Ante-Oedipus: Gender and Racial Capitalism in Plantation Modernity (original) (raw)

Gender and slave emancipation in the Atlantic world

2005

begin their edited collection, of predominantly historical essays on postemancipation societies in the "Atlantic World," with an introduction that wastes no time in letting us know why they write. "The essays. .. draw on feminist theory which shows that gender involves 'doing' rather than 'being.' Scholars. .. have argued that there are no presocial gendered essences. There are just women and men who have different experiences, only people whose bodily differences are, through social and discursive processes, fixed and categorized into two opposed groups: male and female" (p. 2). While we are, therefore, warned to expect normative bias or at least some rooting for women who are struggling to find agency and space, the authors for the most part, neither lead witnesses nor spin evidence. Offering a work on "Gender and Slave Emancipation in Comparative Perspective," which is the title of their introduction, presents, however, more substantive difficulties. Darlene Clark Hine, in her message to members as the President of the American Association of Historians, invited academics to "cross boundaries" and "engage in more collaborative and comparative work."[1] This volume certainly crosses boundaries as it examines the role of gender in a wide variety of settings including the United States South, Caribbean, Brazil, and Africa. But the authors of the articles do not engage one another in a collective enterprise of comparative analysis. Such an analysis demands some conceptual work in arriving at a coherent approach to comparison and contrast. Northwestern University's African American Studies program offers a graduate course in conceptual methodologies that includes in its description the lament that there is a "neglect of focused discussion on the application of critical concepts in interdisciplinary analysis." Several of the authors in 1 Scully et al.: Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World

Gender, Slavery and the Making of New World Identities

Gender & History, 1999

eds), More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Indiana University Press, Bloomington, 1996), pp. ix + 341, 39.95and39.95 and 39.95and18.95. ISBN 0 253 33017 3 (hb) and 0 253 21043 7 (pb). Maggie Montesinos Sale, The Slumbering Volcano: American Slave Ship Revolts and the Production of Rebellious Masculinity (Duke University Press, Durham and London, 1997), pp. x + 264, 49.95and49.95 and 49.95and16.95. ISBN 0 8223 1983 7 (hb) and 0 8223 1992 6 (pb).

Sex, Power and Slavery Section: Legacies: Discourse, Dishonor, and Labor

Sex, Power and Slavery, 2014

This chapter approaches the theme of sex, power, and slavery from the perspective of discourse to focus on the function of the powerful metaphor contributed by the antislavery campaign in legitimating the more general condition of "unfreedom" that was colonialism. More specifically, it locates the image of the "unfree nyai/concubine/'sex slave'" in an evolving discourse on European identity in the Dutch East Indies. I will argue that the discourse on "her" condition had its origins in earlier concerns and formed part of a broader discourse on colonial identity.

Positioning Gender and Race in (Post)colonial Plantation Space

2012

Highlighting the work taking place at the crossroads of sociology, sexuality studies, gender studies, cultural studies, and performance studies, this series offers a platform for scholars pushing the boundaries of gender and sexuality studies substantively, theoretically, and stylistically. The authors draw on insights from diverse scholarship and research in popular culture, ethnography, history, cinema, religion, performance, new media studies, and technoscience studies to render visible the complex manner in which gender and sexuality intersect and can, at times, create tensions and fissures between one another. Encouraging breadth in terms of both scope and theme, the series editors seek works that explore the multifaceted domain of gender and sexuality in a manner that challenges the taken-for-granted. On one hand, the series foregrounds the pleasure, pain, politics, and aesthetics at the nexus of sexual practice and gendered expression. On the other, it explores new sites for the expression of gender and sexuality, the new geographies of intimacy being constituted at both the local and global scales.