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This chapter charts how Paul et Virginie manifests the degradation in the human – thing relationship from intimacy to estrangement; I further show how later artists and writers reincarnate the novel in “after-books” and in “after-art”—wallpaper, paintings, fans and plates. The novel’s insistence on splitting body from spirit, sexuality from virtue, and human from nonhuman leads to sacrificing the heroine’s life to reinforce the illusion of female purity. This sacrifice reinstates binaries partially transcended in the novel’s earlier sections when the characters’ respect for and kinesthetic engagement with the environment intensifies love and gives them the right to belong with each other and with the nonhuman. The chapter argues that after-things reimagine Bernardin’s novel in fresh ways, all of them contending with Paul et Virginie’s ultimate dualism: some recapitulate or complicate that binary thinking; some obliterate Bernardin’s protest against enslavement; and others forge a belonging with between human and nonhuman by restoring Paul and Virginie to life and happiness.
This article reconsiders the classed and gendered construction of the Author in the Roman Mediterranean, a construction that generates the intertwined notions of authorship and authenticity. Modern scholarly conversations about authorship and pseudepigraphy in the Roman Mediterranean often proceed from the uninterrogated assumptions that (a) ancient texts (including early Christian texts) were the monographic products of solitary authors and (b) everyone in antiquity, regardless of gender or class, had access to the status of being an ‘Author’. While conversations about (in)authentic textual production extend beyond the works that become part of the New Testament, these twin assumptions form the basis for modern debates about ‘forgery’ in New Testament literature. This article challenges both assumptions by first surveying the role of uncredited collaboration in Roman literary culture and then analysing ancient Christian discourses surrounding (a) illicit textual meddling and (b) inappropriate textual ascription. These two discursive categories reveal how the categories of class and gender are entangled with early Christian ideas of the Author. Ancient discourses of authenticity and authorship were not simply about who produced texts but about policing which acts of textual production count as ‘authoring’.
This chapter works through multiple valences of queerness in relation to blackness. Alongside the presence of non-normative sexual practices, intimacies, and identifications within black literatures this chapter looks at ways that blackness is often posited as already queer, part of the residue of having been hailed as property. In this reading, blackness destabilizes or “queers” the category of the person. This happens through the blurring of the categories of person and object as well as the possibility of making a distinction between an individual and a collective social identity. We might consider this person-object blurriness to be one of the effects of the processes of commodification that enslavement entailed. This estrangement from personhood though enfleshment, objectification, and loss of the mother also introduces literary possibilities of resistance in a queer register, including movements to mourn and re-find the mother, sonic resistance, and other uses of the flesh to produce forms of embodiment that evade traditional forms of capture. Here, queerness is related to finding different ways to describe orientations toward the world and pleasure.
The Japanese empire’s occupation of China during the Second World War left a complex and bitter legacy in postwar Chinese society. This article examines the occupation and its legacies at the grassroots, taking university students in Nanjing as a case study in occupation history and ‘bottom-up’ wartime commemoration. These young people, who studied at National Central University (NCU) under the Japanese-backed Reorganized National Government of Wang Jingwei, organized three protest movements between 1940 and 1945, defying puppet authorities, Japanese forces, and, after the war, the returning Chongqing Nationalist government, as they campaigned against corruption, opium sales, and discriminatory treatment over their status as ‘bogus students’ who supposedly received Japanese ‘enslavement education’ from a collaborationist regime. In the 1980s, after decades of marginalization under the People’s Republic of China, these former protestors began holding reunions, documenting their experiences, and campaigning for recognition from Nanjing University, which eventually recognized them as alumni. Drawing primarily on privately printed alumni memoirs and commemorative volumes, this article positions the protests in the history of youth activism in Nanjing. That NCU students were able to rehabilitate themselves was due to their own organizational prowess and a sympathetic reception from the leadership of a cash-strapped Nanjing University, though the interests of fellow alumnus Jiang Zemin and the Communist Party-state still set the parameters of historical memory. In this, the example of the Nanjing students complicates the top-down role of the state, as described in much previous scholarship on Chinese wartime commemoration, in producing politically motivated nationalist narratives of wartime history.
This article traces the professional life of Rafael Almarza, the last royal escribano (notary) of Mérida in the captaincy of Venezuela, and his role in undermining monarchical authority among the enslaved community displaced in the plains region (Los Llanos) during the war of independence in 1814-18. Despite their status as minor officials within the Spanish imperial bureaucracy, notaries, through the records they made, helped to establish legally binding truths underlying everyday actions, making them influential agents of colonial rule in the community they served, particularly among those seeking notarial documents to obtain freedom. During the battles for independence, escribanos like Almarza facilitated the transition of sovereignty and created documents that fomented the independence cause among enslaved individuals during the years of total war. By examining the manumission documents found in the notarial book Almarza kept during exile, the author of this article shows the importance of enslaved people in granting legitimacy to the emerging leadership of José Antonio Páez and the Republican project. At the same time, this study aims to provide a new look at manumission during the early stages of nation-building and the involvement of underrepresented groups in this process.
Studies of slavery increasingly refer to ‘enslaved people’ rather than ‘slaves’, and, to a lesser extent, to ‘enslavers’ rather than ‘slave owners’. This trend began with scholarship in the United States on plantation slavery but has spread to other academic publications. Yet ‘slave’ continues to be widely used, indicating not everyone is aware of the change or agrees with it. Despite this, few historians have justified their terminology. After surveying the extent of the preference for ‘enslaved person’, I discuss arguments for and against it. Supporters of using ‘enslaved person’ argue that this term emphasises that a person was forced into slavery – but this emphasis means it is less able to accommodate early medieval cases where people sold themselves into slavery. The accompanying preference for ‘enslaver’ over ‘master’ obscures dynamics of ownership and manumission. In addition, ‘enslaved people’ and ‘enslaver’ do not necessarily bring us away from the perspective of slaveholders to the perspective of slaves. Nor are they essential for readers to appreciate the humanity of slaves. Overall, historians should use this issue as an opportunity to reflect on the extent to which scholarship of transatlantic slavery should set the terms of debate for slavery studies in general.
This chapter examines how people of the Black diaspora in the United States have articulated their histories and experiences in comics and graphic novels, and how they have developed singular aesthetic strategies to counter a white comics imaginary and its stereotyped depiction of Black bodies and culture, in order to construct more accurate images of themselves. This includes revisiting American history – particularly enslavement and Civil Rights activism – through a Black lens and with Black readers in mind. This historical rewriting engages with the social, political, and cultural contributions of Black people, filling voids and questioning occlusions. The chapter studies groundbreaking works of this nature by authors such as Kyle Baker, Roland and Taneisha Laird, and Joel Christian Gill. It also highlights the importance of graphic novels depicting the Black communal experience in the context of resistance to violence and the fight for social justice. Finally, it discusses the importance of Black embodiment and the embracing of Black culture, from early works such as Jackie Ormes’s strips in the 1950s to contemporary graphic novels like Ebony Flowers’s Hot Comb (2019).
Many Black intellectuals and artists have called for a counter-historiography that would redress the silencing of Black voices and the inadequate representation of Black experiences in earlier comics. This chapter identifies three categories of graphic historiographies, each with thematic and formal recurrences: those that propose a frontal look at the context of enslavement, from the horrors of the Middle Passage to the violence of the plantation world; those focusing on the political and social struggles of Black communities after the Civil War, from the Jim Crow era and the courageous actions of Civil Rights leaders to twenty-first-century police brutality; and, finally, those that imagine new Black futures in the mode of speculative fiction, while metaphorically referencing past forms of exploitation and repression. The chapter studies the specific devices of several of these works, including the use of temporal shifts in the graphic adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, the reliance on oral history and photo-based illustrations in John Lewis’s Run, Book One, the depiction of Black women’s subordination in Shirlene Obuobi’s ShirlyWhirlMD webcomic, and the futuristic metaphors of slavery and capitalism in Roxane Gay’s The Sacrifice of Darkness.
Choosing the right words is itself an act of caregiving. Centring on correspondence archives allows pastoral letters to be analysed as a distinct literary genre that contributed in complex ways to early modern practices of caregiving, negotiating political oppression, geographical isolation, and colonial experimentation. Forms of care were solicited, given, and received through the material technology of the letter as a literary artefact. The exchange of letters created new bureaucratic and pastoral structures and entanglements between Protestant believers and others across the British Atlantic and reveals the contentious balance between care and cure within early modern communities. Pastoral care involves exercising power: epistolary exchanges sustain, exploit, shape, and distort the spiritual and material wellbeing of individuals and communities in a landscape fissured by religious division, enslavement, and imperial expansion.
Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.
Edited by
Ben Kiernan, Yale University, Connecticut,T. M. Lemos, Huron University College, University of Western Ontario,Tristan S. Taylor, University of New England, Australia
General editor
Ben Kiernan, Yale University, Connecticut
The European conquest of the seven islands of the Canarian archipelago lasted almost a century (1402-1496). It was carried mostly by private adventurers backed by the legal rights of the Castilian crown and supplied by private financiers, who expected a quick return. It brought the destruction of the native population of all its islands, the erasure of their names, language, custom, economy, land ownership, ecological environment, beliefs, culture, social structure, and political organization. The means by which it was achieved were enslavement, deportation, disease, and the strategic use of terror. Acculturation, miscegenation, and the building of a colonial society based on plantation agriculture and long-distance trade did the rest to erase any trace of the indigenous culture. Genocide, in the case of the Canary Islands, can be understood both as a process of attrition, following its use by Fein and Rosenberg, and as an outcome, the aggregate result of thousands of specific instances of violence. It also was a prelude, a necessary learning ground and a blueprint of the European conquest and settler colonialism in the Antilles begun in the 1490s. The American conquest proved a much faster application of the same template for genocide, over a vast territory.
Edited by
Ben Kiernan, Yale University, Connecticut,T. M. Lemos, Huron University College, University of Western Ontario,Tristan S. Taylor, University of New England, Australia
General editor
Ben Kiernan, Yale University, Connecticut
'Urbicide' is a Latin formation - as deployed in this chapter, it refers to the total or near-total destruction of cities (poleis) of the ancient Greek/Hellenic world between the 6th and the 4th centuries BCE. Urbicide was an extreme measure of interstate politics, but not as rare as one might have predicted - or hoped. It represented the other, dark side of the ancient Greeks' fierce attachment to their own native polis. In some cases a polis might be removed from the map once and for all (e.g. Arisba on the island of Lesbos). In others, it might be only temporarily annihilated (Thebes). In all cases, the possibility of largescale enslavement of formerly free Greek citizens was ever-present, and often was realised.
After freedom, there were many realities, scenarios, and imaginings. Mostly, there were just questions that would soon be answered. How would families like the Qualls-Harper-Payton-Colemans and the parents of the Sunflower Seven – those examined in this work – climb, and under what conditions, if any, would their subsequent generations thrive? Would the compromises made in a rural Slave Republic continue to distort the pursuit of a more egalitarian union? In the pockets of our nation where anti-slavery movements had formed, would new appeals for African Americans’ full citizenship mobilize the once enslaved and their descendants and provide moral, social, and ethical guardrails, not just political and economic ones?
“What took place in the Caribbean,” writes Édouard Glissant, “which could be summed up in the word creolization, approximates the idea of Relation as nearly as possible.”1 For Glissant, the word creolization condenses the history of the Caribbean. This is a history characterized by trans-border connections, culture flows, and the transregional movement of people and capital.2 As the first region to be colonized by Europe in the sixteenth century and the last one to be—incompletely—decolonized in the twentieth, the Caribbean has been shaped by the worldwide demand and supply of colonial labor. It was the destination of nearly half of all the enslaved Africans trafficked into the New World between 1492 and the end of the nineteenth century; of significant numbers of indentured and contracted European laborers during much of the same period; as well as of indentured Indian, Chinese, and Indonesian workers after the formal abolition of slavery at the end of the nineteenth century.3 Subsequently, the first half of the twentieth century saw the emergence of a circuit of intra-regional migration of a labor force to the larger Caribbean islands where US-led corporations operated. After World War II, when labor from the non-independent territories of the Caribbean was recruited to rebuild the postwar economies of western Europe and the United States, the region turned into a source of transcontinental emigration.4 On account of this history, the Caribbean has been theorized in terms of transculturation, creolization, and hybridity; concepts such as “remittance societies,” “circular migration,” or “diaspora,” widely used in transnational studies, have also been coined in relation to the Caribbean.5 More than these other terms, however, the concept of creolization has come to condense both the sedimentation and ramifications of this history.
This chapter surveys the evidence for the use of people and animals as substitutes for prostheses and assistive technology by individuals with a variety of impairments and disabilities. It considers the role that enslavement played in the lives of the impaired and disabled in antiquity, and how the presence of enslaved individuals may have affected the development and adoption of assistive technology, noting that this is a key difference in ancient and contemporary assistive technology usage.
Chapter 1 deals with the Municipal Council of Luanda and the politics of Portuguese governors in Angola in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, detailing how the Municipal Council of Luanda was involved in illegal wars , treachery and robbery in capturing and enslaving Angolans and shipping them to Brazil on behalf of Portugal. It demonstrates how the Municipal Council of Luanda became the site of political intrigue, jealousy, deceit and mutiny in a political landscape in which the main drive was for economic gain; the enslavement of Angolans was the key part of that package. The methods deployed to capture them – wars, pillage, treachery – formed the basis for Mendonça’s Vatican court case.
This note argues that repeated uses of onus ‘burden’ in Plaut. Asin. 591–745 pun on Greek ὄνος ‘ass’ and, in so doing, activate a network of other puns and hints at the play's title, asses (the animal), and both homoerotic and anal sex.
Chapter 8 examines the law governing the exploitation of people’s labour by fighting organizations. The chapter focuses on the international crimes of enslavement and forced labour in armed conflict, as well as the recruitment of children, with a focus on how prohibitions and crime definitions apply to the predatory exploitation of labour in the context of irregular warfare.
African economies were globally integrated yet regionally autonomous. This chapter addresses volume and direction of slave trade, continental and regional export value, and theories of economic growth and enslavement. Details address the varying regional peaks in slave trade as related to warfare, population, regional social orders, and gender relations. The overseas diaspora grew to 10% of the African total of some 140 million. African economies felt the effects of imperial rivalries and global trade, notably in textiles. (Large-scale colonial rule came only after 1870.) The eighteenth century brought expanding overseas slave trade and its steady incursions into domestic economies. The nineteenth century brought a mix of economic changes. Silver became key to African currencies; peasant agricultural exports rose, but only the post-1870 exports of South African diamonds and gold exports exceeded slave-trade earnings. In the ‘second slavery’, African enslavement reached a mid-century peak, in parallel to current maritime Asian and New World plantations. Analysis of African economies benefits from growing collections of empirical data; contending theories on enslavement, the domestic economy, and overseas trade – developed over half a century of analysis – can be strengthened in global context.
This essay surveys the literate culture of the antebellum and Civil War eras among marginal southerners – African Americans, both free and enslaved, and poor and middle-class whites – and explores examples of the ways reading and writing, though quite distinct in formal pedagogies, blended together in the literary lives of the self-educated. Focused especially on Basil Armstrong Thomasson, a yeoman farmer in North Carolina whose diary records his reading practices as well as original verse, and John M. Washington, a Virginia man who kept a diary while enslaved, the essay presents a study in the surprising complexity and variegation of the textual landscape such people inhabited and helped create. It also discusses the scarcer archival traces of the literacy practices of ordinary southern women.