Black Samson

The United States has never existed without a Black Samson. Before Harriet Tubman or Martin Luther King, Jr. were identified with Moses, African Americans linked those who challenged racial oppression in America with Samson. In Black Samson: The Untold Story of an American Icon, Nyasha Junior and Jeremy Schipper investigate legal documents, narratives by enslaved persons, speeches, sermons, periodicals, poetry, fiction, and visual arts to tell the unlikely story of how a flawed biblical hero became an iconic figure in America’s racial history. Along the way, Schipper and Junior engage the work of African American luminaries, including Fredrick Douglass, Ida B. Wells-Barnett, Richard Wright, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Malcolm X, Huey P. Newton, and many others. From stories of slave rebellions to the Harlem Renaissance to the civil rights era and the Black Power movement, invoking the biblical character of Samson became a powerful way for African American intellectuals, activists, and artists to voice strategies and opinions about many race-related issues, including slavery, education, patriotism, organized labor, civil rights, and gender equality. As this provocative book reveals, the story of Black Samson became a story of America’s contested racial history.

Rio de Janeiro, a City in Fear

Rufino arrives in Rio de Janeiro between the last months of 1835 and the first days of 1836, one year after the great Muslim slave rebellion in Salvador. As a result, African Muslims became a main targets of police authorities in Rio de Janeiro, for some of the rebels had been sold, if slaves, or migrated, if freedpersons, to the capital of the Brazilian empire. Throughout the 1830s there were rumors and fear of slave rebellions. Marronage in the suburbs, slave flights, and resistance were rampant. The city and its hinterland were under heavy police surveillance. West Africans, like Rufino, were closely watched.

Enslaved in Bahia

Once in Salvador, Abuncare was baptized as Rufino. His master was a successful apothecary in whose pharmacy Rufino learned how to prepare medicines and came into contact with both free and enslaved people. The city had between 50,000 to 60,000 inhabitants, 42 percent of whom were enslaved. Sixty-three percent of latter were born in Africa. The majority were Yoruba speakers, like Rufino, and worked as domestics or as slaves for hire. Rufino’s arrival coincided with the War of Independence from Portugal. There were also 16 slave rebellions between 1822 and 1826, in Salvador and in nearby sugar plantations. There is no evidence that Rufino was involved in those rebellions, which were clearly waged by fellow Yoruba-speaking Africans.

Of Migrant Slaves and Underground Railroads: Movement, Containment, Freedom

This article explores the figure of the “migrant slave” that appears to conjoin antithetical notions—migration, often associated with intentionality and movement, and slavery, commonly associated with coercion and confinement. The figure of the migrant as slave has been frequently mobilized by “antitrafficking crusaders” in debates over unauthorized forms of trans-Mediterranean crossings to EUrope. Besides scrutinizing the depoliticized and dehistoricized ways in which contemporary migrant journeys have come to be associated with imaginaries of the trans-Atlantic slave trade, this article draws other, actual, comparisons between historic slavery and contemporary forms of migration. It argues that there does exist a historical resonance between the former and the latter. By remembering slave rebellions on land and at sea, the article makes the case that if one had to draw comparisons between historic slaves and contemporary migrants, beyond often crude visual associations, one would need to do so by enquiring into moments in which both enacted escape to a place of perceived freedom. It is shown that the fugitive slave escaping on the “underground railroad” resembles most closely the acts of escape via the Mediterranean and its “underground seaways” today.

Pardos, Free Blacks, and Slave Rebellions in Venezuela during the Age of the Atlantic Revolutions

During the last decades of the 18th century, Venezuela witnessed the emergence of several popular rebellions and conspiracies organized against the colonial government. Many of these movements demanded the reduction or elimination of taxes and the Indian tribute, the transformation of the political system, and fundamental changes for the social order with the abolition of slavery and the declaration of equality among different socio-racial groups. While demanding concrete changes in the local contexts, many of these movements reproduced the political language of republican rights enshrined by the American, French, and Haitian revolutions. Obsessed with silencing and containing local echoes of Franco-Caribbean republican values, the Spanish Crown and colonial agents sought to defuse these political movements, which they viewed as destabilizing, seditious, and extremely dangerous. This proved to be an impossible task; Venezuela was located at the center of the Atlantic Revolutions and its population became too familiar with these political movements: hand-copied samizdat materials from the Caribbean flooded the cities and ports of Venezuela, hundreds of foreigners shared news of the French and Caribbean revolutions with locals, and Venezuelans of diverse social backgrounds met to read hard-to-come-by texts and to discuss the ideas they expounded. During the Age of Revolutions, these written and oral information networks served to efficiently spread anti-monarchical propaganda and abolitionist and egalitarian ideas that sometimes led to rebellions and political unrest.

The “Fused Horizon” of Abolitionism and Islam

This article considers slavery and abolition in Muslim societies globally as a historical and historicist problem. I argue that the changes in popular consensus among Muslims about the desirability and permissibility of owning slaves is primarily due to a Gadamerian “fused horizon” of abolitionism and Islam. I theorize one site of its emergence from interreligious African cooperation in New World slave rebellions. By studying slavery as a global process and parochializing the boundaries between the civilizational and regional histories of Islam, Europe, Africa, Asia and the Americas, there emerges a radical critique of slavery and capitalism that combines elements of both abolitionism and Islam. The historical experience of enslaved people provides an experiential and evidential basis for this new hermeneutical horizon.

1. Early abolitionism

Among the first documented slave rebellions was a 1522 uprising of captive Africans in the Spanish Caribbean. “Early abolitionism: prophets versus profits” describes how new allies of enslaved people helped put abolition on the Atlantic World’s political and cultural radar during the late-1600s and early-1700s. However, as European empires built New World economies, they created massive labor needs. The first formal challenge to bondage in colonial America was the Quakers’ Germantown Protest in 1688. The work of influential abolitionist figures such as Anthony Benezet is described along with the progress of abolitionism during the Age of Revolution. American abolitionists had to overcome political fears about disunion as well as pro-slavery arguments about bondage’s economic importance.