A Kòd Noua [Black Code/Cord] to tie up little pigs

The second chapter of Ti difé boulé explores the history of the infamous French colonial Code Noir, or Black Code, of 1685 and how it operated on slave society. With Grinn Prominnin arriving to discuss colonial times in Saint-Domingue, the book presents an outline of the hierarchies of power within the former French colony. The Black Code buttressed white plantation owners, the French commissioners, businessmen and foreign investors at the expense of the enslaved people who were permanently trapped in apocalyptic conditions. Trouillot conveys a Marxist analysis of the contradictions in the colonial system—ones that foreshadow the predatory reflexes of the Haitian state in the society that arose following the revolution (post-1804). Providing a broad panorama, the chapter argues that the enslaved population resiliently forged the Haitian Creole language and Vodou religion, forming, for Trouillot, the two great coherencies that form the bedrock of subsequent Haitian resistance. While Creole and Vodou represent the surging enslaved proletariat, Trouillot describes the forced conversion of enslaved people to Catholicism as a means of “easing” the consciences of colonists. The final sections explore the Black Code’s carefully calibrated delineations between enslaved people, black and mulatto freedman, and whites. Trouillot riffs on the interplay between the term kòd, which means both “code” and “cord”, to capture the dynamics of legal strangulation that the Black Code put into place. Like a kite in a hurricane, the enslaved people were finally able to slit the Code/cord that kept them in bondage in 1791, the year that sparked the revolution.

Arbitration of labour disputes in Mauritius

The evolution of labour law on Mauritius started with the repeal of the “code noir” (literally the black code) which was introduced in France in 1685 and extended to the island in 1723. It contained inhumane provisions that treated a slave as merchandise, as the property of his master which was subject to a list of punishments for not obeying the orders of the latter. Freedom of movement was then a crime.

Legal Legacies of War and Reconstruction

The Civil War destroyed Mississippi’s slave system and its antebellum economy. From 1865 to 1890, lawmakers struggled to define the legal status and rights of newly-freed slaves and to build a new, more diversified economy. The era was marked by sharp legal shifts. Mississippi created one of the nation’s harshest postwar black codes (1866) but then followed a more liberal course during Reconstruction, enacting one of the nation’s first anti-segregation laws (1873). After Reconstruction, the state’s 1890 constitutional convention showed other Southern states how they could prevent blacks from voting while avoiding federal scrutiny. The shifting times were exemplified by Horatio Simrall, a legislator and judge who helped create the 1866 black code and 1890 anti-suffrage provisions but also upheld the 1873 anti-segregation law; and Isaiah Montgomery, who fought for black economic independence but, to the surprise of both races, supported the 1890 suffrage restrictions and urged his fellow blacks not to resist.

Chore and Choice

This chapter explores the emergence of artificial intelligence as a challenge for theories of post-humanism that fail to center blackness and queerness. Through a reading of the black transfeminine “mind-clone” Bina48—a robot whose affective states mirrors the structural antagonism that the black female subject presents to normative temporalities of technological advance—the chapter seeks to contribute to a nascent field of critical black code studies.

Black Codes and Bondage, Settling the North, Legislative Follies

Chapter 3 covers the years in which the Illinois state capital moved from Kaskaskia to Vandalia to Springfield, focusing on legislative and judicial debates surrounding the Black Code, which limited the rights of free blacks, and the euphemistic practices of indentured/involuntary servitude and apprenticeship contracts. As antislavery populations surged in northern Illinois, political and legal opinions about blacks shifted. The 1832 Black Hawk War, a land dispute involving the Sauk and Fox, led to the 1833 treaty that removed Native Americans from the state. The Illinois General Assembly, including in 1836–37 representatives Stephen Douglas and Abraham Lincoln, chartered state banks that failed; set up internal improvement schemes that indebted the state; and ultimately supported completion of the Illinois and Michigan Canal (1848).