Danielle Skeehan | Oberlin College (original) (raw)
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Surveillance and Race in the New World (1492–1705)
Acoustemologies in Contact, 2021
Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error wi... more Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. ISBN Paperback: 978-1-80064-035-1 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-80064-036-8 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-80064-037-5 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-80064-038-2 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-80064-039-9
On October 1, 1768, Jamaican overseer and plantation owner Thomas Thistlewood recorded the follow... more On October 1, 1768, Jamaican overseer and plantation owner Thomas Thistlewood recorded the following incident between two enslaved seamstresses: he writes, "Phibbah's Coobah marked on Silvia's smock bosom. D T S J H, for Dago, her husband; Mr. Meyler's Tom, her sweetheart; and John Hart[nol]e, who she is supposed to love best; and other ornaments," to which is added the lines: "Here's meat for money/ If you are fit, I'm ready / But take care you don't flash in the pan." 1 Coobah and Silvia had been assigned the task of sewing and mending clothes for other enslaved workers, but clearly Thistlewood caught them in the act of doing something very different: Coobah, it seems, could "write" and the materials she wrote with were needle, cloth, and thread. Between 1750 and 1786 Thistlewood wrote nearly 14,000 pages detailing his life and activities, the planting and harvesting of crops, and his brutal treatment of enslaved workers; however, on this day Coobah's "text" disrupts the aesthetic flow and the discursive authority of the record: in order to record and transcribe her unauthorized act, he must also accurately acknowledge her act of authorship and imitate the formalistic qualities of her text. Whether or not Coobah could write in a traditional sense-with ink on paper-her embroidered writing circulated far more broadly than any of Thistlewood's private recordings: worn outside the clothing, Silvia's smock served as a public broadside. In fact, what Thistlewood recorded that day was an early example of black Atlantic women's writing in which the author converts the very tools of her labor as an enslaved seamstress into a medium through which she can tell stories of love and kinship, as well as sexual exploitation and loss.
Surveillance and Race in the New World (1492–1705)
Acoustemologies in Contact, 2021
Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error wi... more Every effort has been made to identify and contact copyright holders and any omission or error will be corrected if notification is made to the publisher. ISBN Paperback: 978-1-80064-035-1 ISBN Hardback: 978-1-80064-036-8 ISBN Digital (PDF): 978-1-80064-037-5 ISBN Digital ebook (epub): 978-1-80064-038-2 ISBN Digital ebook (mobi): 978-1-80064-039-9
On October 1, 1768, Jamaican overseer and plantation owner Thomas Thistlewood recorded the follow... more On October 1, 1768, Jamaican overseer and plantation owner Thomas Thistlewood recorded the following incident between two enslaved seamstresses: he writes, "Phibbah's Coobah marked on Silvia's smock bosom. D T S J H, for Dago, her husband; Mr. Meyler's Tom, her sweetheart; and John Hart[nol]e, who she is supposed to love best; and other ornaments," to which is added the lines: "Here's meat for money/ If you are fit, I'm ready / But take care you don't flash in the pan." 1 Coobah and Silvia had been assigned the task of sewing and mending clothes for other enslaved workers, but clearly Thistlewood caught them in the act of doing something very different: Coobah, it seems, could "write" and the materials she wrote with were needle, cloth, and thread. Between 1750 and 1786 Thistlewood wrote nearly 14,000 pages detailing his life and activities, the planting and harvesting of crops, and his brutal treatment of enslaved workers; however, on this day Coobah's "text" disrupts the aesthetic flow and the discursive authority of the record: in order to record and transcribe her unauthorized act, he must also accurately acknowledge her act of authorship and imitate the formalistic qualities of her text. Whether or not Coobah could write in a traditional sense-with ink on paper-her embroidered writing circulated far more broadly than any of Thistlewood's private recordings: worn outside the clothing, Silvia's smock served as a public broadside. In fact, what Thistlewood recorded that day was an early example of black Atlantic women's writing in which the author converts the very tools of her labor as an enslaved seamstress into a medium through which she can tell stories of love and kinship, as well as sexual exploitation and loss.