Freedom Seekers

In this fascinating book, Damian Alan Pargas introduces a new conceptualization of 'spaces of freedom' for fugitive slaves in North America between 1800 and 1860, and answers the questions: How and why did enslaved people flee to – and navigate – different destinations throughout the continent, and to what extent did they succeed in evading recapture and re-enslavement? Taking a continental approach, this study highlights the diversity of slave fight by conceptually dividing the continent into three distinct – and continuously evolving – spaces of freedom. Namely, spaces of informal freedom in the US South, where enslaved people attempted to flee by passing as free blacks; spaces of semi-formal freedom in the US North, where slavery was abolished but the precise status of fugitive slaves was contested; and spaces of formal freedom in Canada and Mexico, where slavery was abolished and runaways were considered legally free and safe from re-enslavement.

Runaway Slaves and the Aftermath of Slavery on the Swahili Coast

Along the East African coast, marronage increased in the 19th century as a consequence of the intensification of the slave trade and the development of a plantation economy based on slave labor. Research on the fugitive slaves on the Swahili coast has been conducted since the 1980s and has mainly highlighted the ambivalent relationship (between rejection and belonging) of maroons with the dominant coastal culture—that of the slave owners, shaped in particular by Islam and urbanity. This article goes beyond the existing interpretations by showing that the aftermath of slavery often consisted of a range of options, less static than those described so far and less focused on opting either into or out of coastal culture. Relying on a case study in present-day Kenya and drawing from European written sources and interviews, I examine what happened to escaped slaves in the Witu region, where a Swahili city-state was founded in 1862. Their history is examined through a spatial analysis and the modalities of their economic and social participation in regional dynamics, showing that no single cultural influence was hegemonic in this region.

“Cannibals All!”

This chapter argues that pro- and antislavery advocates mobilized disability rhetoric behind political discourse to garner support and deride opponents. John C. Calhoun, George Fitzhugh, and others constructed proslavery arguments based on benevolent masters’ supposed care of dependent, disabled bondpeople. Others absorbed medical discourses of black defectiveness, cited suspect U.S. Census records as evidence that freedom would lead to insanity and physical degeneration for blacks, and made disability central to their rationalizations of racial slavery and inequality. Abolitionists and fugitive slaves also deployed sentimentalized and often gendered disability rhetoric to underscore the brutalities of slavery. Their persistent reliance on constructing and sentimentalizing disability in their efforts to denounce slavery, however, left them and their audiences with a stigmatized view of race.

The Experience of Employing the Slave Narrative Genre in Describing the History of the Caucasus

The genre of the slave narrative is unique, and is essential to African-American culture. Yet, up to now, personally written stories describing the journey to freedom traveled by “heroic slaves”, writings that could well qualify as nonfiction, have received little attention outside of the US and UK. This makes all the more interesting the attempt by prominent Russian historian A. A. Cherkasov to employ the slave narrative genre in describing the history of the Caucasus, undertaken in his collection of documents “Circassian Slave Narratives”. This review of the collection attempts to analyze the phenomenon of the slave narrative and determine the degree to which it could be transposed to Russia. It is shown that while a portion of the documents published by A. A. Cherkasov, specifically interviews with slaves who escaped from Russia to Circassia, do seem to fit in with the slave narrative genre in theme, most of the Russian-Circassian slave narratives are completely different from classic slave narratives in content and style. These are not publicistic memoirs written for abolitionist purposes but documentation maintained to keep records of fugitives. In the end, the author of the article draws the conclusion that it is impossible to have an exact analogue of the slave narrative for Russian history as the figure of the heroic slave is not something that is typical for Russian history. Accordingly, despite the fact that fugitive slaves’ testimonies were widely written down at the time, as was the case in Circassia, the outcome was a completely different type of writing typologically. However, if the slave narrative is viewed in a broad sense, as an aggregate of first-hand slave accounts that can help provide the reader with a comprehensive documentary picture of the life of actual slaves, “Circassian Slave Narratives” may well be considered a worthy representative of the genre. A. A. Cherkasov provides 180 interviews with slaves and over 1,000 thematically contiguous record-keeping documents, which offer a unique insight into Circassian slavery specifically. Consequently, while it is hardly possible to use the classic slave narrative in describing Russian history, there may be considerable potential in its creative reconceptualization, as has been well substantiated by A. A. Cherkasov.