“Not So Denatured as to Kill Her Child”

2019 ◽  
pp. 96-131
Author(s):  
Sophie White
Keyword(s):  
Sexual Abuse ◽  
Pregnant Woman ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Work Roles ◽  
Childless Woman ◽  
Illinois Country ◽  
Enslaved Women ◽  
Indian Girl ◽  
Court Appearance

Chapter Three moves to the Illinois Country (Upper Louisiana) in 1748 and explores the contentious relationship between two enslaved women: Marie-Jeanne, a pregnant woman of African descent accused of infanticide after going into labor, and Lisette, a young Indian girl. The chapter explores French views of motherhood, and of enslaved Africans as parents, but also enslaved women’s particular vulnerability to sexual abuse from French men both in the French Atlantic and Indian Oceans (especially Mauritius). Marie-Jeanne and Lisette’s court appearance, in Kaskaskia and then in New Orleans where Marie-Jeanne was sent to be tried, afforded them the possibility of narrating their own stories of loss, and, in the fissures between the lines of questioning and their answers, the childless woman and the motherless child interspersed references to work roles, conflicts over authority, and their conceptions of motherhood.

Fighting for Freedom

Walking Raddy ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 21-30
Author(s):  
Jessica Marie Johnson
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Black Community ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Community Formation ◽  
Enslaved Women ◽  
History Of ◽  
Women Of African Descent ◽  
Eighteenth And Nineteenth Centuries ◽  
Free Women ◽  
The City

Since the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, enslaved and free women of African descent have been central to New Orleans’ culture and black community formation. Enslaved women of African descent who secured manumission—or legal documentation of their freedom—laid the foundation for the vibrant and politically savvy black community that would emerge in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The fight for freedom, however, would be long and winding, with complicated successes and failures reflecting diversity and conflict within and among women of African descent, as well as the changing geopolitical terrain the city was founded on and remained situated in throughout its long history. Recovering the voices of these early, founding women—the political and cultural ancestors of the Baby Dolls—is crucial to developing a history of women of African descent’s defiance and resistance to both racial and gendered oppression across New Orleans history.

Voices of the Enslaved

2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sophie White
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
West African ◽  
Court Cases ◽  
Autobiographical Narratives ◽  
Criminal Trials ◽  
Enslaved Women ◽  
Legal Testimony ◽  
Familial Bonds ◽  
French Louisiana

In eighteenth-century New Orleans, the legal testimony of some 150 enslaved women and men--like the testimony of free colonists--was meticulously recorded and preserved. Questioned in criminal trials as defendants, victims, and witnesses about attacks, murders, robberies, and escapes, they answered with stories about themselves, stories that rebutted the premise on which slavery was founded. Focusing on four especially dramatic court cases, Voices of the Enslaved draws us into Louisiana’s courtrooms, prisons, courtyards, plantations, bayous, and convents to understand how the enslaved viewed and experienced their worlds. As they testified, these individuals charted their movement between West African, indigenous, and colonial cultures; they pronounced their moral and religious values; and they registered their responses to labor, to violence, and, above all, to the intimate romantic and familial bonds they sought to create and protect. Their words--punctuated by the cadences of Creole and rich with metaphor--produced riveting autobiographical narratives as they veered from the questions posed by interrogators. Carefully assessing what we can discover, what we might guess, and what has been lost forever, Sophie White offers both a richly textured account of slavery in French Louisiana and a powerful meditation on the limits and possibilities of the archive.

Commandant St. Ange de Bellerive

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carl J. Ekberg ◽  
Sharon K. Person
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
Colonial Power ◽  
Illinois Country ◽  
Black Legend ◽  
Civil Government

This chapter focuses on Louis St. Ange de Bellerive's time as commandant at St. Louis. As of the spring of 1765, no government existed at what would eventually become St. Louis. This would change by the end of year, when St. Ange arrived and established a civil government six months before there was any ecclesiastical presence in the settlement. Crossing the Mississippi with St. Ange were Joseph-François Lefebvre, chief magistrate in the Illinios Country, and notary Charles-Joseph Labuxière. The chapter begins with an overview of St. Ange's administration of St. Louis as the seat of his government in Upper Louisiana and goes on to discuss the revolt that erupted in New Orleans against Antonio de Ulloa and Spanish rule in Louisiana in October 1768. It also recounts the murder of the Odawa leader Pontiac by a Peoria Indian on April 20, 1769, that threw the entire Illinois Country into turmoil. Finally, it considers the Black Legend, an accumulation of propaganda and Hispanophobia that painted Spain as an evil colonial power.

The Sisters of the Holy Family and the Veil of Race

2000 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 187-224 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tracy Fessenden
Keyword(s):  
New Orleans ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Religious Order ◽  
Women Of African Descent ◽  
The Veil ◽  
First Time ◽  
The City

In 1872, a young novice, Sister Marie, appeared at the door of the private study of Napoleon Perche, archbishop of New Orleans. This was not Sister Marie's first visit to the archbishop's residence. As a member of the religious order “last in rank” in the city, she was regularly called on to perform housekeeping duties for the archbishop and had worked for him in this capacity first as a postulant and later as a novice. Today, the reason for her visit was different: she appeared before him for the first time in a religious habit, which her order's mother superior, Josephine Charles, had designed and made. Mother Josephine was one of three founders of the Soeurs de Sainte-Famille or Sisters of the Holy Family (SSF), the order lowest in rank in New Orleans because its members were women of African descent.

scholarly journals Табу и эвфемизмы, связанные с рождением ребенка, в башкирском языке

2020 ◽  
Vol 13 (6) ◽  
pp. 1667-1676
Author(s):  
Gulnaz R. Karimova ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Pregnant Woman ◽  
Research Centre ◽  
Childless Woman ◽  
Folk Beliefs ◽  
Federal Research ◽  
Language And Literature ◽  
Mother And Child ◽  
Turkic Languages ◽  
Evil Spirits ◽  
Almost All

Introduction. This article examines the use of taboos and euphemisms in birth-related vocabulary of the Bashkir language. Goals. The paper reveals both linguistic facts and those of traditional ritual culture, ethnic worldviews. The Bashkir birth-related taboo vocabulary has not been a subject of special research yet. Materials and Methods. Actual meanings of lexemes were identified through the use of author’s field materials collected during comprehensive expeditions (2004 to 2008), lexical and phraseological data from dictionaries of the Bashkir and other Turkic languages, dialectal materials stored by the Institute of History, Language and Literature (Ufa Federal Research Centre of the RAS). The work employs a number of linguistic research methods, such as the ethnolinguistic and comparative-descriptive ones, component analysis method, and that of lexicographic selection. Results. As is known, this group of words is mainly tabooed in the Bashkir language. The vocabulary associated with birth rites is sacred and reflects a complex set of ideas about a pregnant woman. Ritual actions, magical prohibitions are aimed at protecting the health of women and at the birth of a healthy offspring. In this case, the vocabulary denoting a childless woman, a pregnant woman and the concepts of ‘childbirth’ and ‘obstetric aid’ were tabooed. The paper clarifies that the concepts associated with birth rites in the Bashkir language are expressed by euphemisms to protect the mother and child from evil spirits and the evil eye. The author has recorded a large number of euphemisms denoting a pregnant woman (auyrly, auyrғakalyu, auyrayҡly, auyry bar, auyrkүtүreә, auyrlau, yөklө, etc), a childless woman (balakүrmәgәn, biҙәү, tүlһeҙ, ҡyҫır, irғoraҡ and others), and those denoting the concept of ‘childbirth’ (bala tabyu, kureneү, bәpeslәү, bәpәilәү, ҡotolou, bushanyu, donyaғa keileү, etc.). Taboos and euphemisms of birth rites play an important role in the development of the vocabulary of the Bashkir language. The available materials on this topic require further systematization with the involvement of linguistic analysis. Over time, many archaisms disappeared from the modern vocabulary, while others have been used only in certain dialects of the Bashkirs. Almost all euphemistic vocabulary is represented by word combinations from common Turkic lexemes used in figurative meanings. The latter reflect the ethnic ritual traditions, good manners, politeness, observance of the rules of decency ― rules of ethics. They represent the speech etiquette and identity of the Bashkir people, being a valuable linguistic and cultural source for the study of the traditional folk beliefs of the Bashkirs.

“American Politics”

2019 ◽  
pp. 285-328
Author(s):  
Cécile Vidal
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Labor Force ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Mississippi Valley ◽  
Fault Line ◽  
Local Authorities ◽  
Lower Mississippi Valley ◽  
Saint Domingue ◽  
French Louisiana

This chapter unravels another paradox: that the relatively slow demographic and economic growth of French Louisiana did not accentuate the segmentation of the labor force between workers of various statuses. On the contrary, as local authorities and settlers were influenced by the Saint-Domingue model, they quickly became convinced that the only way they could succeed in developing the Lower Mississippi Valley would be to rely mainly on slaves of African descent. Their commitment to racial slavery never waned despite unfavorable circumstances. Consequently, heavy labor came to be reserved for slaves of African descent while slaveownership became the ultimate social fault-line among whites, including within New Orleans.

scholarly journals “Comme des bons pères de famille:” Masculinity, Patriarchy, and the Transnational Violences of Slavery in French Colonial North America

2017 ◽  
Vol 5 ◽  
Author(s):  
Lauren Laframboise
Keyword(s):  
North America ◽  
New Orleans ◽  
18Th Century ◽  
New France ◽  
Sexual Assaults ◽  
French Empire ◽  
Class Differences ◽  
Enslaved Women ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
French Louisiana

French colonial Louisiana has long captured the imaginations of academic and amateur historians alike. However, the histories of French Louisiana and New Orleans have often been analyzed within the canon of American history, overlooking its transnational and transcontinental connections to New France and the French Empire. This paper mobilizes 18th Century court documents from French colonial New Orleans that detail an assault perpetrated by a plantation overseer against enslaved workers. Jacques Charpentier dit le Roy migrated to Louisiana from what is now known as Canada, and was employed as an overseer by plantation owner and Superior Council member Amyault d’Auseville. Charpentier’s violent conduct led to the death of an enslaved man by the name of Brunet, and perpetrated multiple physical and sexual assaults against enslaved women, including Brunet’s wife, Bizao. The d’Auseville vs. Charpentier case not only illustrates the violence of slavery within the French Empire, but also the ways in which class differences were mobilized to entrench racial hierarchies. Above all, the case shows that the institution of slavery was sustained by migrations within the French Empire in North America, and provides concrete evidence of the transnational and transcontinental nature of slaveholding. This paper problematizes historiographical arguments that slavery was ‘less brutal’ in the French Empire by bringing the d’Auseville vs. Charpentier case in conversation with the Codes Noirs and its patriarchal foundations.

“Look’d Like Milk”: Colonialism and Infant Feeding in the English Atlantic World

2020 ◽  
Vol 10 (2-3) ◽  
pp. 147-178
Author(s):  
Carla Cevasco
Keyword(s):  
Infant Feeding ◽  
Atlantic World ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Settler Colonialism ◽  
Baby Food ◽  
Captivity Narratives ◽  
Enslaved Women ◽  
Women Of African Descent ◽  
English Atlantic World ◽  
Scholarly Attention

Abstract While wet nursing interactions between enslaved women of African descent and colonial women have received extensive scholarly attention, much remains to be done in understanding colonial and Native women’s interactions around breastfeeding and infant feeding. This article close-reads two captivity narratives in which baby food features prominently: God’s Protecting Providence, Jonathan Dickinson’s 1699 narrative of being shipwrecked among Ais, Jeaga, Jobé, Santaluces, and Surruque Indians in coastal Florida in 1696; and God’s Mercy Surmounting Man’s Cruelty, Elizabeth Hanson’s 1728 narrative of being captured by Wabanaki people during Dummer’s War in 1724. Captivity rendered the colonists dependent upon intimate Native care for the survival of their children. When Dickinson and Hanson crafted their narratives of their captivities, however, they sought to reinscribe colonial supremacy after experiences that called it into question. The complexities of colonial-Native interactions around infant feeding in these sources demonstrate the need for further scholarship on reproduction and settler colonialism.

The Bonds of Kinship, the Ties of Freedom in Colonial Peru

2016 ◽  
Vol 42 (1) ◽  
pp. 3-21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachel Sarah O’Toole
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
African Descent ◽  
Colonial Peru ◽  
Enslaved Women ◽  
Peruvian Coast ◽  
Public Recognition ◽  
Early Eighteenth Century ◽  
Freed People

By contrasting how families who mobilized African-descent networks gained more autonomy than those who relied on slaveholder patronage, this article explores the interplay between kinship and manumission on the northern Peruvian coast from the mid-seventeenth century into the early eighteenth century. For enslaved and freed people, kinship did not constitute a status, but a series of exchanges that required legal or public recognition and mutual acknowledgment. Manumission was embedded in articulated kinships, or announced relations, as well as in silenced kinships that often occurred because owners refused to recognize their relationships with enslaved women.

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