Atlantic Slavery and Its Passionate Transgressions

2021 ◽  
pp. 112-167
Keyword(s):  
Atlantic Slavery

The Ontological Work of Genre and Place: Wuthering Heights and the Case of the Occulted Landscape

2021 ◽  
Vol 49 (1) ◽  
pp. 107-138
Author(s):  
Lauren M. E. Goodlad
Keyword(s):  
Crime Fiction ◽  
Trade Flows ◽  
Uneven Development ◽  
Sense Making ◽  
Narrative Fiction ◽  
World Systems ◽  
Wuthering Heights ◽  
Life And Death ◽  
History Of ◽  
Atlantic Slavery

This essay shows how genre and place enable the “ontological reading” of narrative fiction. Such sense-making dialectics enable readers to infer the terms of existence that shape fictional worlds. World-systems thinkers have theorized the critical premise of material worlds shaped though ongoing processes of combined and uneven development. Ontological reading is a comparative practice for studying the narrative work of “figuring out” those processes—for example, through the “occulted landscapes” of Yorkshire noir. Emily Brontë's Wuthering Heights () can be likened to a species of crime fiction in prefiguring the “hardboiled” pull from epistemological certainty to ontological complication. Whereas David Peace's millennial Red Riding series of novels and films palimpsestically layers multiple pasts and presents, Wuthering Heights’ photomontage-like landscape airbrushes the seams of combined and uneven histories. Both narratives evoke moorland terrains conducive to a long history of woolens manufacturing reliant on the energized capital and trade flows of Atlantic slavery. Both works body forth occulted landscapes with the capacity to narrate widely: their troubling of ontological difference—between human and animal, life and death, past and present, nature and supernature—lays the ground for generically flexile stories of regional becoming. Ontological reading thus widens literary study.

Penal Slavery in Early Modern Scandinavia

2021 ◽  
Vol 6 (3) ◽  
pp. 343-368
Author(s):  
Johan Heinsen
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
Distinct Form ◽  
Exceptional Set ◽  
Security Breaches ◽  
Multiple Voices ◽  
Penal Institution ◽  
The Status ◽  
The Creation ◽  
Atlantic Slavery

Abstract In Scandinavia, a penal institution known as “slavery” existed from the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries. Penal slaves laboured in the creation and maintenance of military infrastructure. They were chained and often stigmatized, sometimes by branding. Their punishment was likened and, on a few occasions, linked to Atlantic slavery. Still, in reality, it was a wholly distinct form of enslavement that produced different experiences of coercion than those of the Atlantic. Such forms of penal slavery sit uneasily in historiographies of punishment but also offers a challenge for the dominant models of global labour history and its attempts to create comparative frameworks for coerced labour. This article argues for the need for contextual approaches to what such coercion meant to both coercers and coerced. Therefore, it offers an analysis of the meaning of early modern penal slavery based on an exceptional set of sources from 1723. In these sources, the status of the punished was negotiated and practiced by guards and slaves themselves. Court appearances by slaves were usually brief—typically revolving around escapes as authorities attempted to identify security breaches. The documents explored in this article are different: They present multiple voices speaking at length, negotiating their very status as voices. From that negotiation and its failures emerge a set of practiced meanings of penal “slavery” in eighteenth-century Copenhagen tied to competing yet intertwined notions of dishonour.

Alternative Soundscape Paradigms from Kamau Brathwaite and the Mighty Sparrow

2021 ◽  
Vol 25 (2) ◽  
pp. 16-35
Author(s):  
Mark Harris
Keyword(s):  
Caribbean Literature ◽  
Sound Studies ◽  
John Cage ◽  
Economic Determinants ◽  
Black Experience ◽  
Kamau Brathwaite ◽  
Atlantic Slavery ◽  
Jacques Attali ◽  
Alternative Practices ◽  
The Impact

This essay asks how the soundscapes represented in Caribbean literature and music provide alternative paradigms for conceptualizing noise and silence. As American and European sound studies have drawn from the writings of John Cage, Murray Schafer, and Jacques Attali to articulate alternative practices of listening and soundmaking, they have marginalized black experience. Caribbean noise, formed out of resistance to slavery and colonialism, has been excluded from informing those alternative practices. The depths of sonic experience revealed by soundscapes of Kamau Brathwaite’s poetry and the Mighty Sparrow’s calypsos concern the impact of centuries of Atlantic slavery on black hearing and speaking. They expose the racial and economic determinants of sound studies’ advocacy of indifferent listening and pure sound environments. In contrast, Caribbean histories of resourceful hearing and soundmaking bring distinctive sonic cultures to challenge established listening practices and provide ways of questioning canonical definitions of noise and silence.

Military Material Life in the British Caribbean

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephan T. Lenik ◽  
Zachary J. M. Beier
Keyword(s):  
Material Culture ◽  
Military Personnel ◽  
British Imperialism ◽  
Material Life ◽  
Enlisted Men ◽  
British Caribbean ◽  
British Military ◽  
Tobacco Pipes ◽  
Atlantic Slavery ◽  
Second World

Previous research in British Caribbean colonies investigates the lives of free and enslaved military personnel during the period of Atlantic slavery, within the context of each outpost’s strategic significance. Less well known are militia infantry and artillery that were stationed at military sites from the late 19th to the mid-20th century. In Jamaica, Rocky Point Battery, later Fort Rocky, defended Kingston Harbor from the 1880s until the Second World War. Jamaican volunteer militia and enlisted men as well as European officers and engineers stationed at this battery chose a British military life that dictated a regime of rigid spatial and temporal segregation whereby imperial thinking was deployed as military strategy. This paper examines ceramics, tobacco pipes, and uniform parts as objects that reflect institutional material culture which strove for homogeneity, while simultaneously leaving room for asserting a complex set of affiliations and individuality in a setting structured by British imperialism and geographic isolation.

Narrative and servitude

2018 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael Harrigan
Keyword(s):  
Human Agency ◽  
Colonial Era ◽  
Social Ecological ◽  
The Social ◽  
Atlantic Slavery ◽  
Shared Understandings

This chapter explores the tools that were available to early commentators for understanding Atlantic slavery, and what textual and graphic strategies can reveal about the knowledge about, and responses to, slavery. Early accounts of the colonies reflect shared understandings of the social, ecological and religious domains to various extents. These accounts also had recourse to the Graeco-Roman tradition, particularly Roman slave law, and to Scripture to understand slavery, though not without significant interrogations. Colonial-era narratives were historicising narratives, relying on shared understandings of human agency, chronology and knowledge, but excluding Amerindian and African peoples from these domains. Knowledge about slaves, which was produced in a polemical climate in which the script had considerable power to inform and to edify, was essentially oblique. Colonial-era texts that are self-consciously representative can also be instructive about human space and the perception of human coexistence. Engravings of slavery testify to some prescriptive potential, and can also illustrate what was gratifying about plantation power.

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