Winner of the 2015 LGBT Studies Award presented by the Lambda Literary Foundation Unearths connections between homoeroticism, cannibalism, and cultures of consumption in the context of American literature and US slave culture that has largely been ignored until now Scholars of US and transatlantic slavery have largely ignored or dismissed accusations that Black Americans were cannibalized. Vincent Woodard takes the enslaved person's claims of human consumption seriously, focusing on both the literal starvation of the slave and the tropes of cannibalism on the part of the slaveholder, and further draws attention to the ways in which Blacks experienced their consumption as a fundamentally homoerotic occurrence. The Delectable Negro explores these connections between homoeroticism, cannibalism, and cultures of consumption in the context of American literature and US slave culture. Utilizing many staples of African American literature and culture, such as the slave narratives of Olaudah Equiano, Harriet Jacobs, and Frederick Douglass, as well as other less circulated materials like James L. Smith's slave narrative, runaway slave advertisements, and numerous articles from Black newspapers published in the nineteenth century, Woodard traces the racial assumptions, political aspirations, gender codes, and philosophical frameworks that dictated both European and white American arousal towards Black males and hunger for Black male flesh. Woodard uses these texts to unpack how slaves struggled not only against social consumption, but also against endemic mechanisms of starvation and hunger designed to break them. He concludes with an examination of the controversial chain gang oral sex scene in Toni Morrison's Beloved, suggesting that even at the end of the twentieth and beginning of the twenty-first century, we are still at a loss for language with which to describe Black male hunger within a plantation culture of consumption.

The Land Act of 1820 made it possible for settlers to begin to populate the West and added to the confiscation of land from Native Americans. Former landowners - a mix of Native American, African and European ancestry - migrated to the northern frontier and founded at least thirty well-defined free black communities between 1820 and 1850 in the Old Northwest, becoming an important safe haven and beacon of freedom. Its notoriety and size grew as slaves often migrated to these locations after they were granted emancipation in the wills of slave owners who purchased land in the area for them to settle on. The newly free people found sanctuary as these communities were also rumored to shelter runaway slaves in their role as active participants in the Underground Railroad Movement. However, the prosperity of blacks living in these villages angered some of the local whites - many of whom were migrating at the same time and were connected to local law officials and politicians. Archival documents reveal continued acts of terrorism perpetuated against blacks which heightened the importance of the strength of the communities they founded - specifically schools, churches, businesses, and intergenerational family structures - in providing a unified front that allowed them to bond and thrive in an environment that was not always conducive to their survival. Invisible in Plain Sight: Self-Determination Strategies of Free Blacks in the Old Northwest provides a rare detailed examination of an often overlooked piece of the American tapestry. It is perfect reading for history classes in high school and college, as well as for history enthusiasts looking for something new.

Confluence Narratives: Ethnicity, History and Nation-Making in the Americas explores how a collection of contemporary novels calls attention to the impact of ethnicity on national identities in the Americas. These historical narratives portray the cultural encounters-the conflicts and alliances, peaceful borrowings and violent seizures-that have characterized the history of the American continents since the colonial period. In the second half of the twentieth century, North and South American readers have witnessed a steady output of novels that revisit moments of cultural confluence as a means of revising national histories. Confluence Narratives proposes that these historical novels, published in such places as Brazil, Argentina, Mexico, the United States, and Canada, make up a key literary genre in the Americas. The genre links the various parts of the hemisphere together through three common historical experiences: colonization, slavery, and immigration. Luciano Tosta demonstrates how numerous texts from the United States, Canada, Spanish America, the Caribbean, and Brazil fall into the genre. The book focuses on four case studies from ethnic groups in the Americas: Amerindians, Afro-descendants, Jewish Americans, and Japanese Americans. Tosta uses the experience of the American nations as a springboard to problematize the concept of the contemporary nation, an identity marked by border-crossings and other experiences of deterritorialization. Based on the exploration of "confluence narratives," Tosta argues that the "contemporary" nation is not as contemporary as one may think. Informed by postcolonial theory and transnational and ethnic studies, this book offers an important comparative study for and of inter-American literature. Its analysis of the representation of cultural encounters within distinctive national histories underscores the complex nature of 'otherness' in the Americas, as well as the inherently transcultural aspect of a trans-continental American identity.

Material things mattered immensely to those who engaged in daily struggles over the character and future of slavery and to those who subsequently contested the meanings of freedom in the post-emancipation Caribbean. Throughout the history of slavery, objects and places were significant to different groups of people, from the opulent master class to enslaved field hands as well as to other groups, including maroons, free people of colour and missionaries, all of who shared the lived environments of Caribbean plantation colonies. By exploring the rich material world inhabited by these people, this book offers new ways of seeing history from below, of linking localised experiences with global transformations and connecting deeply personal lived realities with larger epochal events that defined the history of slavery and its abolition in the British Caribbean. This book was originally published as a special issue of Slavery & Abolition.

From the late eighteenth century, the planter class of the British Caribbean were faced with challenges stemming from revolutions, war, the rise of abolitionism and social change. By the nineteenth century, this once powerful group within the British Empire found itself struggling to influence an increasingly hostile government in London. By 1807, parliament had voted to abolish the slave trade: an early episode in a wider drama of decline for New World plantation economies. This book brings together chapters by a group of leading scholars to rethink the question of the 'fall of the planter class', offering a variety of new approaches to the topic, encompassing economic, political, cultural, and social history and providing a significant new contribution to our rapidly evolving understanding of the end of slavery in the British Atlantic empire. This book was originally published as a special issue of Atlantic Studies.

First Published in 1995. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.

Escaping Servitude: A Documentary History of Runaway Servants in Eighteenth-Century Virginia is an edited collection of runaway servant advertisements that appeared in newspapers in eighteenth-century Virginia. In addition to documenting the fugitive in the Chesapeake, it adds to our understanding of indentured servitude and provides valuable insights into an important chapter in American history. Escaping Servitude's contribution to scholarship is threefold. First, it calls new attention to the scant scholarly body of work concerning indentured servitude; specifically, the work pertaining to fugitive servants. Highlighting well over one thousand accounts in which bondsmen and women ran away from their masters in Virginia during the colonial era, Escaping Servitude complements Abbot Emerson Smith's Colonist in Bondage: White Servitude and Convict Labor in America, 1607-1776, Edmund Morgan's American, American Freedom, David W. Galenson's White Servitude in Colonial America, Anthony Parent Jr.'s Foul Means, Don Jordon and Michael Walsh's White Cargo, and others studies of American serfdom. Secondly, considering that there is currently no other documentary history in print for other colonies in British America, Escaping Servitude hopes to inspire similar histories for eighteenth-century Maryland, North and South Carolina, Georgia, and the northern colonies. Less known are the life stories of indentures who absconded in other parts of British America. Finally, in its explication of the lives of the unfree, Escaping Servitude hopes to expand the current academic discourse regarding the history of slavery and race.

The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano, or Gustavus Vassa, the African, first published in England in 1789, was one of the earliest and remains to this day one of the best-known English language slave narratives. Characterizing Olaudah Equiano's eighteenth-century narrative of his life as a type of ''scriptural story'' that connects the Bible with identity formation, Vincent L. Wimbush's White Men's Magic probes not only how the Bible and its reading played a crucial role in the first colonial contacts between black and white persons in the North Atlantic but also the process and meaning of what he terms ''scripturalization.'' By this term, Wimbush means ''a social-psychological-political discursive structure'' or ''semiosphere'' that creates a reality and organizes a society in terms of relations and communications. This scripturalization, achieved by the British to establish a colonial and racialized society in and through the promotion of literacy and the Bible as a ''fetishized center-object,'' was also performed by an abject outsider or stranger like Equiano through his reading of the Bible as well as his own writing with the goal of imagining and promoting a more inclusive society. It is for this reason that Wimbush calls Equiano's narrative a ''scriptural story,'' and he argues that this is why the talking book trope appears repeatedly in writings of eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century black Atlantic writers. He identifies three different types of scripturalization: (1) scripturalization as social-cultural matrix and comparative magic; (2) scripturalization in the service of nationalization and for the purpose of naturalization; and (3) scripturalization in negotiation and for resistance. Because it is based on the particularities of Equiano's narrative, Wimbush's theoretical work is not only grounded but inductive. Wimbush shows that scripturalization is bigger than either the historical or the literary Equiano. Scripturalization was not invented by Equiano, he says, but it is not quite the same after Equiano.

Eliza Potter's 1859 autobiography expresses her indignation, abolitionist sentiments, fiery temper, and sheer joy of life as she reveals the private selves of the white women whose heads she "combed." As an insider on the margins, her identity provides a unique vantage point for her story and that of the elites of nineteenth-century Cincinnati society.

"A servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren". So reads Noah's curse on his son Ham, and all his descendants, in Genesis 9:25. Over centuries of interpretation, Ham came to be identified as the ancestor of black Africans, and Noah's curse to be seen as the biblical justification for American slavery and segregation. In this book Stephen Haynes examines the history of the American interpretation of Noah's curse. He begins with an overview of the prior history of the reception of this scripture and then turns to the distinctive and creative ways in which the curse was appropriated by American pro-slavery and pro-segregation interpreters. He argues that the story of Noah's curse was compelling for antebellum white Southerners because it resonated with the themes of antiquity, domesticity, race, and sin.

The Economic Consequences of the Atlantic Slave Trade shows how the West Indian slave/sugar/plantation complex, organized on capitalist principles of private property and profit-seeking, joined the western hemisphere to the international trading system encompassing Europe, Africa, North America, and the Caribbean, and was an important determinant of the timing and pattern of the Industrial Revolution in England. The new industrial economy was no longer dependent on slavery for development, but rested instead on investment and innovation. Solow argues that abolition of the slave trade and emancipation should be understood in this context.

As interest in aesthetic experience evolved in the eighteenth century, discussions of the sublime located two opposed accounts of its place and use. Ferguson traces these two positions - the Burkean empiricist account and the Kantian formalist one - to argue that they had significance of aesthetics, including recent deconstructive and New Historicist criticism.

A comprehensive bibliography dealing specifically with African slave trade. This volume has been sub-classified for easier consultation and the compiler has provided, where possible, descriptions and comments on the works listed.

This comprehensive study of women anti-slavery campaigners fills a serious gap in abolitionist history. Covering all stages of the campaign, Women Against Slavery uses hitherto neglected sources to build up a vivid picture of the lives, words and actions of the women who were involved, and their distinctive contribution to the abolitionist movement. It looks at the way women's participation influenced the organisation, activities, policy and ideology of the campaign, and analyses the impact of female activism on women's own attitudes to their social roles, and their participation in public life. Exploring the vital role played by gender in shaping the movement as a whole, this book makes an important contribution to the debate on `race' and gender.

This book is a transnational and comparative study examining the processes that led to the memorialization of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade in the second half of the twentieth century. Araujo explores numerous kinds of initiatives such as monuments, memorials, and museums as well as heritage sites. By connecting different projects developed in various countries and urban centers in Europe, Africa, and the Americas during the last two decades, the author retraces the various stages of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery including the enslavement in Africa, the process of confinement in slave depots, the Middle Passage, the arrival in the Americas, the daily life of forced labor, until the fight for emancipation and the abolition of slavery. Relying on a multitude of examples from the United States, Brazil, and the Caribbean, the book discusses how different groups and social actors have competed to occupy the public arena by associating the slave past with other human atrocities, especially the Holocaust. Araujo explores how the populations of African descent, white elites, and national governments, very often carrying particular political agendas, appropriated the slave past by fighting to make it visible or conceal it in the public space of former slave societies.

The public memory of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, which some years ago could be observed especially in North America, has slowly emerged into a transnational phenomenon now encompassing Europe, Africa, and Latin America, and even Asia - allowing the populations of African descent, organized groups, governments, non-governmental organizations and societies in these different regions to individually and collectively update and reconstruct the slave past. This edited volume examines the recent transnational emergence of the public memory of slavery, shedding light on the work of memory produced by groups of individuals who are descendants of slaves. The chapters in this book explore how the memory of the enslaved and slavers is shaped and displayed in the public space not only in the former slave societies but also in the regions that provided captives to the former American colonies and European metropoles. Through the analysis of exhibitions, museums, monuments, accounts, and public performances, the volume makes sense of the political stakes involved in the phenomenon of memorialization of slavery and the slave trade in the public sphere.

The Amistad incident, one of the few successful ship revolts in the history of enslavement, has been discussed by historians for decades, even becoming the subject of a Steven Spielberg film in 1997, which brought the story to wide audiences. But, while historians have examined the Amistad case for its role in the long history of the Atlantic, the United States and slavery, there is an oil on canvas painting of one man, Cinque, at the center of this story, an image so crucial to the continual retelling and memorialization of the Amistad story, it is difficult to think about the Amistad and not think of this image. Visual and material culture about the Amistad in the form of paintings, prints, monuments, memorials, museum exhibits, quilts and banners, began production in the late summer of 1839 and has not yet ceased. Art of the Amistad and The Portrait of Cinque is the first book to survey in total these Amistad inspired images and related objects, and to find in them shared ideals and cultural creations, but also divergent applications of the story based on intended audience and local context. Tracing the revolutionary creation of what art historian Stephen Eisenman calls "a highly individualized, noble portrait of an African man," Art of the Amistad and The Portrait of Cinque is built around visual and material culture, and thus does not use images merely as illustration, but tells its story through the wide range of images and materials presented. While the Portrait of Cinque seems to sit quietly behind Plexiglass at a local history museum, the impact of this 175-year old painting is palpable; very few portraits from the 19th century-let alone a portrait of a black man-remain a relevant part of culture as the Portrait of Cinque continues to be today. Art of the Amistad the Portrait of Cinque is about the art and artifacts that continue to inform and inspire our understanding of transatlantic history-a journey 175 years in the making.

A study of slave memory in South Africa using feminist, postcolonial and memory studies.

Much has been made about South Africa's transition from histories of colonialism, slavery and apartheid. 'Memory' features prominently in the country's reckoning with its pasts. While there has been an outpouring of academic essays, anthologies and other full-length texts which study this transition, most have focused on the Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC).

What Is Slavery To Me? is the first full-length study of slave memory in the South African context, and examines the relevance and effects of slave memory for contemporary negotiations of South African gendered and racialised identities. It draws from feminist, postcolonial and memory studies and is therefore interdisciplinary in approach. It reads memory as one way of processing this past, and interprets a variety of cultural, literary and filmic texts to ascertain the particular experiences in relation to slave pasts being fashioned, processed and disseminated. Much of the material surveyed across disciplines attributes to memory, or 'popular history making', a dialogue between past and present whilst ascribing sense to both the eras and their relationship. In this sense then, memory is active, entailing a personal relationship with the past which acts as mediator of reality on a day to day basis.

The projects studies various negotiations of raced and gendered identities in creative and other public spaces in contemporary South Africa, by being particularly attentive to the encoding of consciousness about the country's slave past. This book extends memory studies in South Africa, provokes new lines of inquiry, and develops new frameworks through which to think about slavery and memory in South Africa.

In contrast to the prevailing scholarly con-sensus that understands sentimentality to be grounded on a logic of love and sympathy, "Apocalyptic Sentimentalism "demonstrates that in order for sentimentality to work as an antislavery engine, it needed to be linked to its seeming opposite--fear, especially the fear of God's wrath. Most antislavery reformers recognized that calls for love and sympathy or the representation of suffering slaves would not lead an audience to "feel right" or to actively oppose slavery. The threat of God's apocalyptic vengeance--and the terror that this threat inspired--functioned within the tradition of abolitionist sentimentality as a necessary goad for sympathy and love. Fear, then, was at the center of nineteenth-century sentimental strategies for inciting antislavery reform, bolstering love when love faltered, and operating as a powerful mechanism for establishing interracial sympathy. Depictions of God's apocalyptic vengeance constituted the most efficient strategy for antislavery writers to generate a sense of terror in their audience.
Focusing on a range of important anti-slavery figures, including David Walker, Nat Turner, Maria Stewart, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and John Brown, "Apocalyptic Sentimentalism "illustrates how antislavery discourse worked to redefine violence and vengeance as the ultimate expression (rather than denial) of love and sympathy. At the sametime, these warnings of apocalyptic retribution enabled antislavery writers to express, albeit indirectly, fantasies of brutal violence against slaveholders. What began as a sentimental strategy quickly became an incendiary gesture, with antislavery reformers envisioning the complete annihilation of slaveholders and defenders of slavery.

Faith and Slavery in the Presbyterian Diaspora considers how, in areas as diverse as the New Hebrides, Scotland, the United States, and East Central Africa, men's and women's shared Presbyterian faith conditioned their interpretations of and interactions with the institution of chattel slavery. The chapters highlight how Presbyterians' reactions to slavery -which ranged from abolitionism, to indifference, to support-reflected their considered application of the principles of the Reformed Tradition to the institution. Consequently, this collection reveals how the particular ways in which Presbyterians framed the Reformed Tradition made slavery an especially problematic and fraught issue for adherents to the faith. Faith and Slavery, by situating slavery at the nexus of Presbyterian theology and practice, offers a fresh perspective on the relationship between religion and slavery. It reverses the all too common assumption that religion primarily served to buttress existing views on slavery, by illustrating how groups' and individuals reactions to slavery emerged from their understanding of the Presbyterian faith. The collection's geographic reach-encompassing the experiences of people from Europe, Africa, America, and the Pacific-filtered through the lens of Presbyterianism also highlights the global dimensions of slavery and the debates surrounding it. The institution and the challenges it presented, Faith and Slavery stresses, reflected less the peculiar conditions of a particular place and time, than the broader human condition as people attempt to understand and shape their world.

This is the first book to explore national representations of slavery in an international comparative perspective. Contributions span a wide geographical range, covering Europe, North America, West and South Africa, the Indian Ocean and Asia.

Previous histories on O'Connell have dealt predominantly with his attempts to secure a repeal of the 1800 Act of Union and on his success in achieving Catholic Emancipation in 1829, Kinealy focuses instead on the neglected issue of O'Connell's contribution to the anti-slavery movement in the United States.

Explores the social composition of the Jamaican slaveholding class during the era of the British campaign to end slavery, looking at their efforts to maintain control over local society and considering how their economic, cultural and military dependency on the colonial metropole meant that they were unable to avert the ending of British slavery.

Traces; slave names, the islands and cities into which we are born, our musics and rhythms, our genetic compositions, our stories of our lost utopias and the atrocities inflicted upon our ancestors, by our ancestors, the social structure of our cities, the nature of our diasporas, the scars inflicted by history. These are all the remnants of the middle passage of the slave ship for those in the multiple diasporas of the globe today, whose complex histories were shaped by that journey. Whatever remnants that once existed in the subjectivities and collectivities upon which slavery was inflicted has long passed. But there are hints in material culture, genetic and cultural transmissions and objects that shape certain kinds of narratives - this is how we know ourselves and how we tell our stories. This path-breaking book uncovers the significance of the memory of the slave ship for modernity as well as its role in the cultural production of modernity. By so doing, it examines methods of ethnography for historical events and experiences and offers a sociology and a history from below of the slave experience. The arguments in this book show the way for using memory studies to undermine contemporary slavery.

This work explores the dynamic issues of race and religion within the Cherokee Nation and to look at the role of secret societies in shaping these forces during the nineteenth century.