New Studies in the History of American Slavery

by Baptist, Edward E.; Camp, Stephanie M. H.

• ISBN13: 9780820326948
• ISBN10: 0820326941
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-02-06
• Publisher: Univ of Georgia Pr

Summary

These essays, by some of the most prominent young historians writing about slavery, fill gaps in our understanding of such subjects as enslaved women, the Atlantic and internal slave trades, the relationships between Indians and enslaved people, and enslavement in Latin America. Inventive and stimulating, the essays model the blending of methods and styles that characterizes the new cultural history of slavery's social, political, and economic systems.Several common themes emerge from the volume, among them the correlation between race and identity; the meanings contained in family and community relationships, gender, and life's commonplaces; and the literary and legal representations that legitimated and codified enslavement and difference. Such themes signal methodological and pedagogical shifts in the field away from master/slave or white/black race relations models toward perspectives that give us deeper access to the mental universe of slavery.Topics of the essays range widely, including European ideas about the reproductive capacities of African women and the process of making race in the Atlantic world, the contradictions of the assimilation of enslaved African American runaways into Creek communities, the consequences and meanings of death to Jamaican slaves and slave owners, and the tensions between midwifery as a black cultural and spiritual institution and slave midwives as health workers in a plantation economy.Opening our eyes to the personal, the contentious, and even the intimate, these essays call for a history in which both enslaved and enslavers acted in a vast human drama of bondage and freedom, salvation and damnation, wealth and exploitation.

Author Biography

Edward E. Baptist is an assistant professor of history at Cornell University and the author of Creating an Old South. Stephanie M. H. Camp, associate professor of history at the University of Washington, is the author of Closer to Freedom.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments	vii
Introduction: A History of the History of Slavery in the Americas	1	(20)
Stephanie M. H. Camp
Edward E. Baptist
I. GENDER AND SLAVERY
``Some Could Suckle over Their Shoulder'': Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology	21	(44)
Jennifer L. Morgan
Consciousness and Calling: African American Midwives at Work in the Antebellum South	65	(22)
Sharla M. Fett
The Pleasures of Resistance: Enslaved Women and Body Politics in the Plantation South, 1830--1861	87	(40)
Stephanie M. H. Camp
II. RACE, IDENTITY, AND COMMUNITY
Genealogies to a Past: Africa, Ethnicity, and Marriage in Seventeenth-Century Mexico	127	(21)
Herman L. Bennett
Kinship and Freedom: Fugitive Slave Women's Incorporation into Creek Society	148	(18)
Barbara Krauthamer
My People, My People: The Dynamics of Community in Southern Slavery	166	(13)
Dylan C. Penningroth
III. THE POLITICS OF CULTURE IN SLAVERY
Spiritual Terror and Sacred Authority: The Power of the Supernatural in Jamaican Slave Society	179	(32)
Vincent Brown
Correspondences in Black and White: Sentiment and the Slave Market Revolution	211	(32)
Phillip Troutman
``Stol' and Fetched Here'': Enslaved Migration, Ex-slave Narratives, and Vernacular History	243	(32)
Edward E. Baptist
British Slavery and British Politics: A Perspective and a Prospectus	275	(20)
Christopher L. Brown
Recommended Readings	295	(4)
Contributors	299	(2)
Index	301