns over time in West Africa, emphasising the significant role played by archaeobotanical studies. West African food consumption has been influenced by various factors such as economic, environmental, and external influences. Our initial studies focused on plant and animal domestication and the spread of grains. The arrival of Europeans in the 15th century brought changes in foodways, introducing new crops from the New and Old World. Some misconceptions about African food and agriculture have been challenged, accentuating the region’s diversity and resilience. The paper discusses the initial focus on economic factors and the domestication of plants, leading to a better understanding of the connection between food and society. Additionally, it dispels misapprehensions about West African cuisine and highlights the impact of the Atlantic trade on foodways. The study underscores the significance of interdisciplinary research in rectifying any biases surrounding Africa’s food history. Archaeobotanical research has shed light on the dynamic nature of African foodways, including the integration of American crops into local food traditions. However, knowledge of the extent of adoption and use of these crops during the precolonial era remains limited. More research is required to comprehend the adoption of American crops and the resilience of African food systems.

Between the Wizard and the Fire‐Eaters: The Last Records of the Illegal Slave Trade to Brazil, 1866–1870

Following the enactment of the Eusébio de Queirós law under British pressure in 1850, the Brazilian Empire brought an end to the international slave trade. Illicit arrivals continued to occur, but around 1856 the trade was deemed extinct by the Brazilian authorities. This study discusses rumours and potential evidence of illicit trafficking on the brink of the repeal of the Aberdeen Act, which stirred up officials from the Brazilian Empire, as well as diplomats from the United States and the United Kingdom, and suggest a connection with the conclusion of the American Civil War, particularly Confederate emigration, and a racist organisation in the United States.

‘I Have Been Faithful to Thee, Cynara’: Parodying Canonical Pro-Slavery Novel in The Wind Done Gone

Parody, as a specific case of adaptation and intertextuality, is not only burlesquing background text but also creating a critical distance through superimposition strategies. This paper sought to show the parodic means performed in the novel The Wind Done Gone (TWDG) written by Alice Randall. It was meant to be a parody of Margaret Mitchell's novel Gone with the Wind (GWTW) and has intertextuality with other literary works. The interconnection of the novel's narrative strategies and its effort to attach historical reassessment suggested a trustworthy reality of the black slave experience. Randall effectively deconstructed and reconstructed the black experience and identity, as well as dismantled the racist representation in the canonical novel GWTW. Enslaved black people are transformed into dominants as active agents and intelligent, creating a beautiful mulatto, tagging black intellectuals in American history and the new Negroes, naming ties, and providing verbatim quotes to revisit the stereotype and cultural misconstruction against black Americans. Randall seemed not to alter the meta-history of slavery but rather to show the irony of the racist discourse in the canonical saga and other popular media.

Anti-Blackness and Moral Repair

For centuries, Europeans interpreted the biblical curse of Ham to justify the colonization and enslavement of Africans. Yet some Zambians today repeat this story as a demonstration of God’s intention for Africans to be servants to whites, thus explaining global inequalities. I approach these apparently anti-Black views not as evidence of false consciousness but as counterhegemonic theorizations of racism, coloniality, and capitalism. Many Zambians use the Ham narrative to challenge the liberal fetishization of equality amid the territorializing border logics of the nation-state. They demonstrate how, in a radically unequal world, these fetishes perpetuate social divisions that contravene God’s will. This constitutes a non-egalitarian decolonizing critique that instead demands relations of mutual connection, kinship, and care across continents. Working toward moral repair, I enlist the resources of liberation theology to imagine new ethical and political futures that are both anti-racist and anti-statist.

Old Testament Perspective on Migration and Its Implications for Africans in Diaspora

This paper explores the Old Testament perspective on migration and its implications for Africans in the diaspora. Migration has been a significant aspect of human history, shaping societies and cultures across the globe. Africans in the diaspora have a unique experience of migration, often driven by historical factors such as the transatlantic slave trade. By examining Old Testament narratives, this paper aims to shed light on the theological and ethical dimensions of migration and provide insights into the experiences of Africans in the diaspora. The paper emphasizes themes of displacement, liberation, justice, and cultural preservation within the context of migration while acknowledging the complexity and diversity of the African diaspora experience.

The Carried-Off and the Constitution: How British Harboring of Fugitives from American Slavery Led to the Constitution of 1787

AbstractAccounts of the factors that led to the drafting of the U.S. Constitutional Convention have focused on Congress' failures to levy taxes, regulate commerce, and provide security against internal unrest and foreign encroachments. Left out from history are the attempts of the founders to force Britain to return thousands of escapees from slavery they sheltered. Patriot state leaders tried to coerce the return of all fugitives from slavery evacuated with the British army by blocking payment of debts to England in violation of the Treaty of Paris. Such actions ultimately caused the breakdown of the agreement and exposed the structural inability of the Congress to enforce the terms of a duly ratified treaty over intransigent states. Ultimately, the issue of the “carried off” and with it the nation's ability to conduct foreign policy, was the paramount issue that could only be resolved by a fundamental restructuring of the federal structure of government.

Ideas: A deep dive into the transatlantic slave trade

Ideas: A deep dive into the transatlantic slave trade

Colonial Slavery, the Lord-Bondsman Dialectic, and the St Louis Hegelians

AbstractHegel's lord-bondsman dialectic has been of especially great interest to progressive and radical Hegelians—broadly speaking, politically left-leaning interpreters of Hegel who object to certain social hierarchies and demand their abolition. They read Hegel as giving an account of how ‘lordship’ over others is an inherently unstable and unsatisfying social formation, even for its supposed beneficiaries. Marxists, feminists and post-colonial theorists have all found inspiration in Hegel's analysis of the lord and bondsman by applying it to concrete relations of oppression, such as capitalism, patriarchy, or racism. In contrast, recent scholarship on Hegel's views on race and colonialism has cast doubt on whether his systematic political philosophy and philosophy of history can be of similar use to progressives. Hegel was undeniably a Eurocentric thinker, but philosophers like Robert Bernasconi and Alison Stone have convincingly shown that he was also a racist and a defender of colonialism. Crucially, however, few of the scholars who write on Hegel's pro-colonialism have analysed this feature of Hegel's thought in connection with the lord-bondsman dialectic. In this article, I argue for two connected theses. First, I argue that contrary to the hopes of some progressive defenders of Hegel, we cannot easily separate the lord-bondsman dialectic from Hegel's pro-colonialism. This is because Hegel himself appealed to the lord-bondsman dialectic to argue that colonial slavery educated its victims, and could therefore be temporarily justified. Second, I argue that this pro-colonial reading of the dialectic, though largely ignored by contemporary interpreters, was in fact recognized and embraced by a group of Hegelians in North America known as the St Louis Hegelians. They used the lord-bondsman dialectic as a basis for a qualified defence of pre-Civil War American slavery.

Narrating/translating online plantation tourism

Abstract The purpose of the essay is to conduct an analysis of plantation tourism websites in the USA South, measuring the degree to which the history of slavery remains (in)visible or is explained within online promotional texts like websites, and to outline if today the digital space can become a space for inclusivity and equality. The essay will be divided in two parts: the analysis of a corpus of 10 major Historical Plantations websites in order to outline the principal verbal and visual strategies used to portray the history of slavery in the American South, and a comparison of 3 websites which offer translations in Italian and/or French in order to outline differences, adaptations, omissions, changes in the target texts. The methodology used will refer to CDA, Social Semiotics and Tourism Translation with the primary aim of outlining all the aspects of a website as a multimodal text. The essay will offer the results of both a quantitative and qualitative analysis trying to show how plantations as tourist attractions are represented through linguistic, cultural, and visual choices that represent the tourist experience in a highly codified way, and to demonstrate how this representation is adapted into different languages/cultural contexts, often reducing information and useful data to attract international tourists, and simplifying the message.

Justice and Race in Frederick Douglass?s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave and Toni Morrison?s Beloved

Justice and Race in Frederick Douglass?s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass: An American Slave and Toni Morrison?s Beloved

Slavery between Greed and Survival in Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave

Solomon Northup's Twelve Years a Slave is a powerful memoir and slave narrative that reveals the barbarity and inhumanity of the 19th-century American slave trade. Through his firsthand account of being kidnapped and sold into slavery, Northup exposes the greed, deceit, violence, and subjugation that drove white slave traders and masters to dehumanize and commodify black people for their own economic gain. Northup's narrative sheds light on the brutality of slavery and how it stripped both enslaved people and white slaveholders of their humanity. The book illustrates the horrors of slavery, from the physical and emotional abuse inflicted upon enslaved people to the use of religion to justify and uphold the system of slavery. Northup's narrative emphasizes the helplessness, impotence, and oppression of black slaves, particularly those who were born free but were abducted and sold into slavery like himself. Ultimately, the book reflects the resilience and determination of enslaved people to survive in a violent, oppressive, and hostile world.