Differing Narratives of the Case of the Jaham Brothers and its Aftermath: Enslavement, Emancipation and their Legacies in Martinique (original) (raw)
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For a long time, the impact of Atlantic slavery on European societies was discussed in academic circles, but it was no part of national, regional and local histories. In the last three decades this has changed, at different rhythms in the former metropolises. The 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in France (1998) and the 200th anniversary of the prohibition of the slave trade in Great Britain opened the debates to the broader public. Museums and memorials were established, but they coexist with monuments to slave traders as benefactors of their town. In Spain and Portugal the process to include the remembrance of slavery in local and national history is developing more slowly, as the impact of slave trade on Spanish and Portuguese urbanization and industrialization is little known, and the legacies of recent fascist dictatorships are not yet overcome. This article focuses on sites of commemoration and silent traces of slavery.
Public memories of the Atlantic slave trade and slavery in contemporary Europe
European Review; Interdisciplinary Journal of the Humanities and Sciences of the Academia Europaea; The Academy of Europe, 2009
For centuries, rnajor European states were involved in the Atlantic slave trade and in slavery in their colonies in the Americas. In the last decade, this subject has attracted serious but uneven attention in Europe beyond the realms of descendants and academia. The British, French and Dutch govetnments have engaged with the subject, expressing l€lrorse and stirnulating public commemorations. Portugal and Spain on the other hand have hardly addressed the subject. The reason for this remarkable divergence, the author suggests' lies with divergent commemorative traditions and the fact that the two Iberian countries have no substantial Caribbean communities as visible reminders of this past. The last part of the afticle discusses some problerns associated with the politicized rediscovery of these ernbaffassing chapters in European history.
The STARACO project (STAtus, ‘Race’ and Colour in the Atlantic World from Antiquity to the Present), financed by the French Region Pays de la Loire, is offering support for doctoral students and post-docs (from Europe, Africa and the Americas) to participate in the Summer Programme in Nantes from 22-26 June 2015 on the subject “Freedoms and Slaveries in the Atlantic World.” Conference Focus Today, bibliography on the phenomenon of slavery in the Atlantic is incredibly vast. However, our research group on the definition of hierarchies of colours and of 'races' cannot avoid addressing this subject. It is clear that the deportation of millions of African captives towards the Americas constituted the most powerful impetus for the racialisation of slavery, leading to the ‘natural’ representation according to which all slaves are black. This simple equation, however, covers over a complex historical process that this research conference seeks to analyze more closely. We must begin by ‘denaturalizing’ the concept of slavery. The term slavery, in fact, includes situations that are very different in time and space, which the various specialists in our research network will be able to compare. This is why we use the word ‘slaveries’ in the plural. The diversity of slaveries mirrors that of the modes of liberation and the various statuses that freedom generated. Here, the goal is to show that slavery does not respond to a single definition, but rather describes a process. Similarly, coming out of a servile condition led to the creation of various statuses, ranging from full access to equal citizenship (in modern times) to certain situations of minority, for people who could no longer be identified as slaves but still carried its stigma in freedom. The condition of slave was certainly a status, but it was also a state that could, within certain limits and under certain conditions, be negotiated in social practice. In this perspective, the problem of abolitionism and its ambiguities may be explored through the implicit renewals of forms of slavery in the nineteenth century, beyond the legal abolition of that particular institution.
Atlantic Slavery and the Making of the Modern World: Experiences, Representations, and Legacies
Current Anthropology
This introductory article outlines the general orientations of the Wenner-Gren Foundation's 158th symposium held in Sintra, Portugal, in the autumn of 2018. It summarizes and reflects on the various communications and teases out how the entanglements of Atlantic slavery, knowledge production, and colonization shaped the modern world. It then contemplates a more equitable future through alternative problem-solving anthropology. On October 12-18, 2018, the Wenner-Gren Foundation for Anthropological Research hosted its 158th symposium at Tivoli Palácio de Seteais in Sintra, Portugal. The symposium gathered scholars from different disciplinary and geographical homes and was convened by Deborah L. Mack and Ibrahima Thiaw. It was designed to be an intellectual challenge to academic traditions within anthropology and offer models of what anthropology could become in order to have greater impact in policy, public culture, and action. It was intended to engage an uncomfortable and painful past whose buried memories continue to linger in the present. To do that, it was structured to accommodate a broad spectrum of cultural sensibilities and political subjectivities that lay bare the positionality of the researcher. The ultimate goal was to provoke, revisit, and redirect debates on Atlantic slavery and modernity across racial, cultural, class, and gender, as well as methodological and theoretical, boundaries for the twenty-first century and beyond. Following the statement of the goals and orientations of the symposium, all participants were asked to prepare papers that were circulated prior to the meeting. Paper presentations during the meeting were followed by thematic focus group discussions. The history of Atlantic slavery is tightly linked to that of European colonization of the rest of the world that went hand in hand with the production of Eurocentric knowledge. European global voyages, ca. 1400, were largely motivated by commerce and later colonization that meant economic and political control over new resources, territories, and their inhabitants. That colonial expansion was built on unequal relations legitimized by Eurocentric views of the world in general, elevating European over different others, particularly Black Africans and Indigenous communities in the Western Hemisphere. Physiological, biological, and phenotypical differences were translated into discriminating racial, ethnic, and national distinctions that were naturalized first on the basis of religion and physical appearance and later by way of anthropological and historical knowledge that, by the nineteenth century, became a powerful medium for representing and controlling non-European others (Cooper 2005; McClintock 1995; O'Brien 2010; Pratt 1992; Schlanger and Taylor 2012; Stoler 2002a). Eurocentric knowledge was strategically mobilized to intrude, search, analyze, dissect, and ultimately consume Black bodies according to European demands, needs, and standards (Curran 2011). Anthropological gaze born of modernity is a direct outcome of that colonial history that continued to reproduce canonized discourses and representations that locked people of African descent and Indigenous communities of the Western Hemisphere into the imagination of others (Mudimbe 1988, 1994; O'Brien 2010; Trouillot 2003). Hence, it is critical to interrogate how these legacies infiltrated the core methodological and theoretical foundations of anthropological discourses (
“History and Heritage of Slavery and the Atlantic Slave Trade in the South Atlantic”
Since the 1980s, an increasing number of historians started exploring Brazilian archives to develop studies on slavery in Brazil. Th is change occurred aft er several years during which it was assumed that following the 1890's decree issued by the Minister of Finance Ruy Barbosa most Brazilian archives on slavery were burned, supposedly condemning Brazilian slavery to oblivion. Especially aft er 1988, the year of the centennial of abolition of slavery, numerous studies on slavery in Brazil and the Luso-Brazilian slave trade, examining new demographic data and a myriad of primary sources including baptism, marriage, and death records, have been published not only in Portuguese, but also in English and French. Th ese works have provided many examples of how enslaved men and women developed agency and had never been merely passive victims, as argued in most previous studies published by the members of the Escola de Sociologia de São Paulo in the 1960s and 1970s. Moreover, both in Brazil and in the United States, Brazilian slavery historians started giving particular attention to the internal dynamics of West and West Central African societies and their impact on the development of the Luso-Brazilian slave trade and Brazilian slavery. Th rough studies highlighting the cultural and religious practices transferred from Africa to Brazil, these scholars also brought to light the trajectories of enslaved Africans and former slaves who were able to resist and to negotiate places of freedom in the Brazilian society. Th e development of this new scholarship on Brazilian slavery arose in a context of growing importance of Afro-Brazilian political and cultural activism promoting connections with Africa through the arts, religion, and popular culture. Although references to Africa existed in Bahia's carnival as early as in the nineteenth century, aft er the 1970s they became much more visible with the creation of carnival groups or blocos including the Ilê Aiyê and many other musical groups such as Olodum and Timbalada. In Rio de Janeiro, even though this Africanization was not as visible as it was in Bahia,
New Sources and New Findings for Slavery and Abolition in the Atlantic World
This special issue focuses on a group of newly discovered or underutilized sources for the study of slavery and abolition. It features work by a number of multilingual and archivally savvy scholars who have been working in Portuguese, Spanish, German, Dutch and Swedish materials from Europe, Africa and Latin America that date from the seventeenth through the nineteenth centuries. Their findings change and enrich our understandings of slavery and its end in the Atlantic World. Kara Schultz has tracked the documentary trails connecting the early South Atlantic slave trade from the Kingdom of Angola to Brazil and Buenos Aires and the ruses traders, priests, military officers and government officials used to carry on what was supposed to be a forbidden commerce. Her data, meticulously combed from difficult notarial records, criminal investigations and government correspondence, show that Buenos Aires received more than 20,000 slaves from the late sixteenth through the mid-seventeenth centuries, and further, that a significant number of the enslaved were children. Her research thus changes the total volume of the TransAtlantic slave trade and challenges the myth that Buenos Aires was a minor port in that trade. Angela Sutton's work in the archives of the Swedish Africa Company, the Danish Africa Company and the Prussian Brandenburg Africa Company is enabled by her command of seventeenth-century German, Dutch and Swedish paleography. The slaving contracts and correspondence she analyzes offer insights into the business of
2016
In 2011 the New York Historical Society opened Revolution! The Atlantic World Reborn, the first exhibition to relate the American, French and Haitian revolutions as a single, global narrative. Spanning decades of tremendous political and cultural changes, the exhibit traced how an ideal of popular sovereignty, introduced by the American Revolution, soon sparked more radical calls for a recognition of universal human rights, and set off attacks on both sides of the Atlantic against innate priv...