The Constitution and Slavery: A Special Relationship

In their efforts to understand how antebellum American abolitionists interpreted the relationship between slavery and the United States Constitution, scholars have underestimated abolitionists' concern with the question ‘Is the Constitution a pro-slavery document?’ Drawing on abolitionist newspapers, periodicals and correspondence, this article shows that the anti-slavery constitutional theories of the 1830s did not presume slavery to be unconstitutional, nor did they assume that the Constitution was pro-slavery, and therefore irrelevant to the abolitionist cause. These constitutional interpretive subtleties laid the foundations for the more prominent and radical theories that came in the following decade from the pens of Wendell Phillips and Lysander Spooner.     

The New Slave Narrative and the Illegibility of Modern Slavery

This paper argues that the first-person narratives of human trafficking that have been published since 1991 should be considered as the reemergence of the slave narrative. The paper outlines the contours of the slave narrative's revival, suggesting that the genre found fertile ground in the 1990s and 2000s through a confluence of diverse cultural forces – reinvigorated abolitionist advocacy, heightened public fluency in the discourses of slavery and rights, an expanded media terrain that encourages first-person testimony and post-9/11 cultural anxieties. This environment promoted the development of survivor testimony that would act as ‘flesh and blood' examples of the largely hidden and illegible human rights violation of modern slavery. Slave narrators face a crisis of legibility resulting from public scepticism regarding modern slavery, but what emerges from the public requirements for evidence is a generic tendency against the voyeuristic demands for the bodily detail and towards narrative strategies of displacement that direct attention towards external authorities and experiences. These strategies allow survivors to maintain control over their exposure in their life narratives, and thereby revise and interrogate the spectacular expectations promoted by many human rights projects.     

Review Essay:Analyzing Slavery and the Slave Narrative

Many Thousands Gone: The First Two Centuries of Slavery in North America, by Ira Berlin. Remembering Slavery: African Americans Talk About Their Personal Experiences of Slavery and Emancipation, edited by Ira Berlin, Marc Favreau, and Steven F. Miller.     

The Political Implications Of Digital Innovations: Trade-offs of democracy and liberty in the developed world

This paper addresses three issues: the potential trade-offs of democracy and liberty that the Internet may produce, the connection between real life and cyberspace, and the consequences for the conceptual apparatus of political science. It is argued that the Internet and real worlds are entwined, and thus classic political trade-offs remain pertinent. Important normative issues are addressed. It is established that the Internet is a nearly-neutral medium, so it is important how its development and effects are controlled. It is argued that a privately-controlled Internet would have negative implications for citizenship, political democracy and liberty.However, it is shown that existing Internet politics is significantly democratic, and if the 'net was used within a system similar to existing arrangements, i.e. with checks and balances, then one could optimistically foresee enhanced democracy. In this relatively unexplored but rapidly changing area of political life, this paper serves as a simple warning - public good, private bad - and justifies this in terms of the potential trade-offs of political citizenship versus market consumerism.     

Slavery in a Texas Seaport: The Peculiar Institution in Galveston

Historians of urban slavery, free black people and the Atlantic maritime world have demonstrated that the urban milieu, maritime commerce and proximity to the sea provided free and enslaved African Americans in seaport cities with opportunities that challenged the premises and practices of bondage. Yet the relatively young and small seaport of Galveston, Texas, has received little attention from scholars. Growing in the two decades before the American Civil War from a rough village to one of the most important cotton ports on the Gulf of Mexico, Galveston maintained strict slave codes modelled on those adopted by other Southern states in response to slave rebellions and the rise of militant abolitionism in the 1830s. Nevertheless, black Galvestonians, like black seaport residents elsewhere, found greater possibilities for resisting or fleeing slavery than were available to African Americans in the interior.