“Ameliorating the Situation” of Empire: Slavery and Abolition in The Woman of Colour

2021 ◽  
Vol 34 (2) ◽  
pp. 167-186
Author(s):  
Kristina Huang
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Mixed Race ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Secondary Character ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
Colonial Governance ◽  
Slavery Debates

In this essay, I examine how The Woman of Colour (1808) extends from the ameliorative context of the British slavery debates that were about reforming imperial rule overseas in the wake of the 1807 British abolition of the slave trade. By thinking alongside the work of Lisa Lowe’s The Intimacies of Four Continents, I argue that The Woman of Colour abstracts plantation slavery while positioning the protagonist Olivia Fairfield, a mixed-race heiress of a Jamaican plantation, as a figure of British imperial tutelage. The abstraction manifests through Dido, a secondary character whose relationship to Olivia is ambiguously presented to readers. Although the representation of Dido is akin to the grateful slave trope, the novel represents her as a dedicated servant to Olivia, implying that their relationship is benign and harmonious. By turning to Dido’s characterization and the pedagogical objectives of the novel, I identify a liberal imperial project in The Woman of Colour: the novel envisions a paternalistic notion of emancipation in Jamaica while remaining heavily invested in colonial governance of Black people.

Cycles

2019 ◽  
pp. 153-176
Author(s):  
Michelle Burnham
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Travel Narratives ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Botanic Garden ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Natural Histories

This chapter situates William Earle’s 1800 novel Obi within a network of texts—including histories, natural histories, poems, and travel narratives—that surface the novel’s engagement with the profitable business of botanical transplantation which, at the turn into the nineteenth century, depended on connections between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. Earle aligns human bodies with plants in order to represent the slave trade as a destructive form of transplantation and amputation. Drawing from Erasmus Darwin’s poem Botanic Garden, the novel Obi advances a “vegetable economy” in which revolution is a natural, botanical response to the violent transplantation project of the Atlantic slave trade. The surprisingly transoceanic and political life of plants during this period therefore forms the backdrop for the novel’s anti-slavery argument, which aligns human bodies with the bodies of plants and understands plantation slavery in terms of botanical transplantation.

scholarly journals Adapting Wives and Daughters for Television: Reimagining Women, Travel, Natural Science, and Race

Adaptation ◽  
2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Gill Ballinger
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Natural Science ◽  
Black People ◽  
Racial Politics ◽  
The Novel ◽  
African People ◽  
Female Protagonist ◽  
Late Twentieth ◽  
Late Twentieth Century

Abstract This essay examines the depiction of women, travel, natural science, and race in Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (1864–66) and Andrew Davies’s BBC adaptation of the novel (1999). It argues that the adaptation offers a recognizable transposition of Gaskell’s text, but makes some significant adjustments that reveal its contemporary reimagining of the novel’s gender and racial politics. In particular, Davies transforms Gaskell’s unexceptional female protagonist Molly Gibson into a proto-feminist naturalist adventurer, and revisions the casual racism the novel expresses towards black people in line with late-twentieth-century sensibilities. Each text, novel and film, reveals the period-specific ideological forces that shape its portrayal of Englishwomen and African people.

scholarly journals STATE OF EXCEPTION THROUGH RASISME IN GO SET A WATCHMAN IN AGAMBEN’S POLITICAL PHILOSOPHY

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (2) ◽  
pp. 123-134
Author(s):  
Damay Rahmawati ◽  
Ramadhani Ardianto Karsa Sunaryono ◽  
Mira Utami
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Racial Discrimination ◽  
Black People ◽  
Lower Class ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Citizenship Rights ◽  
American Society ◽  
The Impact ◽  
Harper Lee

This study aims to see racism in the novel Go Set a Watchman by Harper Lee as state of exception; a political philosophy of Agamben. Agamben's idea of ​​state of exception is used in this study as the theoretical framework. This research specifically reveals how racism becomes part of state of exception in American society around 1960s when the novel was written. The analysis focuses on issues of racism in American society as depicted in the novel. The issue of racism is taken with the aim of analyzing state of exception in USA, in dealing with racial discrimination. After analyzing the issues of racism and state of exception in the novel, this study reveals that racism in American society is politically structured. The finding of this study is the discrimination experienced by lower class citizens who are dominated by black people, as the impact of state of exception which affects their citizenship rights.

Biology and African Slavery

2012 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kenneth F. Kiple
Keyword(s):  
Falciparum Malaria ◽  
Yellow Fever ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Black People ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Separate Branch ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
Atlantic Slave Trade ◽  
Tropical Plantation ◽  
Indentured Servants

This article reviews scholarship on the biology of African slaves. Mother Africa ensured that her sons and daughters could tolerate a disease environment sufficiently harsh that it served as a barrier to European outsiders for many centuries, keeping them confined to the coast and, save for some notable exceptions, away from the interior. Falciparum malaria and yellow fever, however, the chief ramparts in this barrier, did not remain confined to Africa. Rather, they reached the Americas with the Atlantic slave trade to rage among non-immune white and red people alike. But they largely spared blacks who were relatively resistant to these African illnesses, as well as to the bulk of those Eurasian diseases whose ravages were mostly directed at indigenous peoples. The sum of these pathogenic susceptibilities and immunities added up to the elimination of the latter (and white indentured servants) as contenders for tropical plantation labourers, and placed that onus squarely on the shoulders of the Africans. Yet, such a nomination in an age of rationalism bore with it the notion that black people, because of their ability to resist fevers, were sufficiently different biologically from Europeans as to constitute a separate branch of humankind and a lower one at that.

Movin’ on Up—and Out

2019 ◽  
pp. 94-118
Author(s):  
Courtney R. Baker
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black People ◽  
Historical Memory ◽  
Middle Passage ◽  
Civil Rights Era ◽  
Black America ◽  
Visual Politics ◽  
Plantation Slavery ◽  
Popular Images ◽  
Post Civil Rights

This chapter discusses the visual culture of 1970s Black America, focusing especially on popular culture artifacts such as film, television, and comics, to make sense of the idea of movement in the postsegregationist United States. It attends to the representation of black people in various locations—from the inner city to the suburbs to a historical memory of the plantation slavery, the middle passage, and an African motherland—in visual forms, including Afrocentrist iconography, photography, and fine art. By attending to popular images, an important if not fuller picture of Black visual politics during the post-civil rights era becomes apparent.

Social Injustice Tormented the Psyche of Parentless Children

2020 ◽  
pp. 199-207
Author(s):  
Alagesan M. ◽  
S. Horizan Prasanna Kumar ◽  
B. Meadows Bose
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Black People ◽  
Future Generations ◽  
Social Injustice ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Civil Rights Movements

This study explores how social injustice affects the characters of the three parentless children in the novel Jazz, which tells the story of a triangular love. This chapter highlights civil rights movements which impact on black people and future generations. It is the story about the three parentless children who suffer because of the lack of parent's guidance. Morrison tries to instill the importance of mothers by depicting the lives of the three orphaned protagonists and how they meet with a fatal end.

From slavery and colonialism to Black Lives Matter: new mood music or more fundamental change?

2020 ◽  
Vol ahead-of-print (ahead-of-print) ◽  
Author(s):  
Nelarine Cornelius
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
White Supremacy ◽  
Slave Trade ◽  
Sub Saharan Africa ◽  
Policy And Practice ◽  
Content Type ◽  
Black Lives Matter ◽  
Black Africa ◽  
Chattel Slavery ◽  
The Usa

Purpose2020 has proved to be a challenging year. In addition to the challenges of COVID-19, yet again, the USA has witnessed police brutality leading to the death of a Black man, George Floyd. The Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement, founded in the US but now an international organisation which challenges white supremacy and deliberates harm against Black people, mobilised hundreds of thousands of people to take to the streets across the globe. Increasingly, the protests focus not only on George Floyd's murder but also the continued failure to challenge the celebrity of those involved in the transatlantic slave trade and European imperialism. In this article, the author will contend that many organisations are now reexamining their association with these historical wrongs against Black Africa and its diaspora. Further, the author will contend but that the failure to highlight the role of Black chattel slavery and imperialism in the accumulation of economic, commercial and political benefits reaped by the global north is a source of shame not only for many firms and institutions but also for universities.Design/methodology/approachThe author has reviewed the online media for the latest developments in response to Black Lives Matter's George Floyd campaign in 2020 and reviewed the literature on the link between European global ambition and its impact on the Americas and sub-Saharan Africa.FindingsInternationally, there is a discernible change in outlook towards the importance of the evils of slavery and colonialism on the Black experience today. These small steps will require scholars to embark on a fresh reexamination of race, society and work.Originality/valueFor decades, the slave trade and colonialism were issues rarely raised in government, firms and business schools. This will inevitably change especially in those countries that are the main beneficiaries of Black chattel slavery and colonial exploitation. Much Equality, Diversity and Inclusion (EDI) practice is fundamentally tokenism. A root and branch reappraisal will be needed to create more effective EDI policy and practice in support of race equality and anti-racism.

scholarly journals Cultural Violence represented in Indonesia and American Literatures

2018 ◽  
Vol 53 ◽  
pp. 03003
Author(s):  
Fatchul Mu’in ◽  
Rustam Effendi
Keyword(s):  
Social Life ◽  
Black People ◽  
American People ◽  
African American People ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Negative Consequences ◽  
Political Opportunity ◽  
Cultural Behavior ◽  
American Novels ◽  
Cultural Violence

This article is aimed at describing the lives of dominated people of both Indonesia and America. Among the dominated people in Indonesian community are Indonesian Chinese people, and those in American community are African American people. The discussion on some Indonesia novels of post tragedy of 1998 shows that personally Chinese faced a hard life; and socially they were dominated. Therefore, it can be concluded that: (1) the personal behaviour of Indonesian Chinese is represented through the hard life, (2) social behaviour of Indonesian Chinese is represented through the dominated social life, and (3) cultural behavior is represented through the religious life with many problems.This is say that the cultural behaviour of Indonesian Chinese in Indonesia novels is represented through cultural violence. The similar result of discussion on some American novels of post slavery shows that (1) the black man as the representation of Black people (African-Americans) was always in a dilemmatic condition leaving him without any options. Whatever he chose, will have negative consequences, (2) the struggle for ‘equality’ through ‘violence’ will result in a ‘tragic fate’, and (3) the novel reflected the black people who yearned for freedom from white domination and expected to have good education, good employment, and equality in political opportunity, law enforcement/law protection, and in other sociocultural life.

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.

scholarly journals Racism in Arabic literature: Glimpses from Poetry, novel and folklore: ظواهر عنصرية في الأدب العربي - ملامح من الشعر والرواية والسير الشعبية

2021 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Alaa Fahti El-Gabry, Mohamed Ibrahim Elaskary
Keyword(s):  
Black People ◽  
Arabic Literature ◽  
People Of Color ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Western Literature ◽  
Subjective Representation

This paper discusses the idea of racism in Arabic literature. It mainly focuses on the subjective representation of black people as early as the pre-Islamic era until the modern ages. We trace the subjective representation of black people in poetry, the novel and folklore. In this paper, we do not intend we defend the Arabic culture or Arabic literature, nor do we aim to beautify the biased representation of people of color in Arabic writings. Rather, we will try to study this phenomenon in an objective and balanced way. In this regard, we would like also to reiterate the fact that the image of black people in Western literature is not in any way brighter than their depiction in Arabic literature.

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