Subject Of Slavery Research Articles

O discurso paulino e as representações da escravidão romana no século I e.c.: um estudo de caso sobre a 'Epístola a Filemon'

O presente artigo tem como principal objetivo apresentar os resultados obtidos com a pesquisa desenvolvida junto ao Grupo de Estudos em História Clássica e Ensino de História (GEHCEH) do curso de Licenciatura da Universidade Federal do Estado do Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO). Nele, analisaremos o discurso paulino e as representações da escravidão romana no século I e.c. por meio do estudo da Epístola a Filemon. Para tanto, investigaremos as tramas do texto atribuído a Paulo e a temática da escravidão no âmbito das ekklesíai a partir do personagem chave do texto epistolar, a saber, o escravo Onésimo.

Civic Lessons: Fauriel’s ‘Chants Populaires’ and the Abolitionist The Humming Bird

DURING the Greek War of Independence (1821–27) Charles Claude Fauriel (1772–1844) collected heroic ballads that characterize the national spirit of Greece. Seemingly a literary pursuit, Fauriel’s underlying purpose for ‘Chants Populaires de la Grèce Moderne’ was civic, as is evident from his close friend Mary Mohl (née Clarke)’s comment that he was ‘the only man in Europe who has taken up [his] pen on their behalf … on a grand scale’.1 She mentions how his pursuit had inspired her to ‘translate … a little of [his] Greek book—and added three pages of [her] own!’ which she proposed ‘to be put in a little magazine concerned with the slavery question’.2 She only aimed to show this anonymous publication to her family, not even to him. Although no definite publication has been traced, an anonymous review of ‘Chants Populaires’ in The Humming Bird; or, Morsels of Information, on the Subject of Slavery: with various Miscellaneous Articles, an abolitionist periodical printed and published in Leicester, may be by Mohl. The reviewer assumed that as the periodical ‘is published entirely for the purpose of exciting interest for the oppressed, … something about the oppressed Greeks may be acceptable’ (1:11 (1825), pp. 329–38). Mary Mohl had connections in Leicestershire with the Martin family, and records of memorabilia, letters and a certified copy of her will are still held in the Leicestershire, Leicester, and Rutland archives. According to these Mr Martin represented the English relations at Mme Mohl’s funeral.3

The Subject of Slavery in Translation: Between Jack Qiu and Simone Browne

The Subject of Slavery in Translation: Between Jack Qiu and Simone Browne

Memory, Identity and Heritage in the south Kenya Coast: Case of Shimoni Slave caves

Though slavery was practised in the Kenya coast for a long time, the subject of slavery has,however, been an anathema in Kenya. Nobody has been willing to talk about it or its effects.Slowly, however, things have started to change and now people, especially those thought to be descendants of slaves or slave traders have started to talk about it. This paper, using theShimoni slave caves on the south Kenya coast, examines what is being remembered and how these memories are being used to construct relationships not only within and between the communities of these areas but with the wider Kenyan nation.

Georges Adéagbo’s Postcolonial Cabinet of Curiosities

This article explores the installation art of the Beninese artist Georges Adéagbo who is based in Cotonou. His work focuses on themes of slavery, archaeology, socialism, art, space, religion, or historical figures, and is made up of diverse materials collected by the artist in his home country and in the West, including local and global consumer goods, African sculptures, natural objects, and texts. Schmidt-Linsenhoff criticizes the Western reception of the artist for being dependent on preconceived notions of “primitive” art and on the readability of Adéagbo’s installations in terms of contemporary artistic tendencies and postcolonial theories. The author then examines how his work might resist aesthetic integration into Western models of taste and interpretation by considering his work in the context of its production in Cotonou.

WORTH 5 SILVER SHEKELS: SLAVERY IN MESOPOTAMIAN'S PRIVATE ARCHIVES

We propose a reflection about the theme of slavery, from the study of the archives of an important businessman in the city of Larsa, in the south Mesopotamian, named Ubar-Šamaš, during the reign of King Rîm-Sîn (1822-1763 BCE). This merchant exercised relevant economic activities, such as buying and selling land in urban and rural areas, silver loans and slave trade. In paleobabylonian society, slave labor did not occupy an important role in the economy, and the conditions of the trade of servantswere directly linked to political conditions, such as war and its economic and social consequences. Another objective of this article is to offer Brazilian readers research sources for the study of economic history of the ancient world, from the translation of documents directly from Akkadian language and cuneiform writing into Portuguese.

“Thrusting the Private into the Public Sphere”: North African Women's Writing Identities in the Epistolary Form

SummaryThis article engages North African Women's writing their unique identities in the epistolary form as depicted in the anthology, Women Writing Africa: The Northern Region. The epistolary or letter form is a unique genre. On one hand, the form of a letter is personal, and lays claim to private experiences whose content is the confidential lives of those who write them. And yet, on the other hand, the contents of an epistolary form can be thrust into the public domain where the lives on which it narrates is read by many people for the interest it can generate when the form assumes the figure of a metaphoric allegory. In the anthology, there are six letters written by women, touching on themes of slavery, sisterhood, marginality and the quest for political freedom in a patriarchal-dominated North African community. It is curious to observe that North African women who represented their experiences in the form of the letters did so against the repression of this form from the predominance of realism, song and political treatise. This article argues that the editors of Women Writing Africa: The Northern Region can be accused of bias in their selection that privileges literary forms ordinarily associated with men's preference for classical realism. Despite this literary imbalance, the epistolary form effects some form of resistance to ideological and literary enforcements. The epistolary form also attempts to manage contradictory identities revealed on the spectrum of differences in how women shape their identities. Thus, the epistolary form functions in an ambiguous way; it affirms as well as interrogates patriarchy and also critiques the writings on women by women who write for men or like men.

Family or Freedom: People of Color in the Antebellum South by Emily West

Reviewed by: Family or Freedom: People of Color in the Antebellum South by Emily West Sharony Green Family or Freedom: People of Color in the Antebellum South. By Emily West. Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2012. 244pp. $50.00. ISBN 978-0813136929. Emily West’s study on the voluntary enslavement and residency petitions of free people of color is among the latest scholarly works to widen our awareness of just how peculiar an institution slavery was in the United States. Her primary mission: examining the ways in which anxious free blacks and enslaved people used these petitions to preserve “family” ties during the late antebellum period, a time when white southerners were justifiably concerned about the future of slavery. Proceeding often chronologically, she takes up the many strands to this issue with the now-obligatory nod to Walter Johnson. In other words, she never overstates the “agency” of free blacks in their seeming use of proslavery laws to enhance their own condition. West pursues her topic by first providing an overview of the increasing number of laws and restrictions on free people of color, state by state. She is especially concerned with the 1850s, a period when “moves to expel or enslave free blacks reached a crescendo” especially after the 1857 Dred Scott case brought the question of citizenship for African Americans up for political debate and the [End Page 171] 1859 Harper’s Ferry raid revealed the extent of white disagreement on the subject of slavery (19, 25). Next, West focuses on residency requests, carefully showing that most of these were made prior to the 1850s, the decade that saw a greater number of enslavement petitions. Notably, much of the surviving evidence of residency requests comes from Texas. Though she does not say so explicitly, this might possibly be a result of the point at which Texas entered into the Union. While a republic, free African Americans and their white advocates in this territory “took advantage of a perceived malleability in race relations” (58). But, even after residency restrictions were passed following Texas’ admission as a state in 1845, free people of color quietly ignored them. For example, Greenberry Logan moved to Texas following his manumission from Kentucky. In his 1837 petition, he stated that he had been informed that he could only live legally in Texas only by “the consent of Congress,” something that distressed him, as he had fought during the Texas War of Independence (59). While his request was sent to a special committee, it was apparently never heard. Yet Logan continued to live quietly in the state with his free-born wife. Logan’s experience demonstrates the ineffectiveness of residency and enslavement laws, which decreed one thing while black and white bodies did something else. The fuzziness around the outcomes of such laws is one reason why earlier scholars have been reluctant to examine them. Such reluctance is also a consequence of the admittedly small body of evidence. West herself relied on just 143 petitions for enslavement and 38 for residency, drawn primarily from the Race and Slavery Petitions Project at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro, supplemented by primary sources in earlier published work, some of the latter verified when possible. Scholarly foot-dragging, as West remarks, is also a result of the huge challenge of doing textual analyses. When one gets right down to it, the true authors of these petitions, as she writes, were often never known. West rightly embraces Stephanie Camp’s injunction that we speculate bravely on what people really meant or wanted. Thus, in later chapters, she devotes considerable space to exploring [End Page 172] the motivations of those who claimed to write them (blacks), or those who seemed to benefit most from them (whites). While West is keen to foreground kinship as the leading impetus for why blacks resorted to so drastic an act as re-enslaving themselves or their family members, the multiple meanings of kinship might be better tackled in the same manner that she troubles the notion of freedom. While it is certain many blacks were “cajoled,” as West often notes, into making such petitions by unscrupulous whites, the tensions between these blacks’ experiences...

New Works about Slavery on the Antebellum Frontier

New Works about Slavery on the Antebellum Frontier Lea VanderVelde (bio) Matthew Salafia. Slavery’s Borderland: Freedom and Bondage Along the Ohio River. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. 320pp. Illustrations, notes, and index. $55.00. Dana Elizabeth Weiner. Race and Rights: Fighting Slavery and Prejudice in the Old Northwest, 1830–1870. Dekalb: Northern Illinois University Press, 2013. 327pp. Appendix, notes, bibliography, and index. $38.00 (cloth); $28.00 (paper). These two books on the subject of slavery in the Midwest have taken very different approaches. Race and Rights goes narrow, focusing on abolitionist sentiment in a few Illinois counties in the four decades bracketing the Civil War. Its focus is a social movement: how Illinois abolitionists rejected slavery as an idea. By limiting its scope in this way, Race and Rights is unable to reach more general conclusions about social change. By contrast, Slavery’s Borderland focuses on the social reality of slaveholding and slave experience in a larger region, taking a wider view, both geographically and demographically. Its scope encompasses both banks of the Ohio River Valley. As such, the book is able to contrast the settlement and development of the legally free region on the river’s northern bank to that of the southern bank where slavery was legal. Ultimately, this approach pays off. Salafia adopts a methodology that alters our perspective on slavery and freedom divisions in the developing Midwest.1 By starting with American settlement along the river, Matthew Salafia demonstrates that the region’s integrity as a river valley transcended the artificial legal divide between free and slave territory. Slavery’s Borderland also brings a considerable amount of new evidence to light and juxtaposes the previous evidence in interesting ways. By seeing beyond the artificially drawn legal boundary between the free lands north of the Ohio River and the slave state, Kentucky, south of the river, he re-contextualizes the region as unified socially and economically. Salafia stresses how the functional significance of the river as a unifying artery of transportation preceded the legal divide and, in fact, provided such a strong [End Page 498] interconnection that it survived even the national division during the Civil War to hold Kentucky in the Union. Salafia reminds us that before there were states—before there was any actual government to enforce a border between free territory and slave territory—the river unified its watershed region by facilitating transport along it and transit across it. The watershed was an intact, naturally drawn community. The watershed unified the community because river transport was so much easier than overland travel. Families often settled on both sides of the river and moved back and forth with their slaves. Taking this approach, Salafia effectively overcomes the narrowed bracketing of history drawn and constrained by state borders. Frequently, that conventional bracketing of history over-determines the significance of state borders and excludes the significance of local events occurring just beyond those borders. For example, state histories sometimes fail to recognize that their founding families were also the founding families of other states as well, because the region’s earliest settlers were the only settlement influences over vast expanses that were not yet states. State borders only became significant as governing regimes decades later, when the state’s infrastructure and legislatures were established. By examining the history of the Ohio River borderland, Salafia demonstrates how “residents on both sides of the river struggled to accommodate it as at once a dividing line and a unifying economic force. . . . Rather than marking a line that slavery could not penetrate, the Ohio River muddied distinctions, and residents used that ambiguity to try to hold the region together even against the threat of civil war” (p. 1). Ultimately, this analysis yields a new understanding of why Kentucky was a slave state that never seceded from the Union during the Civil War. Borderland’s focus explains Kentucky’s role as a slave state loyal to the Union. With such strong and long-lasting familial, social, and economic ties established between Kentuckians and their neighbors on the river’s north bank, the idea that Kentucky would ally with the Southern rebellion—even if that rebellion sought to secure slavery...

SEGUNDO CONDE COMO IDEAL POLÍTICO EN SAMPER: A PROPÓSITO DE LA NOVELA FLORENCIO CONDE

En el presente artículo se realiza un análisis de la primera parte de la novela de José María Samper, FlorencioConde, escrita en 1875 cuando aún pertenecía al partido liberal y estaba próximo a dimitir hacia elconservador. Esa primera parte tiene como eje central los temas de la esclavitud, la minería y a SegundoConde como personaje principal, padre de quien le da título a la novela. Se parte de la premisa de que paraSamper la literatura tenía fines educativos y moralizantes, asimismo servía para fines políticos.

‘A Full Knowledge of the Subject of Slavery’: The Amistad, Expert Testimony, and the Origins of Atlantic Studies

This article explores the role of testimony, expertise, and the academy in the production of knowledge about slavery in the context of the trials of the Africans aboard the slave ship La Amistad, 1839–1841. Testimony provided by enlisted self-professed experts formed the intellectual architecture to the legal argument as it advanced to the Supreme Court. When considered separately from the trials, and distinctly as a question of the production of knowledge, the role of expert testimony provides crucial insight into the function of the university in antebellum anti-slavery thought and action, the marginalization of the lived African slave experience, and the emergence of Atlantic studies in the contemporary present. Examining the relationship between the university and the marshalling of expertise – broadly understood as linguistic, political and cultural knowledge of slavery and the slave trade – suggests that the early use of expert testimony had an important albeit neglected role in the birth of Atlantic studies.

Memórias perdidas da nação moçambicana: Terra Sonâmbula e O Outro Pé da Sereia de Mia Couto

LOST MEMORIES OF THE MOZAMBICAN NATION: TERRA SONÂMBULA AND O OUTRO PÉ DA SEREIA BY MIA COUTO The aim of this article is to question the relation between memory and oblivion in the process of constructing national identity, analysing two novels by the Mozambican writer Mia Couto. Terra Sonâmbula and O Outro Pé da Sereia present several characters who travel in search of the lost memories from their own past as well as from the common past of the nation. The first novel deals with the suffering caused by the long civil war in the post‑independence period while the other is focused on the Mozambican colonial history and the subject of slavery.

Letras negras, páginas brancas: as imagens do negro entre a historiografia e o ensino de história (Brasil, segunda metade do século XX)

O debate sobre as imagens do negro nos livros didáticos História produzidos no Brasil na segunda metade do século XX nos remete à análise das principais interpretações historiográficas desenvolvidas sobre a escravidão no mesmo período. Estas abordagens historiográficas, de uma forma ou de outra, têm influenciado a leitura dos autores de livros didáticos da área de História no que concerne a esta temática. Neste sentido, o presente trabalho irá abordar as representações do negro forjadas pelo discurso histórico a partir do diálogo com os saberes da história acadêmica e escolar no período. Ao longo deste ensaio iremos apresentar as duas matrizes interpretativas recorrentes – Gilberto Freyre (“democracia racial”) e Florestan Fernandes (“denúncia da violência da escravidão e do racismo”) – sobre a temática da escravidão e do negro, procurando estabelecer as suas diferenças, pontos de embate e os desdobramentos de suas teses no ensino de História.

Intertextuality, Slavery and Abolition in Maria Edgeworth's "The Good Aunt" and "The Grateful Negro"

George E. Boulukos's influential article on Edgeworth's tale, The Grateful Negro, in 1999, argued that, because of its close ties with and echoes of Bryan Edwards's pro-plantocratic History of the West Indies (to which the tale refers both explicitly and through allusion), Edgeworth's The Grateful Negro should be understood as aligning itself with anti-abolitionism. By examining Edgeworth's unpublished writings on the subject of slavery and slave labour, attending to the intertextual elements of The Grateful Negro, and analyzing how Edgeworth uses allusions to Bryan Edwards and Erasmus Darwin in The Good Aunt (written five years before The Grateful Negro), I suggest that Edgeworth's view of slavery and slave-trading was much more sceptical of Bryan Edwards's polemical history than has been argued before now.

"Tangled Skeins": Henry Timrod's "The Cotton Boll" and the Slave Narratives

"Tangled Skeins":Henry Timrod's "The Cotton Boll" and the Slave Narratives Carl Plasa (bio) Little dreamed the ingenious Eli Whitney, when riveting the teeth on his admirable invention, the cotton-gin, that he was at the same time riveting the fetters on the slave, and the foulest of institutions on the framework of American society. —"Revolution of the Spindles, For the Overthrow of American Slavery"1 According to Toni Morrison, neither slavery nor black people at large were phenomena that nineteenth-century American writers could readily escape. As she observes in Playing in the Dark (1992): The alertness to a slave population did not confine itself to the personal encounters that writers may have had. Slave narratives were a nineteenth-century publication boom. The press, the political campaigns, and the policy of various parties and elected officials were rife with the discourse of slavery and freedom. It would have been an isolato indeed who was unaware of the most explosive issue in the nation. How could one speak of profit, economy, labor, progress, suffragism, Christianity, the frontier, the formation of new states, the acquisition of new lands, education, transportation (freight and passengers), neighborhoods, the military—of almost anything a country concerns itself with—without having as a referent, at the heart of the discourse, at the heart of definition, the presence of Africans and their descendants? (50; italics in original) [End Page 1] Morrison answers her own catch-all question by suggesting that, while it "was not possible" to speak in such a way, writers were able to approach the topics she enumerates "with a vocabulary designed to disguise" (50) black presences, supporting her claims with readings of fiction by major figures of the day from Edgar Allan Poe to Mark Twain. For all its scope, however, Morrison's analysis is not comprehensive, privileging canonical rather than non-canonical authors and stopping short of an engagement (despite the interest in Poe) with nineteenth-century American poetry altogether. Given Morrison's commitment to the novel, such a preference for fiction rather than poetry as the object of critical scrutiny is neither a surprise nor reason for reproach, but it does raise the intriguing question of how the problematic she outlines and explores in the one genre might operate in the other and it is this matter that I seek to address below, using as case-study Henry Timrod's "The Cotton Boll" (1861). What strategies does Timrod deploy in order to occlude the existence of the slaves who produce the commodity his poem celebrates? In what ways, conversely, are those slaves' traces nonetheless legible in the poem's interstices? By considering these questions, the article contributes to a "body of scholarship" on poetic production in nineteenth-century America that has been steadily "growing" "over the past two decades" (Larson 1)—since, indeed, the time when Morrison's critical essay originally appeared. Equally, though, I am concerned to broaden this inquiry beyond the subject of slavery in "The Cotton Boll" and examine that of cotton in the slave narratives. Despite cotton's familiar centrality to slavery, the question of how slaves themselves represented the commodity is an aspect of their stories that remains strangely under-considered, both in classic studies and more recent ones.1 It is nonetheless of some importance, not only in its own right, but also, in this context, for what it tells us about the ideologically contested nature of the literary and cultural milieu in which the so-called Laureate of the Confederacy is located. Jim Crow Grammar: Bracketing Slavery in "The Cotton Boll" In a speech given in 1858, James H. Hammond explains the reasons why a war between the slave-holding South and abolitionist North would not be feasible. Chief among his arguments is the South's preeminence as an economic power, a status acquired primarily from [End Page 2] slave-worked cotton sold to flourishing textile industries both in the North itself and the wider world, particularly England. For Hammond (a South Carolinian like Timrod), those who oppose slavery on moral grounds cannot oppose it militarily, because to do so is to jeopardize the very thing on which their own prosperity relies:2 would...

‘Bound by the Wrongs We Have Done in the Past’: English Catholics and the Anti-Slavery Movement in Victorian Britain

This article examines the growing involvement of English Catholicism in the antislave trade and anti-slavery campaigns of the nineteenth century. Early in the century, Catholics in England were conspicuously absent from the Wilberforce-inspired crusade to eradicate the slave trade. By the end of the century, Catholics in England played a leading role in that continuing crusade. The article examines several events that led to growing Catholic participation as the century progressed, including the restoration of the hierarchy, the American Civil War, Herbert Vaughan’s missionary endeavours, the death of Charles Gordon in Khartoum, and the celebrated efforts of French Cardinal Charles Lavigerie to end the slave trade in northern Africa. This argument is placed within the greater context of papal encyclicals on the subject of slavery from the nineteenth century and earlier. The article surveys the work and words of Cardinals Wiseman, Manning and Vaughan, as well as the Catholic press, including theTablet, theDublin Review, and theMonth.

The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia (review)

Reviewed by: The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia Greg Clingham (bio) Samuel Johnson . The History of Rasselas, Prince of Abissinia, ed. Thomas Keymer. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009. xlv+157 pp. US$12.95; £7.99. ISBN 978-0-19-922997-0. Rasselas has been well served by its editors and critics. Since its publication 250 years ago, it has never been out of print, and it has attracted some of the most thoughtful criticism of any of Samuel Johnson's works. Both scholarly and teaching editions of Rasselas have been particularly good. G.B. Hill's Clarendon Press edition of 1887 (reprinted many times), R.W. Chapman's Clarendon Press edition of 1927, and Gwin Kolb's Yale edition of 1990 all set high bibliographical standards. Among the many mass-market editions of Rasselas, J.P. Hardy's World's Classics edition (1966 and 1988) surpassed others in identifying its philosophical interests, and Jessica Richard's excellent Broadview edition (2008) has created a context for the tale in relation to British Orientalism. Thomas Keymer's new World's Classics edition of Rasselas is the conscious beneficiary of earlier editions, while also developing its own modern focus. Like Chapman and Hardy, it prints the text of the second, corrected edition of 1759 and maintains first-edition readings in some cases of compositional error. It has a chronology, a useful (though obvious) bibliography, and a helpful glossary of unfamiliar words that draws on Johnson's Dictionary. Keymer's introduction is an excellent critical essay in its own right. Highlighting the enlightened nature of Johnson's text, he deftly describes several intersecting biographical, historical, and intellectual narratives. Especially interesting, Keymer associates Johnson's account of the pursuit of happiness with Thomas Jefferson's writings, suggesting that they "may have been closer to one another in their thinking about the pursuit of happiness, if not about equality or slavery" (x). Johnson, of course, was more liberal than the early Americans on the subject of slavery, as his parenting of Francis Barber and his advocacy of Joseph Knight indicate (in discussing Knight with Boswell [23 September 1777] Johnson states, "It is impossible not to conceive that men in their original state were equal ... [slavery] is injurious to the rights of mankind"). Keymer links these enlightened views with Johnson's critique of imperialism, directly argued in his Introduction to the World Displayed (1759) and deployed in Rasselas in his rewriting of the popular form of the oriental tale. Keymer's explanatory notes track Johnson's familiarity with contemporary historiography of Abyssinia and the Ottoman Empire, identifying extensive echoes in the text from Aaron Hill's A Full and Just Account of the Present State of the Ottoman Empire (1709), Stephen Whatley's A Complete System of Geography (1747), Familiar Letters from a Gentleman at Damascus to His Sister in London (1750), and [End Page 449] other works. The notes are very helpful in suggesting the complexity of the tale's contexts. Keymer goes further by arguing that Johnson uses "oriental" themes, images, and settings to criticize British colonialism: "Far from being an 'orientalist' in the Saidian sense, one for whom lush new worlds were alluring fair game, Johnson was notorious in the year of Rasselas—the 'Year of Victories,' in which the war turned decisively in Britain's favour—as a prophet against empire, doggedly resistant to the opportunities for domination of the globe from Asia to America that were suddenly opening up" (xxviii). Johnson taps the generic commonplaces of "orientalist" fiction in order to challenge the political and historicist views associated with that genre (xxiv-xxv). Furthermore, Keymer argues that Johnson's critique of colonialism is supplemented in Rasselas by his interest in the contemporary debate about fiction and truth. Its ambiguous consideration in Rambler no. 4 (1750) is less about Fielding's "wicked characters" than the power of Richardson's realism (xxvi), which Johnson admires, but whose ideological and moral effects he doubts: "the power of [Richardsonian] example is so great, as to take possession of the memory by a kind of violence, and produce effects almost without the intervention of the will." In the right hands, realism can disable the memory...

“The Guilty Ship”: Ruskin, Turner and Dabydeen

This article examines critical responses to J. M. W. Turner’s Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying —Typhon Coming On (1840) and John Ruskin’s 1843 critique of the painting, in the years following the publication of David Dabydeen’s Turner (1994). The representation of drowning slaves in Turner’s painting and in Ruskin’s art criticism, has resulted in the emergence of something of a critical consensus in which both figures are seen either to neglect or take pleasure in the subject of slavery. The purpose of this article is to explore available evidence and to argue that insufficient attention has been paid to Turner’s painting, to his politics and to his purpose in Slavers; to Ruskin’s objectives in critiquing Turner; to distinctions between Ruskin’s imperialism and his position on slavery; and to his examination of Turner’s painting. In a corrective to recent critical assumptions, I suggest that in these instances claims made on these issues often rest on shaky foundations and that it is possible for more sustainable readings of Turner’s painting and Ruskin’s criticism to emerge.

Pliny,Epistles8.14: Senate, Slavery and theAgricola

ABSTRACTEpistles8.14, one of Pliny's longest letters, has been widely dismissed as a clumsy combination of two ill-fitting stretches of prose. This article demonstrates a significant chain of allusions in the letter's opening to Tacitus’Agricola, as well as to Cicero, Ovid and Seneca; it shows how Pliny prompts such a reading in the surroundingEpistles8.13 and 8.15; and, through consideration of the diptych form and the theme of slavery, it demonstrates the letter's pivotal role as centrepiece to Book 8.

Slavery, Shame and Pride: Debates over the Marking of the Bicentennial of the Abolition of the British Trans-Atlantic Trade in Africans in 2007

This essay intervenes in the public debates over the relevance of the bicentenary of the abolition of the British trans Atlantic trade in Africans to post-colonial societies in the Caribbean. It is offered as a way of understanding the longer-term meaning and legacy of abolition in the 21st century. The choice of subject matter has not only been determined by the controversies that emerged in the Caribbean and elsewhere during the bicentennial, but influenced also by Elsa Goveia's view that “Our History is not dead knowledge”. Its significance for us is vital and immediate; and by the need to shift the subject of slavery from text to public space. By way of theoretical context, the project located within what David Scott calls the “Foucauldian exercise of writing histories of the present”—an exercise that involves engaging with “the hegemonic persistence into the postcolonial present of aspects of colonialist discourse and practice.”