Towards a More Varied Picture of Slavery

Indrani Chatterjee’s ground-breaking research has shown the centrality of obligation and provision to historical forms of slavery in South Asia, deepening our understanding of slave-using societies beyond the plantation systems that have dominated historiography, as well as historical memory. In this interview, Chatterjee explains why the crucial question in the context of South Asian slavery was: who do you serve and for what purpose? Enslavers were obliged to materially provide for their slaves, in return for the enslaved person’s service, labor and loyalty, creating varied relationships of dependence. By foregrounding the complex set of relationships and obligations in which slaves were enmeshed, Chatterjee seeks to “make people out of laborers.” This has led her to rethink the ways that resistance and agency have been conceptualized in slavery studies and Subaltern Studies, emphasizing the relationships within which a person became an agent. Her research has also deepened our understanding of colonialism and slavery. British colonizers generally ignored slaves’ entitlements to certain labor or taxation exemptions from the state, and colonial revenue-collection made the already-burdened doubly burdened. But in a hetero-temporal colonial context, older ways of identifying and forms of relationships endured. Chatterjee argues that this history of the provision of survival in contexts of enslavement is not “romanticizing,” but rather historicizes multiple forms of violence and shows a fuller, more varied picture of slavery.

“Workers + Warriors”

For this special issue, we bring together an array of interdisciplinary international scholars who are working across the fields of Black studies, African diasporic studies, slavery studies, American studies, and memory studies. They debate, destabilize, interrogate, and reshape widely known and accepted methodologies within literary studies, art history, visual culture, history, intellectual history, politics, sociology, and material and print cultures in order to do justice to the hidden histories, untold narratives, and buried memories of African diasporic freedom struggles over the centuries. This collection is the result of a symposium that we held in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 2018 as part of a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council project titled Our Bondage and Our Freedom: Struggles for Liberty in the Lives and Works of Frederick Douglass and His Family (1818–1920). The inspiration for this project, which we launched in 2018 on the two-hundredth anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s birth, emerged from a determination to revisit his legendary life and pioneering works. A world-renowned freedom fighter, inspirational social justice campaigner, mythologized liberator, exemplary philosopher, breathtaking orator, and beautiful writer, Douglass dedicated his life to the fight for Black liberation by any and every means necessary. As he repeatedly maintained in the motto he endorsed for his radical newspaper, the North Star, “Right is of no sex—Truth is of no color—God is the Father of us all, and we are brethren.” Through engaging with the narratives, poetry, speeches, songs, oral testimonies, correspondence, essays, photography, drawings, paintings, and sculptures produced by and/or representing Douglass and his family members, it becomes newly possible to do justice to the psychological, imaginative, and emotional realities of iconic and unknown Black lives as lived during slavery and into the post-emancipation era. Two hundred years after Douglass’s birth, in the era of Black Lives Matter, there can be no doubt that the Douglass we need now is no representative self-made man but a fallible, mortal individual. The onus is on academics, archivists, artists, and activists to harness every intellectual tool available in order to tell the stories not only of Black women, children, and men living in slavery but of Black women, children, and men experiencing the illusory freedoms of the post-emancipation era. For Douglass’s rallying cry “My Bondage and My Freedom” it is possible to read “Our Bondage and Our Freedom.

Slave, Convict, and Indentured Labor and the Tyranny of the Particular

In Slave, Convict and Indentured Labor and the Tyranny of the Particular, distinguished historian Richard B. Allen draws on forty-five years of research on slavery and indentured labor in the Indian Ocean world and Asia to challenge scholars to look beyond the chronological, conceptual, and geographical confines of the specialized case studies that characterize research on slavery and related forms of migrant labor and situate their studies in more fully developed local, regional, pan-regional, and comparative contexts. As this inaugural Joseph C. Miller Memorial Lecture at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies demonstrates, the globality of European slave trading and abolitionism and the connections between the slave, convict, and indentured labor trades in the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century colonial world highlight the need to adopt more holistic approaches to studying the nature, dynamics, and impact of the human experience with slavery and cognate forms of forced labor in both the past and the present.

Slave Societies, Societies with Slaves

This chapter analyses the common distinction in slavery studies between ‘slave societies’ and ‘societies with slaves’. It looks at the various proposals for how to conceptualize these categories, and considers their relative advantages and disadvantages. It shows how a mechanical application of this approach will invariably result in a black-and-white picture, and that this approach fails to take into consideration differing levels of knowledge about ancient societies and their economic underpinnings. Finally, it shows that much research in Near Eastern slavery has been conducted without awareness of these categories, leading to skewed comparisons between the classical and Near Eastern worlds.

Bound Together?

This introduction reviews the historiographical trajectory of the “slave community” and “resistance” paradigms and argues that the assumption of group solidarity underpinning them continues to inform much of the current-day scholarship on slaves and free people of African descent in the hemispheric Americas. After briefly reviewing the four contributions to this journal issue, this article proposes as an alternative the “unsentimental approach” to slavery studies and points to a number of recent publications that collectively stand as a harbinger of this historiographical seachange, one that does not shy away from evidence of economically exploitative slaveholding among free people of African origin, intra-slave violence, or alliances that linked enslaved and free people of African descent to other groups.

Slave Names and Naming in the Anglophone Atlantic

The naming of slaves has not been treated in dedicated monographs, but it often figures in general accounts of plantation culture and the practices of enslavement. Questions about slave naming intersect with some of the major debates in slavery studies (especially regarding Creolization and the formation of Atlantic Creoles) and can illuminate issues about the ethnicity of African slaves, the personhood and agency of those enslaved, the nature of kinship structures among the enslaved, and the survival of African cultural practices in the diaspora. There has been disagreement about whether it was slaveholders or the enslaved who gave the recorded names. Practices undoubtedly varied, and different archival sources may yield different conclusions. In addition to time and place, a likely variable is whether the birth rate, in a severely overworked and maltreated population, was sufficient to ensure a relatively stable population over several generations, or whether the high mortality associated with slavery led to declining numbers and hence to the frequent acquisition of new slaves. Slaveholders often renamed newly acquired slaves; but self-naming by slaves, which also occurred, is likely to be underreported in the records, which were mainly created by and for slaveholders. Also largely unrecorded are the alternative names the enslaved used among themselves, sometimes called “country names” or “basket names”; they may also, according to African practice, have had multiple names over a lifetime. There are issues, too, about how to interpret the recorded names, which have been classified in different ways depending on researchers’ interests. Major types on which most would agree are European place and literary names, European personal names in hypocoristic (pet or diminutive) form, biblical and classical names, and names of African origin. Many names, whether African derived or English, refer to birth circumstances, including both the ubiquitous day-names, which derive from the West African Akan-Twi language group, and others such as birth order and time of birth (e.g., day of the week, month, or season). But the meanings of names certainly evolved over time, and some have argued that the principles according to which an individual name was given (e.g., after a relative or ancestor) are at least as important as its apparent meaning and type. Slaves were generally listed with just one name and thus with little to none of the genealogical information recorded for free whites. It is these single names that have been most often studied. However, the enslaved occasionally had surnames, which became normal leading up to and after emancipation as a mark of assimilation into free society. Surnames (not always those of former owners) would then be adopted as family names by former slaves and their descendants. Newly emancipated slaves also frequently chose new first names, discarding those associated with slavery. Analyzing Creole names, especially those of African origin, demands a combination of historical and linguistic expertise that has not yet been systematically applied to slave names.