Book Review on Tarter and Bell, Buried Lives: Incarcerated in Early America, in Southern Historian, Spring 2014 (original) (raw)
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Beginning in the 1970s, scholars such as Theda Perdue participated in the development of a new ethnohistorical scholarship on native people in the lower South that featured indigenous perspectives. In the last two decades, that scholarship has often centered specifically on women. 1 Separately, over a decade ago, works by scholars such as Kathleen M. Brown helped develop a cultural historical scholarship that made gender and sexuality a starting point for analyses that intersected with race and class power dynamics. 2 The two fields have emphasized different interpretive methods-ethnographic anthropology and cultural studies, respectively-but have shared an interest in placing the perspectives of historiographically marginalized people and power dynamics at the center of their analyses. The works under review bear the imprint of these developments in quite different ways. Read together, however, they advance the project of showing how indigenous women and indigenous gender systems were central to the struggle over colonial development by changing the strategies and tactics of power in trade and diplomacy at the highest and the most local levels.
The Bone and Sinew of the Land: America’s Forgotten Black Pioneers and the Struggle for Equality
Civil War Book Review
When considering African-Americans, historical narratives of western expansion over the past few decades often follow the patterns and politics of the slave trade. The accompanying story of abolitionist rhetoric is likewise usually circumscribed to urban areas. Anne-Lisa Cox, whose exhibition on the power of place is displayed at the National Museum of African American History and Culture, seeks to, in her book The Bone and Sinew of the Land, unify the threads of expansion and abolition through a study of black citizenship in the Northwest Territories in the initial decades of the nineteenth century. Drawing from census records and a multitude of secondary sources, Cox recreates the likely lifestyles of black pioneers west of the Ohio River, arguing that this migration of African-Americans of various circumstances was motivated by a desire for the full citizenship privileges afforded by property ownership. The Northwest Ordinance of 1787, which created the region in question, is notable for its ban on slavery, though many white settlers who relocated there brought with them their bondspeople due to a lack of enforcement or legal exemptions. This did not deter the 63,000 African-Americans, well more than the threshold of 60,000 required for statehood, who relocated to the future states of Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and Indiana at the turn of the 18 th century as laws for manumitted slaves displaced large numbers of freed people (3). Among these migrants were Charles and Keziah Grier, a formerly enslaved African-American couple who owned 40 acres along the Patoka and Wabash Rivers which Charles had purchased in 1815. Charles was manumitted when his ownership passed to a preacher, while Keziah was brought to the territory as an enslaved woman from South Carolina. The book's nine chapters are filled with episodes concerning the Griers and others like them, such as the Lyles, who dealt with restrictive black codes and legal barriers to their well-being. Although this new territory beckoned many 1
A Canada in the South: Marronage in Antebellum American Literature
2017
This dissertation considers maroons-enslaved people who fled from slavery and selfexiled to places like swamps and forests-in the textual and historical worlds of the pre-Civil War United States. I examine a counter-archive of US literature that imagines marronage as offering alternate spaces of freedom, refuge, and autonomy outside the unidirectional South-to-North geographical trajectory of the Underground Railroad, which has often framed the story of freedom and unfreedom for African Americans in pre-1865 US literary and cultural studies. Broadly, I argue that through maroons we can locate alternate spaces of fugitive freedom within slaveholding territory, thereby complicating fixed notions of the sectional geography of freedom and mobility as they were tied to conceptions of liberalism in the antebellum United States. Whereas previous scholars, especially those whose work focuses on Latin America and the Caribbean, have tended to regard forms of marronage in relation to their potential for largescale emancipatory schemes like those made famous by the maroons of Jamaica, Suriname, and Brazil (among others), I am less interested in the concrete or imagined connections between marronage and enslaved revolt and more interested in those between marronage and freedomseeking practices via flight in their many possible forms and manifestations. In this sense, marronage becomes an optic through which I investigate the production of alternate formations v of community, sociality, belonging, space, and ultimately geography and freedom that primarily African American writers in the 1850s were exploring through literary discourse. The texts I examine ultimately form a constellation which articulates a black-centered politics of resistance based on a freedom of movement disarticulated from liberal conceptions of citizenship and the nation state. The emphasis on the 1850s reflects a rise in attention to marronage after the passage of the Fugitive Slave Law in 1850, which effectively nationalized the institution of slavery in the eyes of the law. The mobility exhibited by runaway enslaved people who sought freedom by heading north, sometimes via the Underground Railroad, has been made to comport with the teleological narrative of the liberal subject in US history so as to appear as an example of those wrongfully denied liberal subjecthood valiantly striking out in search of it. The mobility exhibited by maroons, on the other hand, has been largely ignored in the US context because it does not comport with racial ideologies of assimilation and integration. This dissertation aims to demonstrate the extent to which marronage engages with contested, complicated, often nonliberal meanings of freedom for enslaved and fugitive African Americans in the antebellum United States as they were explored and articulated through representations of maroons in literary texts. vi ACKNOWLEDGMENTS My first and most profound debt of gratitude is to my dissertation committee at the Graduate Center: Eric Lott, Duncan Faherty, and Robert Reid-Pharr. They believed in this project from the get-go and have been the best academic support system I ever could have asked for. I am grateful as well to David Reynolds, in whose course the idea for this project first germinated; Kandice Chuh, for early guidance and for giving me the kick I needed to go "all in" on the study of marronage; Hildegard Hoeller, whose course and methodologies drove my early interest in slavery and abolition; and Carrie Hintz, who was always there to help me navigate funding. In my various teaching and fellowship engagements throughout CUNY, Phyllis Van Slyck, Steven Monte, Andrea Fabrizio, and Linda Hirsch have been extraordinary mentors. It would have been impossible to complete this project without generous financial support from the
The Eighteenth Century, 2019
What image defines the antebellum American South in modern cultural memory? More than any other feature of the slave system, the cultural archive of that region's antebellum economic engine is dominated by the decorous milieu of the plantation home-its aristocratic airs, its luxurious clothes, its august architecture. 1 Consider, for instance, the saga Gone with the Wind, both the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Margaret Mitchell (1936) and the blockbuster film adaptation produced by David O. Selznick (1939), which wistfully fantasizes of a time when plantation society was-in the eyes of post-Reconstruction Southerners-at its most refined. But the irony of Mitchell's nostalgic portrait is that in the American colonies' earliest years, plantation settlers largely rejected the niceties of domestic life. During the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, planters of tobacco, sugar, and rice across the "extended Caribbean"-from the Chesapeake region in the north to Surinam in the south-eschewed polite society and focused instead on extracting as much profit as possible from their colonial tracts and from the bodies of their brutalized slave laborers. 2 In turn, metropolitan observers back in England mocked these colonial settlers for their greedy disposition and their boorish manners. Critics were also uneasy about the violence that suffused every facet of plantation society, from cane beatings to slave insurrections. In the eyes of such critics, these settlements failed to rise to the level of decent English "households," muddling along instead as coarse colonial "plantations." 3 The domestic life of white settlers served as a type of barometer by which observers back home measured how effectively English norms and manners had spread to the nation's colonial outposts. Advocates of American settlement 312 THE EIGHTEENTH CENTURY like Robert Beverley insisted that even though colonies like Virginia had been initially settled by "single Men, who had not the Incumbrance of Wives and Children in England," the attractive climate and fertile soil encouraged "People of better Condition [to retire] thither with their Families," including "good Cavalier Families." 4 As the plantation home became more refined, these defenders suggested, England's colonial activities would become more dignified. But integrating the plantation complex into England's empire required more than just encouraging families to emigrate to the extended Caribbean-it also required rehabilitating the colonial household's sordid reputation. Amy Kaplan, speaking of a nineteenth-century American context, has called this cultural refashioning of the private sphere "the process of domestication," in which "the cultural work of domesticity . . . not only monitors the borders between the civilized and the savage but also regulates traces of the savage within itself." This form of "imperial domesticity . . . continually projects a map of unregenerate outlying foreign terrain that both gives coherence to its boundaries and justifies its domesticating mission." 5 As scholars of nineteenthcentury British and American culture have argued, by rewriting imperial expansion as household management, the "cult of domesticity" endowed white women with the mission to civilize the frontier by nurturing metropolitan ideology within the walls of their home, contrasting national norms of the hearth against the "primitive" practices of the racially marked Other. But during the early years of plantation expansion, as white colonial society failed to measure up to English standards, the discourse of imperial domesticity appropriated, rather than rejected, the racial Other in order to civilize the cultural image of the plantation colonies. In this essay, I argue that British writers of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries rehabilitated the plantation's reputation by championing the exemplary familial devotion of enslaved Africans, not of white settlers. Through a range of literary texts, writers like Thomas Tryon, Thomas Southerne, Sir Richard Steele, and Joseph Addison drew attention to the pitiful plight of slave fathers, mothers, and lovers to contrast their filial affection with the callousness of their white counterparts. This "domestication" of African slaves accomplished two types of cultural work: one, it championed African kinships as the moral foundation for an otherwise boorish colonial society. But more importantly, it sought to minimize the revolutionary implications of slave violence by treating such bloodshed as a private, rather than public, affair. By framing slave murder and self-murder as the tragic defense of domestic principles, these writers depicted African slaves as more concerned with their family lives than with their political bondage. And yet, even while these accounts of domestic tragedy downplay the threat of plantation revolt, these tragic "heroes" (almost entirely African men) transcend the sphere of family life that conscribes them. In their willingness to risk all in defense of filial integrity, these "domesticated" slaves demonstrate a fierce zeal for self-determination that portends revolutionary