‘Chords of Freedom’: Commemoration,Ritual and British Transatlantic Slavery

The antislavery activity of the religious fringe of Atlantic Presbyterianism, Covenanters, has been neglected. Covenanters produced longstanding articulations of antislavery rooted in seventeenth-century Scotland. In America, Covenanters created an ignored alternative to traditional paradigms of slavery debates. They were antislavery Biblical literalists. In the American South, their support of the American Colonization Society (ACS) was an attempt to maintain their faith, and they believed the ACS was their brainchild. Everywhere, Covenanters utilized antislavery to maintain connection to their Old World religious traditions.     

Slavery and Bristol's ‘golden age’

Bristol's eighteenth century ‘golden age’ has conventionally been linked to the rise of slavery in British America after 1660. This paper seeks to add substance to this linkage by exploring Bristol's involvement in the Atlantic slave trade, without which slavery in the Americas could not have developed to the level it did, and goes on to explore the impact of slave trafficking and the trades in slave-produced goods such as sugar and tobacco on income levels in the city in the 1780s. It suggests that in the late eighteenth century at least 40 per cent of the income of Bristolians derived from slavery-related activities. The paper concludes by offering some brief reflections on the relationship between slavery and British metropolitan development.     

‘Cinema,Glamour, Atrocity’: Narratives of Trauma

Abstract

Cinematic treatments of trauma have to confront the challenge that every aesthetic choice is also an ethical one. This challenge poses special problems for questions of truth and the representation of victims and perpetrators. Three documentaries made by Mark Kaplan (1996–2004) explore the history of South African student activist Siphiwo Mtimkulu, tortured and murdered by security policemen in the early 1980s, and the subsequent interaction between Gideon Nieuwoudt, one of the perpetrators, and the Mtimkulu family during the Truth and Reconciliation Commission Hearings. Ian Gabriel's fiction film, Forgiveness (2004), uses key aspects of this history in his treatment of a repentant perpetrator seeking forgiveness from his victim's family. In my analysis, I argue that respect for a realist aesthetic – the notion that the camera can and does reveal the world to us – may be combined with self-reflexivity, narrative layering and generic innovation to produce a complex representation of truth, victim and perpetrator. I suggest, further, that the initial choice of subject will determine to some extent the degree of complexity with which issues of truth, on the one hand, and the nature of the victim and the perpetrator, on the other, will be developed.     

Slavery, ‘respectability,’ and being ‘freeborn’ on the shores of nineteenth-century Lake Tanganyika

Concepts of slavery and freedom dominate the historiography of labour and social relations in nineteenth-century East and Central Africa. This article argues that such concepts oversimplify the complexity of other forms of servitude. It does so by analysing the position of people who referred to themselves as ngwana on the shores of Lake Tanganyika. Ngwana translates from Swahili as ‘gentlemen,’ and it implies ‘respectability’ and ‘freeborn’ status. Yet most ngwana could not claim to be free, even if they had ceased being slaves. Rather than freedom, ngwana sought ‘respect,’ and in so doing blurred the lines between slavery and freedom.     

‘Mungo Everywhere’: How Anglophones Heard Chattel Slavery

This article re-engages with the performance history of the character of Mungo, an enslaved servant from Isaac Bickerstaff and Charles Dibdin's comic opera The Padlock (1768), which premiered at London's Drury Lane Theatre during David Garrick's tenure there. In dialogue with nearly a century of criticism that has misread Mungo as solely a caricature prefiguring the codified racism of the American minstrel show, this article examines contemporary periodicals, libretti, and Jean-Jacques Rousseau's writings on music to posit that the opera's musical representation offered a more nuanced alternative to print's black and white representations of racial and status difference.     

Freedom as self-transgression: transformations in the ‘governmentality’ of social work

This article takes as its starting point the growing prominence of what might be called ‘neo-philanthropic’ forms of knowledge in social work during recent years. Inspired by Foucault's concepts of genealogy and governmentality, the article presents an historical analysis including eighteenth century poor policies, philanthropy in the late nineteenth century, welfare planning in the 1960s and the emergence of neo-philanthropic social work from the 1980s onwards. The article argues that the recent rediscovery of concepts and techniques invented by late nineteenth-century philanthropy breaks with traditional welfarist forms of knowledge and practices of social work. As a result, it seems that social work is now to foster new kinds of subjects and create new types of communities. This development indicates that a more profound transformation of the welfare state and its conception of citizenship might be taking place.

The article draws upon the PhD thesis entitled The Genealogy of Social Work: The Struggle to Turn the Poor and Marginalized into Free Persons by the author.     

‘Ways of Remembering’: Transatlantic Connections and African Diaspora's Homecoming in the Republic of Benin

Abstract

Since the seventeenth century, the Atlantic ‘perimeter’ has been characterised by exchanges of commodities, bodies and cultural productions. Within this space, West Africa has established itself as an ‘ancestral land’: a pivotal physical and imagined location for its diaspora. Exploring how a ‘homeland’ is constructed, the article analyses practices of homecoming in the contemporary Republic of Benin. It argues that the particular historical conjuncture of the early 1990s, mainly characterised by the democratic transition, has allowed the restoration of Atlantic connections. Aspiring to establish a vibrant tourism industry, the new government strongly encouraged African American homecomings, commemorating the slave trade and celebrating diasporic cultures. The Vodun religion, because of its propagation across the New World through the slave trade, became the core symbol of this reunion, the very evidence of the strength of ancestral linkages and a foundation for black commonality. Reframing notions of ancestry and transnational belongings, the article examines how the insertion of Benin into global, economic and cultural circuits has led to the emergence of new cultural practices, meanings and subjectivities, both related to national and diasporic spaces.     

‘The Slavery of East and West’: Abolitionists and ‘Unfree’ Labour in India, 1820–1833

This article explores abolitionist treatments of East Indian slavery in the 1820s. It argues that rather than resulting from a lack of information or a conception of the qualitative difference between East and West Indian slavery, ambivalent and muted abolitionist responses to this issue prior to 1833 were conditioned by the wider imperatives of the anti-slavery campaign. Abstentionist substitution of ‘free-grown’ East India sugar for morally tainted West Indian produce, together with wider economic arguments about the equalisation of the sugar duties and the potential of India to provide a free labour alternative to the West Indian slave system, marked points of intersection between abolitionist and East India economic interests that relied on the assumption that labour in India, however cheap, was fundamentally ‘free’. As a result, rather than engaging with the various forms of slavery in India, abolitionists focused on discursively distancing them both from sugar production and from their campaign. This response suggests that abolitionist ideology was intersected by pragmatic political, economic, and discursive imperatives that precluded the universal application of humanitarian anti-slavery ideals.     

Narratives of ‘mixed race’ youth in South Korea: racial order and in-betweenness

South Korea has long been regarded as a country with a single ethnicity. Honhyeol, which literally means ‘mixed blood’ in Korean, exemplifies this orientation. In recent years, the number of ‘mixed race’ children in the country has been on the rise due to the increase in international marriages, particularly between Korean men and foreign women. Drawing on the personal narratives of 56 youths (aged between 9 and 17) obtained from three essay contests, this article examines how, why, and in which contexts the racial hierarchies of ‘mixed race’ children in Korea are constructed. Narratives of ‘mixed race’ children and their peers show that a ‘hierarchical racial order’ – characterized by a color-coding system that simultaneously operates along the lines of national origin – is channeled into ‘mixed race’ people’s everyday lives, thus shaping their identity constructions.     

‘The Realm of Maiden Beauty’: Spectres of Slavery,Rebellion, and Creolisation in the Landscape of Cable’s Louisiana

Using a creative interdisciplinary method of enquiry, this article seeks to exorcise the spectres of revolutionary creolisation embedded in George Washington Cable’s 1880 novel The Grandissimes. It probes, in particular, the secreted traces of the Creole diaspora triggered by the Haitian Revolution of 1791–1804, and attempts to peel back the manifold layers of ideological occlusion embedded in the (ostensibly white, Anglo-American) narrative frame of Cable’s omniscient narrator and his protagonist Joseph Frowenfeld, which suppress the connections between inter-American identities across diverse, revolutionary, creolistic worlds in Louisiana and the Gulf South. Unlike other studies examining traces of the Haitian Revolution in The Grandissimes, which tend to focus on the parallels between fictional and historical figures in Cable’s southern romance, this article dissects the subtle allusions to the revolution and the attendant diaspora found in the plantation infrastructures and the urban landscape of Cable’s Louisiana. In so doing, it demonstrates how Saint-Domingan migrants affirmed and reinvigorated the cultural landscape of the ‘Creole’ South and ‘circumvented’ the ideological spread of ‘Americanness’ at the time of the Louisiana Purchase, and during successive moments thereafter.     

‘A Very Hell of Horrors’? The Haitian Revolution and the Early Transatlantic Haitian Gothic

This article explores the Gothicisation of the Haitian Revolution in the transatlantic discourse during the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. As it argues, the Gothic mode has to be understood as a reaction to the profound challenges that the Haitian Revolution posed to a transatlantic world built on the slave economy. Pro-slavery and pro-colonialist authors demonised this successful slave revolution and one of the first anti-colonial revolutions in modern history by resorting frequently to the ‘hegemonic Haitian Gothic'. By contrast, early Haitian leaders and some Black Atlantic radicals appropriated this mode, turning it into the ideologically contrary ‘radical Haitian Gothic'.     

Florence Hall's ‘Memoirs’: Finding African Women in the Transatlantic Slave Trade

This essay presents the previously unpublished ‘Memoirs’ of Florence Hall, an African-born woman enslaved in early nineteenth-century Jamaica. The brief text describes Hall's childhood in Igboland (now southeastern Nigeria), her enslavement and journey to the Atlantic coast, her experience of the Middle Passage, and her arrival in Jamaica. There, the narrative abruptly cuts off. Evidently, the pages containing the rest of her story were lost. The text was likely written in the early nineteenth century, mediated by planter Robert Johnston, in whose papers the surviving text was found. As one of the only slave trade narratives from an African woman anywhere in the Americas, Hall's ‘Memoirs’ offer a rare opportunity to consider the transatlantic slave trade at its peak from the viewpoint of a female captive.     

Student Rights in an Age of Austerity? ‘Security’, Freedom of Expression and the Neoliberal University

In this profile, we examine a worrying trend taking place in institutions of higher education around the world: a notable increase in their managerial corporatization and neoliberalization, combined with greater repression of freedom of expression on campuses under the aegis of ‘securitization’. We focus attention specifically on how these twinned trends have impacted student activism in a post-2008 austerity-driven economic environment. Drawing on examples from Canada and elsewhere, we highlight attempts to depoliticize and institutionalize student engagement, as well as evidence of students working to break free of myriad constraints to foment change in their respective communities.     

‘A Full Knowledge of the Subject of Slavery’: The Amistad,Expert Testimony,and the Origins of Atlantic Studies

This article explores the role of testimony, expertise, and the academy in the production of knowledge about slavery in the context of the trials of the Africans aboard the slave ship La Amistad, 1839–1841. Testimony provided by enlisted self-professed experts formed the intellectual architecture to the legal argument as it advanced to the Supreme Court. When considered separately from the trials, and distinctly as a question of the production of knowledge, the role of expert testimony provides crucial insight into the function of the university in antebellum anti-slavery thought and action, the marginalization of the lived African slave experience, and the emergence of Atlantic studies in the contemporary present. Examining the relationship between the university and the marshalling of expertise – broadly understood as linguistic, political and cultural knowledge of slavery and the slave trade – suggests that the early use of expert testimony had an important albeit neglected role in the birth of Atlantic studies.     

Troubling the ‘Happy Family’: US Liberalism and Narratives of Transnational Adoption and Immigration from China

This essay connects adoption and immigration from China by considering the relationship between the adoptee and the Chinese nanny hired to care for her. I examine news media alongside Wendy Lee’s 2008 novel, Happy Family, which portrays the adoptive family through the perspective of a Fujianese immigrant domestic worker. Transnational adoption from China emerged in the early 1990s as undocumented immigration from the Fujian province rose, representing a major shift in Chinese immigration. These practices have been apprehended divergently in mainstream discourses. This essay approaches the family as a site of neoliberal privatization that frames adoption in terms of inclusion into US national ideologies of race, gender, and class, while undocumented immigration from China has been framed through exclusion. I argue that the nanny destabilizes the construction of the family as a space of depoliticized inclusion through her labor, revealing the neoliberal inequalities that shape both adoption and immigration.     

Margaret Morgan's Story: A Threshold between Slavery and Freedom, 1820–1842

This article goes beyond previous interpretations of the Prigg v. Pennsylvania opinion by focusing on the historical circumstances and lived experiences of Margaret Morgan and her family and other African Americans who lived along the Mason–Dixon line. By examining the ambiguity of slavery and freedom as revealed in Margaret Morgan's status in Maryland and in Pennsylvania, as well as looking closely at the development of case law in both states, this article also provides a thorough understanding of the issues in the Prigg case.     

Leaving the ‘perfect DREAMer’ behind? Narratives and mobilization in immigration reform

This paper focuses on the consequences of the narrative used to support immigration reform by some immigrant activists, and especially how this narrative may negatively impact potential allies. Policies and policy proposals such as the Development, Relief and Education for Alien Minors (DREAM) Act, and Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals have been consistently championed using a specific narrative of undocumented youths which presents them as well-assimilated, driven, and US-educated. The paper is drawn from 60 in-depth interviews conducted with undocumented youths in 2013 in New York City and northern New Jersey. The paper builds on the literature relative to narratives in social movements, framing and policy-making. Findings indicate that recent campaigns continue to make extensive use of this narrative, even though it creates a divide within the undocumented community. This unintended consequence has recently led some activists to step away from the ‘perfect DREAMer’.