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Inspired by the searing story of Margaret Garner, the escaped slave
who in 1856 slit her daughter's throat rather than have her forced
back into slavery, the essays in this collection focus on
historical and contemporary examples of slavery and women's
resistance to oppression from the nineteenth century to the
twenty-first. Each chapter uses Garner's example--the real-life
narrative behind Toni Morrison's Beloved andthe opera Margaret
Garner--as a thematic foundation for an interdisciplinary
conversation about gendered resistance in locations including
Brazil, Yemen, India, and the United States. Contributors are
Nailah Randall Bellinger, Olivia Cousins, Mary E. Frederickson,
Cheryl Janifer LaRoche, Carolyn Mazloomi, Cathy McDaniels-Wilson,
Catherine Roma, Huda Seif, S. Pearl Sharp, Raquel Luciana de Souza,
Jolene Smith, Veta Tucker, Delores M. Walters, Diana Williams, and
Kristine Yohe.
Focusing on everyday rituals, the essays in this volume look at
spheres of social action and the places throughout the Atlantic
world where African descended communities have expressed their
values, ideas, beliefs, and spirituality in material terms. The
contributors trace the impact of encounters with the Atlantic world
on African cultural formation, how entanglement with commerce,
commodification, and enslavement and with colonialism,
emancipation, and self-rule manifested itself in the shaping of
ritual acts such as those associated with birth, death, healing,
and protection. Taken as a whole, the book offers new perspectives
on what the materials of rituals can tell us about the intimate
processes of cultural transformation and the dynamics of the human
condition."
This enlightening study employs the tools of archaeology to uncover
a new historical perspective on the Underground Railroad. Unlike
previous histories of the Underground Railroad, which have focused
on frightened fugitive slaves and their benevolent abolitionist
accomplices, Cheryl LaRoche focuses instead on free African
American communities, the crucial help they provided to individuals
fleeing slavery, and the terrain where those flights to freedom
occurred. This study foregrounds several small, rural hamlets on
the treacherous southern edge of the free North in Illinois,
Indiana, and Ohio. LaRoche demonstrates how landscape features such
as waterways, iron forges, and caves played a key role in the
conduct and effectiveness of the Underground Railroad. Rich in oral
histories, maps, memoirs, and archaeological investigations, this
examination of the "geography of resistance" tells the new powerful
and inspiring story of African Americans ensuring their own
liberation in the midst of oppression.
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