The Long History of American Slavery

2013 ◽  
Vol 27 (4) ◽  
pp. 23-27
Author(s):  
C. Snyder
Keyword(s):  
American Slavery ◽  
History Of

White Zombie as Captivity Narrative and the Death of Certainty

2020 ◽  
Vol 2 ◽  
pp. 19-25
Author(s):  
Mark C Anderson
Keyword(s):  
American Indians ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Captivity Narrative ◽  
Early American ◽  
Arts And Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Black ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
American Society ◽  
Black Other

Horror films such as White Zombie (1932) reveal viewers to themselves by narrating in the currency of audience anxiety. Such movies evoke fright because they recapitulate fear and trauma that audiences have already internalized or continue to experience, even if they are not aware of it. White Zombie’s particular tack conjures up an updated captivity narrative wherein a virginal white damsel is abducted by a savage Other. The shell of the captivity story, of course, is as old as America. In its earliest incarnation it featured American Indians in the role as savage Other, fiendishly imagined as having been desperate to get their clutches on white females and all that hey symbolized. In this way, it generated much of the emotional heat stoking Manifest Destiny, that is, American imperial conquest both of the continent and then, later, as in the case of Haiti, of the Caribbean Basin. White Zombie must of course be understood in the context of the American invasion and occupation of Haiti (1915-1934). As it revisits the terrain inhabited by the American black Other, it also speaks to the history of American slavery. The Other here is African-American, not surprisingly given the date and nature of American society of the day, typically imagined in wildly pejorative fashion in early American arts and culture. This essay explores White Zombie as a modified captivity narrative, pace Last of the Mohicans through John Ford’s The Searchers (1956), the Rambo trilogy (1982, 1985, 1988), the Taken trilogy (2008, 1012, 2014), even Mario and Luigi’s efforts to rescue Princess Peach from Bowser.

scholarly journals The Negro and the Nation: A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement.

1906 ◽  
Vol 21 (4) ◽  
pp. 703
Author(s):  
Walter L. Fleming ◽  
George S. Merriam
Keyword(s):  
American Slavery ◽  
History Of

Multidirectional Rememory: Slavery and the Holocaust in John A. Williams’s Clifford’s Blues

2019 ◽  
Vol 65 (3) ◽  
pp. 191-216
Author(s):  
Mark A. Tabone
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Jim Crow ◽  
The Novel ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
The Holocaust ◽  
History Of ◽  
Racialized Violence ◽  
American Author ◽  
Black Queer ◽  
Multidirectional Memory

This article focuses on the representation of history in African American author John A. Williams’s 1999 novel, Clifford’s Blues, a fictional account of a Black, queer American expatriate’s internment and enslavement in a Nazi concentration camp. Through a critical perspective that incorporates the imaginative recovery of (often silenced) history that Toni Morrison (1987) called “rememory,” along with what Holocaust scholar Michael Rothberg (2009) calls “multidirectional memory,” this article details Williams’s daring exploration of spaces of overlap between the histories of American slavery, Jim Crow, and the Nazi Holocaust. The article demonstrates how the novel’s unconventional and controversial emplotment allows Williams to create a distinctive historical critique not only of slavery and the Holocaust but, more broadly, of otherization, racialized violence, and modernity itself, while making a number of historiographic interventions. These include inscribing a largely absent history of the experience of Black people affected by the Holocaust and the mapping of theretofore underacknowledged resonances between American and German ideologies and practices. Through its transnational, transcultural “multidirectionality,” the novel opens up a broad, structural critique of apartheid everywhere; however, this article also argues that the novel also offers models for liberatory communities of resistance. The article demonstrates how Williams accomplishes this through his novel’s allegorical and literal use of the blues.

“Justice to India – Prosperity to England – Freedom to the Slave!” Humanitarian and Moral Reform Campaigns on India, Aborigines and American Slavery

2012 ◽  
Vol 22 (2) ◽  
pp. 299-324 ◽  
Author(s):  
ZOË LAIDLAW
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Integrated Approach ◽  
The United States ◽  
East India Company ◽  
Moral Reform ◽  
Equal Rights ◽  
British India ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Slave Emancipation ◽  
History Of

AbstractThis article considers British agitation against East India Company rule in India via an examination of the Aborigines Protection Society and the British India Society. Founded by humanitarians and moral reformers in the 1830s, these organisations placed India within a wide transnational context, which stretched from Britain's settler and plantation colonies to Liberia and the United States. However, in the wake of slave emancipation, British campaigners struggled to reconcile their universal understanding of humanity with their equally strong confidence in the benefits of ‘British civilisation’. Their nebulous and changeable programmes for reform failed to convince Britain's politicians and public that the challenges of free trade could be met by the exclusive use of free labour, or that all imperial subjects possessed equal rights. A fuller appreciation of these campaigns reveals the contradictions and occlusions inherent in mid-nineteenth century humanitarianism, and underscores the importance of a more geographically integrated approach to the history of opposition to Britain's empire.

Diverse Good Causes

1995 ◽  
Vol 19 (3) ◽  
pp. 333-370
Author(s):  
Whitman Stephen
Keyword(s):  
North American ◽  
European History ◽  
Minor Role ◽  
Atlantic Region ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Legal Personality ◽  
British America ◽  
Explanatory Factors ◽  
History Of

In many slave societies manumission coexisted with perpetual bondage, often featured by self-purchase by slave artisans, a practice that some societies monitored through recognition of the slave's legal personality as a contracting party. Manumission played a comparatively minor role in shaping North American slavery, with debatable exceptions in the mid-Atlantic region; historians of slavery there have portrayed manumitters as individuals of conscience and/or economic maximizers seeking profitable exits from a locally declining labor institution. This contrast was first noted by Frank Tannenbaum, who characterized slavery in Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking America as milder than in British America, and targeted differences in religion and in the European history of slavery of each society as key explanatory factors.

Indian Slavery

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Christina Snyder
Keyword(s):  
Native Americans ◽  
Oral Tradition ◽  
Cross Cultural ◽  
Racial Ideology ◽  
Christopher Columbus ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Global Commerce ◽  
History Of ◽  
Women And Children ◽  
Indian Slavery

The history of American slavery began long before the first Africans arrived at Jamestown in 1619. Evidence from archaeology and oral tradition indicates that for hundreds, perhaps thousands, of years prior, Native Americans had developed their own forms of bondage. This fact should not be surprising, for most societies throughout history have practiced slavery. In her cross-cultural and historical research on comparative captivity, Catherine Cameron found that bondspeople composed 10 percent to 70 percent of the population of most societies, lending credence to Seymour Drescher’s assertion that “freedom, not slavery, was the peculiar institution.” If slavery is ubiquitous, however, it is also highly variable. Indigenous American slavery, rooted in warfare and diplomacy, was flexible, often offering its victims escape through adoption or intermarriage, and it was divorced from racial ideology, deeming all foreigners—men, women, and children, of whatever color or nation—potential slaves. Thus, Europeans did not introduce slavery to North America. Rather, colonialism brought distinct and evolving notions of bondage into contact with one another. At times, these slaveries clashed, but they also reinforced and influenced one another. Colonists, who had a voracious demand for labor and export commodities, exploited indigenous networks of captive exchange, producing a massive global commerce in Indian slaves. This began with the second voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1495 and extended in some parts of the Americas through the twentieth century. During this period, between 2 and 4 million Indians were enslaved. Elsewhere in the Americas, Indigenous people adapted Euro-American forms of bondage. In the Southeast, an elite class of Indians began to hold African Americans in transgenerational slavery and, by 1800, developed plantations that rivaled those of their white neighbors. The story of Native Americans and slavery is complicated: millions were victims, some were masters, and the nature of slavery changed over time and varied from one place to another. A significant and long overlooked aspect of American history, Indian slavery shaped colonialism, exacerbated Native population losses, figured prominently in warfare and politics, and influenced Native and colonial ideas about race and identity.

scholarly journals The slippery paths of commemoration and Heritage tourism: the Netherlands, Ghana, and the rediscovery of Atlantic slavery

2008 ◽  
Vol 79 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 55-77 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gert Oostindie
Keyword(s):  
The Netherlands ◽  
Minority Groups ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Atlantic Slavery ◽  
Dutch History

Reflects upon the commemoration of the Atlantic slave trade and American slavery. Author describes how the slave trade and slavery was recently "rediscovered", as a part of Dutch history, and he compares this to the attention to this history in other European countries once engaging in slavery. He argues that despite the fact that the history of the slave trade and slavery is worthy of attention in itself, contemporary political and social factors mainly influence attention to the slave trade and slavery, noting that in countries with larger Afro-Caribbean minority groups the attention to this past is greater than in other once slave-trading countries. He further deplores the lack of academic accuracy on the slave trade and slavery in slavery commemorations and in the connected search for African roots among descendants of slaves, and illustrates this by focusing on the role of Ghana, and the slave fortress Elmina there, as this fortress also has become a much visited tourist site by Afro-Americans. According to him, this made for some that Ghana represents the whole of Africa, while African slaves in the Caribbean, also in the Dutch colonies, came from various parts of Africa. Author attributes this selectivity in part to the relatively large Ghanaian community in the Netherlands.

scholarly journals The Negro and the Nation: A History of American Slavery and Enfranchisement

1906 ◽  
Vol 11 (4) ◽  
pp. 903
Author(s):  
Carl Russell Fish ◽  
George S. Merriam
Keyword(s):  
American Slavery ◽  
History Of
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