Agency Of The Enslaved

Download or read book Agency of the Enslaved written by Daive A. Dunkley and published by Rowman & Littlefield. This book was released on 2013 with total page 241 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Agency of the Enslaved: Jamaica and the Culture of Freedom in the Atlantic World, D.A. Dunkley challenges the notion that enslavement fostered the culture of freedom in the former colonies of Western Europe in the Americas. Dunkley argues the point that the preconception that out of slavery came freedom has discouraged scholars from fully exploring the importance of the agency displayed by enslaved people. This study examines those struggles and argues that these formed the real basis of the culture of freedom in the Atlantic societies. These struggles were not for freedom, but for the acknowledgment of the freedom that enslaved people knew was already theirs. Agency of the Enslaved reveals several major incidents in which the enslaved in Jamaica--a country Dunkley uses as a case study with wider applicability to the Atlantic world--demonstrated that they viewed slavery as an immoral, illegal, unnecessary, temporary, and socially deprecating imposition. These views inspired their attempts to undermine the slave system that the British had established in Jamaica shortly after they captured the island in 1655. Acts of resistance took place throughout the island-colony and were recorded on the sugar plantations and in the courts, schools, and Christian churches. The slaveholders envisaged all of these sites as participants in their attempts to dominate the enslaved people. Regardless, the enslaved had re-envisioned and had used these places as sites of empowerment, and to show that they would never accept the designation of 'slave.'

Download or read book The Quarters and the Fields written by Damian Alan Pargas and published by University Press of Florida. This book was released on 2010-11-28 with total page 437 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Quarters and the Fields offers a unique approach to the examination of slavery. Rather than focusing on slave work and family life on cotton plantations, Damian Pargas compares the practice of slavery among the other major agricultural cultures in the nineteenth-century South: tobacco, mixed grain, rice, and sugar cane. He reveals how the demands of different types of masters and crops influenced work patterns and habits, which in turn shaped slaves' family life. By presenting a broader view of the complex forces that shaped enslaved people's family lives, not only from outside but also from within, this book takes an inclusive approach to the slave agency debate. A comparative study that examines the importance of time and place for slave families, The Quarters and the Fields provides a means for understanding them as they truly were: dynamic social units that were formed and existed under different circumstances across time and space.

Download or read book Spectacular Suffering written by Ramesh Mallipeddi and published by University of Virginia Press. This book was released on 2016-04-29 with total page 343 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Spectacular Suffering focuses on commodification and discipline, two key dimensions of Atlantic slavery through which black bodies were turned into things in the marketplace and persons into property on plantations. Mallipeddi approaches the problem of slavery as a problem of embodiment in this nuanced account of how melancholy sentiment mediated colonial relations between English citizens and Caribbean slaves. The book’s first chapters consider how slave distress emerged as a topic of emotional concern and political intervention in the writings of Aphra Behn, Richard Steele, and Laurence Sterne. As Mallipeddi shows, sentimentalism allowed metropolitan authors to fashion themselves as melancholy witnesses to racial slavery by counterposing the singular body to the abstract commodity and by taking affective property in slaves against the legal proprietorship of slaveholders. Spectacular Suffering then turns to the practices of the enslaved, tracing how they contended with the effects of chattel slavery. The author attends not only to the work of African British writers and archival textual materials but also to economic and social activities, including slaves’ petty production, recreational forms, and commemorative rituals. In examining the slaves’ embodied agency, the book moves away from spectacular images of suffering to concentrate on slow, incremental acts of regeneration by the enslaved. One of the foremost contributions of this study is its exploration of the ways in which the ostensible objects of sentimental compassion—African slaves—negotiated the forces of capitalist abstraction and produced a melancholic counterdiscourse on slavery. Throughout, Mallipeddi’s keen reading of primary texts alongside historical and critical work produce fresh and persuasive insights. Spectacular Suffering is an important book that will alter conceptions of slave agency and of sentimentalism across the long eighteenth century.

Download or read book Dispossessed Lives written by Marisa J. Fuentes and published by University of Pennsylvania Press. This book was released on 2016-06-28 with total page 232 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Vividly recounting the lives of enslaved women in eighteenth-century Bridgetown, Barbados, and their conditions of confinement through urban, legal, sexual, and representational power wielded by slave owners, authorities, and the archive, Marisa J. Fuentes challenges how histories of vulnerable and invisible subjects are written.

Download or read book Dred and Harriet Scott written by Gwenyth Swain and published by Minnesota Historical Society Press. This book was released on 2004 with total page 116 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The landmark U.S. Supreme Court decision Dred Scott v. Sandford, in which the slave Dred Scott was denied freedom for himself and his family, raised the ire of abolitionists and set the scene for the impending conflict between the northern and southern states. While most people have heard of the Dred Scott Decision, few know anything about the case's namesake. In this meticulously researched and carefully crafted biography of Dred Scott, his wife, Harriet, and their daughters, Eliza and Lizzie, award-winning children's book author Gwenyth Swain brings to life a family's struggle to become free. Beginning with Dred's childhood on a Virginia plantation and later travel with his masters to Alabama, Missouri, Illinois, and the territory that would become Minnesota, this "family biography" vividly depicts slave life in the early and mid-nineteenth century. At Fort Snelling, near St. Paul, Dred met and married Harriet, and together they traveled with their master to Florida and then Missouri, finally settling in St. Louis, where the Scotts were hired out for wages. There they began marshalling evidence to be used in their freedom suit, first submitted in 1846. Their case moved through local and state courts, finally reaching the U.S. Supreme Court in 1857. But the Court's decision did not grant them the freedom they craved. Instead, it brought northern and southern states one step closer to the Civil War. How did one family's dream of freedom become a cause of the Civil War? And how did that family finally leave behind the bonds of slavery? In Dred and Harriet Scott: A Family's Struggle for Freedom, Swain looks at the Dred Scott Decision in a new and remarkably personal way. By following the story of the Scotts and their children, Swain crafts a unique biography of the people behind the famous court case. In the process, she makes the family's journey through the court system and the ultimate decision of the Supreme Court understandable for readers of all ages. She also explores the power of family ties and the challenges Dred and Harriet faced as they sought to see their children live free.

Download or read book Speaking for the Enslaved written by Antoinette T Jackson and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2016-06-16 with total page 179 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Focusing on the agency of enslaved Africans and their descendants in the South, this work argues for the systematic unveiling and recovery of subjugated knowledge, histories, and cultural practices of those traditionally silenced and overlooked by national heritage projects and national public memories. Jackson uses both ethnographic and ethnohistorical data to show the various ways African Americans actively created and maintained their own heritage and cultural formations. Viewed through the lens of four distinctive plantation sites—including the one on which that the ancestors of First Lady Michelle Obama lived—everyday acts of living, learning, and surviving profoundly challenge the way American heritage has been constructed and represented. A fascinating, critical view of the ways culture, history, social policy, and identity influence heritage sites and the business of heritage research management in public spaces.

Download or read book Joining Places written by Anthony E. Kaye and published by Univ of North Carolina Press. This book was released on 2009-01-05 with total page 376 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In this new interpretation of antebellum slavery, Anthony Kaye offers a vivid portrait of slaves transforming adjoining plantations into slave neighborhoods. He describes men and women opening paths from their owners' plantations to adjacent farms to go courting and take spouses, to work, to run away, and to otherwise contend with owners and their agents. In the course of cultivating family ties, forging alliances, working, socializing, and storytelling, slaves fashioned their neighborhoods into the locus of slave society. Joining Places is the first book about slavery to use the pension files of former soldiers in the Union army, a vast source of rich testimony by ex-slaves. From these detailed accounts, Kaye tells the stories of men and women in love, "sweethearting," "taking up," "living together," and marrying across plantation lines; striving to get right with God; carving out neighborhoods as a terrain of struggle; and working to overthrow the slaveholders' regime. Kaye's depiction of slaves' sense of place in the Natchez District of Mississippi reveals a slave society that comprised not a single, monolithic community but an archipelago of many neighborhoods. Demonstrating that such neighborhoods prevailed across the South, he reformulates ideas about slave marriage, resistance, independent production, paternalism, autonomy, and the slave community that have defined decades of scholarship.