Dread Scott’s Slave Rebellion Reenactment

Dread Scott’s two-day Slave Rebellion Reenactment, part recreation and part historical revision, dramatized the 1811 slave rebellion in a more fully developed manner than historical records authored by slaveholders, incorporating a range of strategies used in other artworks depicting slave resistance, including: elisions, caesura, lacuna, off-screen action, obfuscation, abstraction, redaction, and more. These devices safeguard history from appropriation or commodification on the one hand; and on the other, highlight the way slave resistance is neglected in the historical record and commemorative landscape.

SLAVE RESISTANCE AND DECOLONIZING CARIBBEAN HISTORY IN ANDREA LEVY’S THE LONG SONG

Set during the final days of Slavery on the island of Jamaica, Andrea Levy’s 2010 novel, The Long Song is a neo-slave narrative that explores the nature of slave resistance and colonial historiographical control. When read through a postcolonial lens, The Long Song takes the form of a counter-discourse, where the main character of Miss July offers a corrective to the dominant white narratives of Caribbean history. This essay argues that the experience of resistance in Levy’s narrative is one of literary mimicry, analysing July’s written resistance as it answers back to and confronts the colonial narratives that disregard the oppressed individual experience from history. Levy, in reanimating the history of Jamaican slavery by aligning her text with the unheard ‘History From Below’ perspective, demonstrates and replicates the unreliable narratives orchestrated by those ‘From Above’. As such, both Levy and her fictional July employ a method of historiographic metafiction to reclaim the previously silenced voice of the Jamaican slaves that the hegemonic White Planter class seek to oppress and obliterate from historical record. <p> </p><p><strong> Article visualizations:</strong></p><p><img src="/-counters-/edu_01/0751/a.php" alt="Hit counter" /></p>

Maroon Societies in the Americas

Communities formed by Maroons—self-liberated enslaved Africans and their descendants—dotted the fringes of plantation America, from Brazil to Florida, from Peru to Texas. Maroon communities, called palenques in the Spanish colonies and mocambos or quilombos in Brazil, ranged from tiny bands that survived less than a year to powerful states encompassing thousands of members that lasted for generations or, in some cases, centuries. Marronage represented a major form of slave resistance, whether accomplished by lone individuals, by small groups, or in great collective rebellions. Throughout the Americas, Maroon communities stood out as a heroic challenge to white authority, as the living proof of the existence of a slave consciousness that refused to be limited by the whites’ conception or manipulation of it. In the 2020s, Maroons still form semi-independent communities in several parts of the Americas, for example, in Suriname, French Guiana, Jamaica, Belize, Colombia, and Brazil. As the most isolated of Afro-Americans (the descendants of enslaved Africans brought to the Americas), they have since the 1920s been an important focus of scientific research, contributing to theoretical debates about resistance to slavery, the heritage of Africa in the Americas, the process of creolization, and the nature of historical knowledge among nonliterate peoples.

Digital Commemorations of Slave Revolt

This article presents, troubles, and ultimately seeks to answer two simple questions: What does the digitization of slave resistance look like, and can it serve as a virtual memorial commemorating historic events where markers are lacking in geographic places, such as locations where slave revolts occurred? In four main parts, this article presents an example of digital commemoration of slave resistance in a now defunct online list of shipboard rebellions; it then contrasts this digital resource to material monuments to slave revolt leaders and to diverse types of museum displays (as at the International Museum of Slavery at Liverpool); the next section profiles online resources about slave revolt, including Vincent Brown’s animated map of slave insurrections in Jamaica and repositories, archives, and databases of newspaper advertisements for runaways, arguing that these resources can sometimes be understood not merely as educational tools but also as digital commemorations of slave revolt. Finally, engaging with theory on monuments, memory, and history, this piece explains why digital commemorations existing in virtual space might productively acknowledge our discomfort with the existent archive and the insurmountable gaps in our knowledge of history.