Between Human and Animal

2020 ◽  
pp. 39-68
Author(s):  
Stefanie Hunt-Kennedy
Keyword(s):  
Maternal Inheritance ◽  
Physical Impairment ◽  
Political Status ◽  
Enslaved Women ◽  
British Caribbean

Through a close examination of British Caribbean slave laws, this chapter argues that British Caribbean slave law always recognized the humanity of the slave, and the law’s power derived from its ability to see Africans’ humanity and effectively disable it. Slave law suspended Africans and their descendants between the human and the animal through disability-inducing laws. The principle of maternal inheritance was a legal notion that positioned enslaved women as legally equivalent to animals. The slave codes of Barbados and Jamaica disabled enslaved Africans by limiting their mobility, freedom, and autonomy, and by divesting them of political status. The codes encouraged the physical impairment and disfigurement of captives by sanctioning punishments that disabled and disfigured as well as by establishing a culture in which whites could punish captives with impunity in whatever way they desired.

‘Ill Used by our Government’: The Darien Venture, King William and the Development of Opposition Politics in Scotland, 1695–1701

2019 ◽  
Vol 98 (1) ◽  
pp. 22-44 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rachael E. Comunale
Keyword(s):  
Crucial Role ◽  
New World ◽  
Significant Proportion ◽  
Status Quo ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Movement ◽  
Political Status ◽  
The Press ◽  
Public Consciousness ◽  
Political Factions

This article examines the development of political opposition in Scotland from 1695 to 1701 in the context of the Company of Scotland Trading to Africa and the Indies. It is argued that the potency of the political movement inspired by Darien derived from the view that King William was directly implicated in the failure of the colony. Three episodes in the Company's history—the loss of subscriptions in Hamburg, the appearance of memorials in the new world prohibiting English aid to the colony and the imprisonment of Darien sailors by the Spanish authorities—are examined in detail. The ramification of these controversies was increasingly seen as the result not of English interference, but rather the crown's refusal to act on behalf of the Company. Because a significant proportion of the population was invested in the Company, and because the press helped to keep Darien in the forefront of public consciousness, these issues transformed Darien into a major political grievance that united disparate political factions in support of a single cause. Although the alliance inspired by Darien was temporary, it, nonetheless, played a crucial role in disrupting the political status quo.

Buried Narratives: Exhuming the Mother's Story in Oliver Twist

2018 ◽  
Vol 8 (3) ◽  
pp. 247-266
Author(s):  
Michelle L. Wilson
Keyword(s):  
Social Change ◽  
Maternal Inheritance ◽  
The Novel ◽  
Poor Law ◽  
The Family ◽  
The Law ◽  
First Time ◽  
Critical Consideration

Initially, Oliver Twist (1839) might seem representative of the archetypal male social plot, following an orphan and finding him a place by discovering the father and settling the boy within his inheritance. But Agnes Fleming haunts this narrative, undoing its neat, linear transmission. This reconsideration of maternal inheritance and plot in the novel occurs against the backdrop of legal and social change. I extend the critical consideration of the novel's relationship to the New Poor Law by thinking about its reflection on the bastardy clauses. And here, of course, is where the mother enters. Under the bastardy clauses, the responsibility for economic maintenance of bastard children was, for the first time, legally assigned to the mother, relieving the father of any and all obligation. Oliver Twist manages to critique the bastardy clauses for their release of the father, while simultaneously embracing the placement of the mother at the head of the family line. Both Oliver and the novel thus suggest that it is the mother's story that matters, her name through which we find our own. And by containing both plots – that of the father and the mother – Oliver Twist reveals the violence implicit in traditional modes of inheritance in the novel and under the law.

A Study on the works of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn with reference to Indian Genocide

IJOHMN ◽  
2017 ◽  
Vol 3 (6) ◽  
pp. 31-43
Author(s):  
V. Padmanaban
Keyword(s):  
Native American ◽  
Indigenous Peoples ◽  
Native American Studies ◽  
American Government ◽  
White American ◽  
Political Status ◽  
The People ◽  
Indigenous Lands ◽  
Westward Movement ◽  
Wounded Knee

This work is a study on the works of Elizabeth Cook-Lynn who is proficient scholar and hails from South Dakotas and Sioux nations and their turmoil, anguish and lamentation to retrieve their lands and preserve their culture and race. Many a aboriginals were killed in the post colonization. Elizabeth Cook-Lynn grieves and her lamentation for the people of Dakotas yields sympathy towards the survived at Wounded Knee massacre and the great exploitation of the livelihood of the indigenous people and the cruelty of American Federal government. Treaty conserved indigenous lands had been lost due to the title of Sioux Nation and many Dakotas and Dakotas had been forced off from their homelands due to the anti-Indian legislation, poverty and federal Indian – white American policy. The whites had no more regard for or perceiving the native’s peoples’ culture and political status as considered by Jefferson’s epoch. And to collect bones and Indian words, delayed justice all these issues tempt her to write. The authors accuses that America was in ignorance and racism and imperialism which was prevalent in the westward movement. The natives want to recall their struggles, and their futures filled with uncertainty by the reality and losses by the white and Indian life in America which had undergone deliberate diminishment by the American government sparks the writer to back for the indigenous peoples. This multifaceted study links American study with Native American studies. This research brings to highlight the unchangeable scenario of the Native American who is in the bonds of as American further this research scrutinizes Elizabeth’s diplomacy and legalized decolonization theory which reflects in her literature career and her works but defies to her own doctrines.

A Short History of the People Israel from the Patriarchs to the Messiah

2011 ◽  
Vol 2 (2) ◽  
pp. 181-207
Author(s):  
Beth A. Berkowitz
Keyword(s):  
Early Period ◽  
Second Temple ◽  
Sexual Practice ◽  
Short History ◽  
Second Temple Period ◽  
Rich Variety ◽  
Political Status ◽  
Leviticus Rabbah ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of

This article addresses recent arguments that question whether “Judaism,” as such, existed in antiquity or whether the Jewishness of the Second Temple period should be characterized in primarily ethnic terms. At stake is the question of whether it is appropriate to speak of Judaism as an abstract system or religion in this early period. An appeal to the under-used collections of Midrash Aggadah provides the context for new insights, focused around a pericope in Leviticus Rabbah that is preoccupied with this very question. This parashah goes well beyond the ethnicity/ religion binary, producing instead a rich variety of paradigms of Jewish identity that include moral probity, physical appearance, relationship to God, ritual life, political status, economics, demographics, and sexual practice.

Sign in / Sign up

Export Citation Format

Share Document