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 Depictions of American Indians in George Armstrong Custer’s My Life on the Plains

Humanities ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 56
Author(s):  
Danielle Johannesen
Keyword(s):  
American Indians ◽  
American West ◽  
Literary Text ◽  
Indian Culture ◽  
Historical Scholarship ◽  
Military Conflict ◽  
Arts And Culture ◽  
History Of ◽  
Popular Representations

General George Armstrong Custer remains one of the most iconic and mythologized figures in the history of the American West. His infamous defeat at the 1876 Battle of the Little Bighorn largely defines his legacy; historical scholarship and popular representations of Custer consistently focus on his “Last Stand.” However, Custer was also a writer with a keen appreciation for arts and culture. This article analyzes Custer’s descriptions of American Indians in his memoir My Life on the Plains (1874). I trace how Custer’s descriptions of Indians and Indian culture clearly reveal a colonial mindset; yet, Custer regularly reflects on Indians and Indian culture with interest, curiosity, and even respect. I analyze these moments of potential commiseration and question whether these moments depart from a colonial mindset. Additionally, I analyze how Custer constructs Indians as the “enemy” and show how these constructions are problematic, yet critical for Custer’s aestheticizing of military conflict. Ultimately, I argue that Custer’s memoir is deserving of increased attention as a literary text and show how to reveal complexities and contradictions with literary and historical implications.

Toward a ‘real, profane history’ of early American society∗

1985 ◽  
Vol 10 (3) ◽  
pp. 367-381
Author(s):  
Marcus Rediker
Keyword(s):  
Early American ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Society

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.

A Dream of the Judgment Day

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
John Howard Smith
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
American Indians ◽  
Religious Identity ◽  
Cultural Landscape ◽  
American Exceptionalism ◽  
The United States ◽  
Early American History ◽  
Early American ◽  
History Of ◽  
Contemporary United States

The End is near! This phrase, so well known in the contemporary United States, invokes images of manic self-proclaimed prophets of doom standing on street corners shouting their warnings and predictions to amused or indifferent passersby. However, such proclamations have long been a feature of the American cultural landscape, and were never exclusively the domain of wild-eyed fanatics. A Dream of the Judgment Day describes the origins and development of American apocalypticism and millennialism from the beginnings of English colonization of North America in the early 1600s through the formation of the United States and its travails in the nineteenth century. It explores the reasons why varieties of millennialism are an essential component of American exceptionalism, and focuses upon the nation’s early history to better establish how millennialism and apocalypticism are the keys to understanding early American history and religious identity. This sweeping history of eschatological thought in early America encompasses not just traditional and non-traditional Christian beliefs in the end of the world, but also how American Indians and African Americans have likewise been influenced by, and have expressed, those beliefs in unique ways.

scholarly journals Plantation as Mission: American Indians, Enslaved Africans, and Jesuit Missionaries in Maryland

2021 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 385-407
Author(s):  
Laura E. Masur
Keyword(s):  
Latin America ◽  
American Indians ◽  
New France ◽  
European Ancestry ◽  
Archaeological Sites ◽  
Historical Evidence ◽  
Capitalist Production ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Jesuit Missionaries

Abstract Jesuit endeavors in Maryland are difficult to categorize as either missions or plantations. Archaeological sites associated with the Maryland Mission/ Province bear similarities to Jesuit mission sites in New France as well as plantations in Latin America and the Caribbean. It is clear that in Maryland, the Jesuits did not enforce a distinction between missions as places of conversion and plantations as sites of capitalist production. Moreover, people of American Indian, African, and European ancestry have been connected with Maryland’s Jesuit plantations throughout their history. Archaeological evidence of Indian missions in Maryland—however fragmented—contributes to a narrative of the Maryland mission that is at odds with prevailing nineteenth- and twentieth-century histories. Archaeology demonstrates the importance of critically reflecting on available historical evidence, including a historiographic focus on either mission or plantation, on the written history of Jesuits in the Americas. Furthermore, historical archaeologists must reconceptualize missions as both places and practices.

Yellow Fever

2020 ◽  
pp. 89-122
Author(s):  
Michael B. A. Oldstone
Keyword(s):  
United States ◽  
Yellow Fever ◽  
American Indians ◽  
New World ◽  
The United States ◽  
Westward Expansion ◽  
Black African ◽  
African Slaves ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean

This chapter examines the history of yellow fever, the role it played in shaping slavery in the United States, and its part in the country’s westward expansion. Yellow fever was an endemic disease of West Africa that traveled to the New World and elsewhere aboard trading ships with their cargoes of slaves. The black African peoples, although easily infected, nevertheless withstood the effects in that fewer died from the infection than Caucasians, American Indians, or Asians. Ironically, as smallpox and measles devastated natives along the Caribbean coast and islands, growing numbers of African slaves were brought to replace those plantation laborers. When the value of Africans over natives became apparent, by virtue of the blacks’ resistance to yellow fever, the importation of these Africans increased still further. Because it was so lethal to susceptible humans, yellow fever actually disrupted exploration into the Caribbean. In fact, American expansion became possible only after a team led by Walter Reed arrived in Cuba to combat the disease and prove it was transmitted by the Aedes aegypti mosquito.

A European Turn in Early American History?

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-43
Author(s):  
Tim Harris ◽  
Chris Beneke ◽  
Benjamin J. Kaplan ◽  
Wayne Te Brake ◽  
Evan Haefeli
Keyword(s):  
American History ◽  
Colonial America ◽  
British History ◽  
Early America ◽  
Early American History ◽  
European Context ◽  
Early American ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Caribbean ◽  
Religious Landscape

Abstract From the nineteenth century onwards, Americans have naturalized their colonial origins into a consensual nationalist history, emphasizing America’s perceived role as a refuge for the persecuted, while smoothing out a myriad of complexities in the process. Evan Haefeli attempts to overturn the assumptions underpinning this narrative and is convinced that many important aspects of early America need to be understood within a broader European context. In Accidental Pluralism, he argues that the collapse of religious unity in England lies at the root of the emergence of pluralism in colonial America, in which he includes Canada and the Caribbean. Relationships among states, churches, and publics were contested from the earliest decades of colonization and created a pluralistic religious landscape that no one had anticipated. The four reviewers are fulsome in their praise, calling it an impressive, important, powerful, and sweeping book that few scholars could have written. The reviewers also raise questions, for instance by problematizing the incorporation of the colonial American dimension into early British history, criticizing the validity of the chosen end date, and questioning his definitions of diversity, pluralism, and religious toleration. In his response Evan Haefeli takes the opportunity to reflect on what drove him to write the book and to organize it in this way. He acknowledges that connecting early American history with its broader European context was more difficult than it should have been, as the dominant questions in the two historiographies are an ocean apart. While the argument of the book is aimed at early Americanists, Haefeli is grateful that the reviewers situate the story he tells within the broader early modern European history of toleration.

scholarly journals “That Dreadful Country”: C. L. R. James's Early Thoughts on American Civilization

2016 ◽  
Vol 51 (1) ◽  
pp. 21-42
Author(s):  
CHRISTIAN HØGSBJERG
Keyword(s):  
American Literature ◽  
Social Movement ◽  
Black People ◽  
West Indians ◽  
American Slavery ◽  
Pan Africanism ◽  
Marxist Analysis ◽  
History Of ◽  
American Society ◽  
American Working Class

If C. L. R. James could later reflect in Beyond a Boundary that before arriving in Britain, “about Britain, I was a strange compound of knowledge and ignorance,” then the same was fundamentally true about his relation to American society before his arrival there in 1938. This article will begin with discussion of the attraction of America for black West Indians, including George Padmore, in the era of the Harlem Renaissance, as well as the young James's own love of jazz and American literature. The complexities of the young James's “anti-Americanism” will be also explored, before we explore how James's turn to both Marxism and pan-Africanism after 1934 led to a new appreciation of both the power of the American working class and a new understanding of how a revolutionary solution might be found to the “Negro Question,” the question of the systematic racism towards black people in America. The article will conclude with discussion of James's 1938 work A History of Negro Revolt, in particular its Marxist analysis of the history of American slavery and its abolition during the American Civil War, as well as the strengths and limitations of Garveyism as a social movement.

scholarly journals Quixotism, Federalism, and the Question of American National Identity in Royall Tyler’s The Algerine Captive

2019 ◽  
Vol 33 (1) ◽  
pp. 29-46
Author(s):  
Dragoș Ivana
Keyword(s):  
National Identity ◽  
Racial Differences ◽  
John Adams ◽  
Captivity Narrative ◽  
Early American ◽  
Cross Cultural Differences ◽  
Tom Jones ◽  
The Status ◽  
American National Identity ◽  
American Society

Abstract This article places Royall Tyler’s novel, The Algerine Captive, within the socio-political context of the early American Republic which was acutely concerned with the problem of defining its national identity. As a multi-genre text juxtaposing the picaresque format patterned after Henry Fielding’ Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones with the travelogue and the Barbary captivity narrative, The Algerine Captive is a novel which mirrors the incoherent and disjointed character of America in the last two decades of the eighteenth century, in formal as well as generic terms. By the same token, the variegated adventures of the protagonist/narrator Updike Underhill both at home and abroad reveal social, political, legal, religious and racial differences meant to challenge the Federal meaning of nation as an isolated and self-reliant land under the John Adams government. I examine the link between Tyler’s critique of Federalism taken as national insularity and the status of Updike Underhill as a quixotic character. His return to America as a patriotic citizen after escaping from slavery in Algiers is not a traditional quixotic “cure,” i.e. a return to the Federalist status quo. Underhill’s return to his native country enables him to make American society better, not by simply parroting federalist principles, but by upholding and testing cross-cultural differences and global experiences on native soil as a cosmopolitan citizen.

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

2005 ◽  
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.

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