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>

IN SEARCH OF A COLOR LINE

This research examines laws in the colony of Virginia created by a powerful landowning planter class that attempted to draw a color line separating three descent groups: an indigenous native population (Indian), an immigrant population from Europe (English), and an imported population from Africa (Negro). Textual analysis of the Laws of Colonial Virginia shows that the English lawmakers had to learn they were the White component of a color line; they did not, for many years, refer to themselves as White. Contrary to some widely held views that race relations began as soon as these groups came into contact at some point in the seventeenth century, the analysis of written law suggests it took over 100 years, until near the middle third of the eighteenth century in Colonial Virginia, before a definitive concept of race was socially-constructed and a color line was drawn in Black and White.

Antoine Lavalette, Slave Murderer: A Forgotten Scandal of the French West Indies

The name Antoine Lavalette (1708–67) is infamous within the Society of Jesus. The superior of the Martinique mission in the mid-eighteenth century, he is known for triggering the 1764 expulsion from France. Less known is his torture to death of four enslaved men and women. The visitor sent to investigate Lavalette’s commercial activities, Jean-François de la Marche (1700–62), discovered these murders and reported them to Rome. This paper analyzes La Marche’s account of the atrocities within their Caribbean context. It demonstrates that Lavalette’s killings were within the established norms of the planter class. It further argues that his actions were part of the Society’s attempts to reconcile its religious calling with the gruesome realities of plantation slavery.

Radicalism for Southern Conservatives

In this lecture Woodward explores the South’s response to the Military Reconstruction Act (1867). Some southern conservative leaders flirted with the idea of courting African American voters. Though it gained many adherents the plan was short-lived, in large measure because freedpeople asserted their rights to organize, staged demonstrations for integrated schools, and protested racial discrimination on street cars, among other actions. The freedpeople were fully invested in the political process, participating in constitutional conventions, casting votes, and holding office. Woodward then turns to voting patterns in the 1872 election in order to determine the social and economic background of the white southern Republican base. According to Woodward one of the most important things that united white southern Republicans was their animosity toward the former planter class.

South Carolina Takes the Lead

South Carolina had been in the forefront of Southern radicalism since the 1820s, and it took the lead once Lincoln was elected. Pushing to the side the fire-eater Robert B. Rhett and his followers as extremists who would precipitate a war and isolate South Carolina from the other Southern states, moderate lowcountry planters orchestrated a propaganda campaign to achieve peaceful, orderly secession that would pull in the other slave states. Aware that any unified Southern response would be stymied by the temporizing of the Upper South, the secessionists relied on separate state secession to be achieved by popularly elected state conventions. Cooperation would follow among the seceded states. Invoking the horrors of forced emancipation and racial equality under Republican rule with appeals to restore the past glory of South Carolina during the American Revolution, secessionist ideology produced a mandate for immediate secession. To clinch the support of Charleston’s white workers, a harsh repression of free blacks forced many to leave and flee to the North for safety. Sons of planters rushed to join the cause and women in the planter class reveled in their new political role of advocates for secession. Banners, flags, and songs celebrated deliverance from Northern tyranny as workers and clerks flooded the streets of Charleston. Speed was of the essence to ensure that passions did not cool, and once the secessionists pressured the legislature to push the date of the election for convention delegates up to December 6, the state’s secession was a foregone conclusion.

Consumption and Control in the Material Culture of Hacienda El Progreso

This chapter presents the material culture recovered from Hacienda El Progreso midden contexts within the broader perspective of Latin America’s participation in the global market during the later nineteenth century. Two distinct aspects of the imported manufactured goods are suggested: (1) consumption to project a modern image; and (2) technologies used to control the hacienda’s landscape and its workers. Archaeological contexts are described, and the preserved assemblage, including armaments, actuarial implements, money, fencing, alcohol containers, tableware, sewing instruments, toys, and medicaments, are analyzed and contextualized. Consumer choices made by Cobos reflect the consumption habits of a coastal Ecuadorian planter class that were transported to a remote location in time and space.

Forging New Identities in a World Gone Mad

This chapter recounts the turmoil endured by black and white Natchez women and men during the Civil War and Union occupation, and how these experiences shaped historical memories of the war. Mississippi’s economy lay in ruins with nearly a quarter of the white males who served in the Confederate Army killed in action or perishing from wounds or disease at war’s end, while white civilians faced poverty, military loss, and a racial hierarchy turned upside down. Natchez’s large African-American population majority faced their own challenges but found sustenance in black churches and schools organized by the American Missionary Association during Reconstruction. Natchez had all the makings for a complex set of historical memories: great wealth, followed by profound loss, a paternalistic planter class, a sizable free black community that did not always sympathize with former slaves, and a massive formerly enslaved labor force discovering freedom for the first time.