An Effigy for the Enslaved: Jonkonnu in Jamaica and Belisario's Sketches of Character

In 1838, less than one year before the enslaved of Jamaica were fully emancipated, Isaac Mendes Belisario completed his Sketches of Character, a set of lithographs that today constitutes one of the first visual representations of the Jamaican Jonkonnu performance from the pre-emancipation period. This essay considers the links between Jonkonnu and similar performances from the African continent, asking what Jonkonnu meant to the largest group of African-born slaves at the time Belisario finished his Sketches of Character. Ultimately, Jonkonnu is best understood as a mortuary ritual that both mourns the moment of enslavement and provides for the possibility of social resurrection within a new social order.     

Freedom at the fringes? Slave flight and empire-building in the early modern Spanish borderlands of Essequibo–Venezuela and Louisiana–Texas

In spaces of contested sovereignty, self-emancipated slaves exploited imperial rivalries to attain freedom, based on the Spanish religious sanctuary. However, the status of foreign escaped slaves always remained subject to issues of empire-building. This article focuses on fugitive slaves from the Dutch colony of Essequibo and territorial Louisiana looking for freedom at the southern and northern borderlands of the Spanish empire, respectively, in Venezuela and Texas. In the former, increased Spanish control over the borderland created more opportunities for ‘runaways’. In the latter, improvisation led to erratic policies, related to pressure from US planters.     

A New Look at the African Slave Trade in Puerto Rico Through the Use of Parish Registers: 1660–1815

Our knowledge of the volume of slave traffic as well as the geographic origin and ethnicity of slaves introduced into peripheral areas of the Americas, such as the former Spanish colony of Puerto Rico, is limited. Information contained in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century parish baptismal, marriage, and death registers enables us to locate and identify Africans in a number of island communities, including San Juan. Drawing upon data culled from parish registers this study seeks to broaden our understanding of the slave trade to Puerto Rico in the years 1672 to 1810. Few slaves were brought in either from Africa or from elsewhere in the Americas to Puerto Rico, and the supply of these was erratic and limited. Although they were small in number, there was considerable diversity in the geographic origins and ethnicity of African arrivals, with individuals from West and West Central Africa predominating. For the most part, these shared a relatively homogenous culture and a greater similarity insofar as the language(s) they spoke. Such commonalities facilitated integration and promoted social cohesion among the newly arrived Africans as well as those already present in the host population. It also facilitated their integration into what was emerging as a unified Afro-Puerto Rican slave community.     

Laura Smalligan's Jonkonnu,a Jamaican Slave Dance: Contesting the African in African-American

Using insights from her field of West African art and ethnography, Laura Smalligan (in an earlier journal article concerning the Jamaican slave dance, Jonkonnu) opens up and renews challenging perspectives regarding the indispensable African content of New World slavery. Smalligan argues that the Connu slave pageant stemmed from a particular time, place and outlook (of slaves from the Bight of Biafra, modern Nigeria). Discussion here pivots on two comparisons: of dance, often accompanied by trance states (from West Africa to Anglophone plantation societies in the Caribbean and mainland North America); and, of the way contemporary scholars now – often smitten in this generation by the postmodern ‘literary turn’ – view, prematurely, slave ethnicity as heuristically vague and unmanageable, as opposed to local slave society people, black and white, then who in their ordinary talk and activities depicted certain slaves ethnically (and linguistically). These broad comparisons should deepen and advance understandings to that dimension of the African diaspora to the Americas known (fashionably) as ‘ethnogenesis’, that is, the process of becoming African-American.     

An Angry God in the Hands of Sinners: Enslaved Africans and the Uses of Protestant Christianity in Pre-Revolutionary Boston

This article contends that slaves were able to successfully appropriate Christian institutions to decode the Euro-American world they arrived in and resist the dehumanization associated with African slavery in the Americas. Looking beyond religiosity, eschewing the teleological obsession with freedom that obfuscates our understanding of slavery, and using Boston—an Atlantic port city full of churches and slaves—as a case study, we are able to see how enslaved Africans were able to use what they learned in Boston's churches, including the ability to read and write and a powerful Christian vocabulary, in order to meet the master class and other whites on their own terms and challenge the boundaries of slavery.     

Immigrants and refugees: two sides of the same problem. A linguistic analysis through newspapers and social network in Spain 2006 and 2015

ABSTRACT

The phenomenon of immigration has been studied from diverse perspectives. It is important to note that immigration is common during times of crisis. The reason for the avalanche of immigrants to the Canary Islands (Spain) is because it is the gateway to Europe, and therefore, immigrants wanted to enter from this point. This research is based on the need to linguistically determine the treatment of the phenomenon of immigration in the Spanish press. This analysis is relevant given the arrival of thousands of foreign citizens to the coast of the Canary Islands, first in 2006 and almost a decade later, in 2015 to the south of Europe in another great population movement. This research attempts to study four Spanish newspapers, two from the Canary Islands (El Día and Canarias 7) and two Spanish mainland national newspapers (El País and ABC), the online version of the newspapers and their websites were analyzed beside one of the most important social networks, Twitter. The role of incorporating social networks to immigration discourse is also analyzed. To support the data analysis of this research, the Iramuteq software was used.     

José Ortega y Gasset (1934), Ibn Khaldūn Reveals the Secret to Us (thoughts on Africa Minor) translated from Spanish by Cynthia Scheopner

José Ortega y Gasset (1883–1955) was puzzled how Melilla remained a Spanish enclave on the North African coast. By 1927, Spain had solidified its hold on Northern Morocco and several books on the history and culture of “Africa minor” had been published; in one Ortega encountered Ibn Khaldūn. Ortega read the Prolegomena to History in the French translation by William MacGuckin de Slane. He found a key to understanding Spain that he explored in this essay, first published in El Espectador journal of Madrid in 1934. It introduced Ibn Khaldun to European audiences as the first philosopher of history three decades before an English translation of his work. Ortega, then, knew of Ibn Khaldun's theory of generations at the time he was developing his own. Ortega noted page numbers in parentheses in the text where he quoted from De Slane. The end notes are from the text as well, documenting Ortega's secondary sources for his impressions of Ibn Khaldūn, Islam, and North African culture.     

Stolen looks,people unbound: picturing contraband people during the civil war

This article evaluates the images of contraband slaves published in Harper’s Weekly and Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper during the Civil War. As these publications competed for business, they established and reiterated numerous claims regarding the authenticity of their images and news reports. Illustrators initially depicted African Americans using repurposed racial stereotypes that had existed for generations. Blackface minstrelsy, scientific racism, and racialized printed materials depicting African Americans are used as context to understand the images in the two illustrated newspapers. The visual representation of African Americans dramatically changed as emancipation unfolded and black Union military service expanded.     

The Education of Booker T. Washington: American Democracy and the Idea of Race Relations

Over the past decades, the impact of Atlantic ideas and ideologies in the Americas has become a constant subject of discussion. The ways in which the French and Haitian revolutions determined the actions of African slaves in the Americas have only been matched by the relevance given by scholars to the impact of British Abolitionist policies from 1807 onwards. West African wars associated with the transplantation of Islam were just as important. Until today, the impact and the very existence of Islam among West African slaves taken to Cuba have been all but overlooked. In this article, I attempt to establish connections between Islam in West Africa and Islamized West African slaves in Cuba. My key argument is that in one way or another, Islamized Africans were present in Cuba from a very early period and that they continued to arrive in the following centuries. There are certainly enough elements to offer a first, preliminary sketch of the presence and impact of Islamized West Africans in Cuba.     

Dominican‐American Etbnic/Racial Identities and United States Social Categories

The majority of Dominicans have sub‐Saharan African ancestry, ¹ 1 In the 1980 Dominican census, 16 percent of the population were classified as blanco (‘white’), 73 percent were classified as indio (‘indian‐colored’), a term used to refer to the phenotype of individuals who match stereotypes of combined African and European ancestry and 11 percent were classified as negro [‘black’] (Haggerty, 1991). These categories are social constructions, rather than objective reflections of phenotypes. The positive social connotations of “whiteness,” for example, lead many Caribbean Hispanics to identify themselves as white for the public record regardless of their precise phenotype (Dominguez, 1978:9). Judgments of color in the Dominican Republic also depend in part upon social attributes of an individual, as they do elsewhere in Latin America. Money, education and power, for example, “whiten” an individual, so that the color attributed to a higher class individual is often lighter than the color that would be attributed to an individual of the same phenotype of a lower class (Rout, 1976:287).
which would make them “black” by historical United States ‘one‐drop’ rules. Second generation Dominican high school students in Providence, Rhode Island do not identity their race in terms of black or white, but rather in terms of ethnolinguistic identity, as Dominican/Spanish/Hispanic. The distinctiveness of Dominican‐American understandings of race is highlighted by comparing them with those of non‐Hispanic, African descent second generation immigrants and with historical Dominican notions of social identity. Dominican second generation resistance to phenotype‐racialization as black or white makes visible ethnic/racial formation processes that are often veiled, particularly in the construction of the category African‐American. This resistance to black/white racialization suggests the transformative effects that post‐1965 immigrants and their descendants are having on United States ethnic/racial categories.     

Slavery and redemption in the Catholic missions of the Upper Congo, 1878–1909

The French Catholic Société des missionnaires d’Alger, also known as the White Fathers, sought to abolish slavery in the Upper Congo by creating mission outposts of liberated slaves. The missionaries purchased (‘redeemed’) young African slaves, captives, and dependents, and placed them in mission orphanages. The White Fathers claimed to have liberated these redeemed orphans, even while they ensured, often through force, that they remained alienated from their natal communities and subjugated dependents. In much the same fashion as domestic and Islamic slavery in the immediate environs, the slow integration of these orphans drove the expansion of Catholic mission communities. Through studying Catholic mission slave redemptions at the end of the nineteenth century, this article explores the interactions and development of pre-colonial African, Zanzibar Islamic, and European Christian ideas of slavery and freedom.     

Brazilian slavery: A survey from the cape of recent literature in English

This article surveys some of the rich historical writing on slavery in Brazil which has appeared in English over the past twenty years. This work has made important modifications to the notion that Brazilian slavery was part of a benign seigneurial society, markedly different from that of other New World colonies. By selecting five themes ‐ the transition from indigenous Indian to imported African slavery; slavery and rural production; slaves on the mines and in the towns; treatment of slaves; and the causes of emancipation ‐ the article draws attention to features of comparative interest to slavery elsewhere and particularly to that at the Cape.     

‘He outfitted his family in notable decency’: Slavery,Honour and Dress in Eighteenth-Century Lima,Peru

For elite Spaniards in eighteenth-century Lima, elegant clothing provided a language for expressing their wealth, status and honour. They frequently made their way around town in the company of elegantly dressed slave attendants, whose presence underscored their owners' privilege. Yet many slaves found opportunities to function as more than mere canvasses for the expression of their owners' identities. Indeed, for a surprising number of slaves, elegant clothing was a key tool with which they negotiated their status and laid claim to their own definitions of honour. By mapping the study of material culture onto the study of slavery, this paper brings into relief the social meanings that clothing contained for slaves, and highlights the possibilities that urban life contained for the creation of social identities that fell outside the social and colour lines drawn by the colonial state.¹     

A Texas Peasantry? Black Smallholders in the Texas Sugar Bowl, 1865–1890

This article examines a small community of former slaves in Texas's leading sugar-producing county and argues that local conditions fostered the growth of a Caribbean-style ‘reconstituted peasantry’. Using local sources to compile a database of 79 African American landowners, it traces the postwar decline of the sugar plantations, the process of black land acquisition and the smallholders' strategies for survival. The smallholders' position, however, was precarious, and most lost their lands at the close of the nineteenth century. The piece concludes by suggesting that more intensive local research into former-slave communities may force a reconsideration of the notion that all American slaves became landless wage labourers.     

An Equity Against the Law: Slave Rights and Creole Jurisprudence in Spanish America

There exists a long-standing historiographical mystery concerning the legal origins of the practice of Spanish American slaves suing their masters for freedom in royal courts. This essay highlights the importance of working judges' judicial philosophy in the formulation of this customary ‘right’. A close reading of two rare eighteenth-century judicial opinions from Lima, Peru, exposes the rationale of the judges, particularly the Creole judges, who admitted slave cases. High court minister Pedro José Bravo de Lagunas y Castilla considered two legal issues that made slavery distinctive in the region: the right to self-purchase and grants of conditional liberty. In a 1746 letter, the judge rendered a relatively liberal opinion on slaves' legal rights by reading Creoles' own political ‘liberty’ into freedom suits. But as Lima's slaves increasingly entered the secular court system, his judicial philosophy would contract.     

Toussaint L’Ouver-Who? An Anthropological Approach to Infusing the African Diaspora into Caribbean History

Abstract

World history curriculum continues to be plagued by Eurocentric narratives and perspectives eliminating local and community agency in Caribbean history. Textbooks and curriculum standards exclude much of Caribbean history and marginalize the influence and contributions of the African Diaspora. Oftentimes, Caribbean achievements are attributed to European influence and not the local community as seen with the Haitian Revolution and diffusion of the European Enlightenment. African culture and syncretic Haitian religion however, heavily contributed to the inspiration of revolution by African slaves in Haiti. This article explores ways educators can infuse the African Diaspora into Caribbean history through anthropology. Using an ethnographic lens to examine the Haitian Revolution, Haitian Voudou, and Toussaint L’Ouverture presents a new way educators can teach about this pivotal event and society in World History.     

Spanish version of the Cultural Intelligence Scale (CQS) / Versión española de la Escala de Inteligencia Cultural (EIC)

Abstract

In recent years, the concept of cultural intelligence has received increasing attention by researchers and professionals because of its theoretical and practical importance. To understand why some individuals adapt more effectively than others to culturally different social contexts has become a goal with implications for education, recruitment and the prevention of social conflict. The goal of this study was to adapt the Cultural Intelligence Scale (CQS) to Spanish. To do so, two studies were carried out. In the first, the psychometric properties generated by the CQS on a Spanish sample (N = 413) were analysed. In the second study, a confirmatory replication of the factor structure and reliability of the CQS was performed with a different Spanish sample (N = 526) from the first study. The results indicated that the Spanish version of the Cultural Intelligence Scale can be considered a useful and appropriate tool to be used with psychometric guarantees in the Spanish-speaking population.     

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.     

Castle Slaves of the Eighteenth-Century Gold Coast (Ghana)

This article examines the development of the institution known as ‘castle slavery’ on the Gold Coast (West Africa) in the era of the transatlantic slave trade. It places the lived experiences of castle slaves within a comparative Atlantic World context and argues that castle slavery bore significant resemblances to forms of creole elite slavery in the Americas. It also explores the particularly complex roles of female castle slaves in the daily life and operation of European-trading posts in Gold Coast towns.     

Community Revitalization in Post-Katrina New Orleans: A Critical Analysis of Social Capital in an African American Neighborhood

ABSTRACT

This research explored the role of social capital, particularly civic engagement and social trust, in community revitalization efforts in a primarily African American post-Katrina neighborhood (n?=?153). Findings reveal high levels of participation in neighborhood and political activities but low levels of social trust. Eighty-four percent of this primarily African American sample reported that they do not trust people of other races as compared to 23 to 32% of African American respondents in the national study. Drawing from critical theoretical perspectives, we offer a critique of the limits of social capital theory as well as a discussion of the importance of building social and racial trust as central components of community development practice. Implications include emphasizing organizational capacity-building activities, community organizing training, and racial reconciliation efforts in post-disaster environments.