THE ENDURING POWER OF RACISM: A RECONSIDERATION OF WINTHROP JORDAN'S WHITE OVER BLACK

As a history of the origins and development of American racism, White over Black received great acclaim upon its publication in 1968. Deeply researched and covering some 650 pages, it eschewed professional jargon and offered a deft prose style and close attention to matters of sexuality in revealing the origins and lasting influence of racist attitudes arising from Englishmen's impressions of blacks before they became, preeminently, slaves in North America. Jordan's careful weighing of evidence and causation made readers appreciate what he believed his evidence repeatedly demonstrated about white Americans’ attitudes toward African‐Americans: “the power of irrationality in men.” Despite the initial acclaim and scholarly achievement, White over Black soon lost pace with the curve of politics and academic fashion. By the mid‐1970s, the post‐World War II liberal consensus on racial issues had disintegrated, and professional historians were writing principally for other professional historians. Within a decade after its publication, White over Black was relegated to the wasteland of the “suggested supplemental reading list.” However, the book's grasp of the fundamental historical issues requiring explanation has received recent affirmation from influential scholarly and political quarters. A dispassionate review of the literature leading up to and following White over Black's publication indicates that Jordan's emphasis on the causal contribution of racist attitudes to the rise of African slavery in British North America was on target. Moreover, Jordan's appreciation that academic historians should write for nonprofessionals is now widely held inside the academy. The historical accuracy and cogency of expression of Jordan's perspective on race and slavery make White over Black worth reexamining.     

Inscribing nature: Archaeological metaphors and the formation of new sciences

Abstract

Ghanaian authorities restored Cape Coast Castle and Elmina Castle as memorials to the transatlantic slave trade in order to draw African Americans to Ghana. While this was a positive development for a travel industry that rarely caters to diaspora African needs, the Ghanaian initiative has evoked strong criticisms from concerned African Americans who feel that the restoration has erased the monuments' associated images of slavery and has removed the desired experiential effect. I focus on the complex interplay of these concerns, African Americans' previous attempts to preserve some of these monuments and the history of structural changes to the monuments. These complex issues require several layers of analysis. I situate my discussion within the debate of whether there is any such thing as original monuments and whether there is a necessary correlation between monuments per se and the experience of historical reality. For African Americans, such a strong relationship can be established. The preservation of these monuments, of global significance, calls for an international dialogue based on respect, tolerance and sensitivity.     

试论美国奴隶制时期的黑人家庭

生活在美国奴隶制下的黑人奴隶被看作主人的财产,其婚姻和家庭没有法律保障,但黑人在特殊的生存环境中并未放弃这种最基本的权利,他们建立了属于自己的家庭生活并形成了奴隶制度下特有的家庭观念。黑人在家庭中找到一种群体归宿感和个体身份,家庭生活是黑人奴隶在奴役和剥削下得以生存的重要策略。     

The Passenger Cases Reconsidered in Transatlantic Commerce Clause History

The Supreme Court's 5–4 decision in the Passenger Cases (1849) overturned two Northern states' taxes on poor foreign immigrants. The Court's eight opinions disputed whether destitute transatlantic immigrants arriving in U.S. ports were legally and constitutionally “persons” like fugitive slaves fleeing the South, free African Americans residing in the U.S.‐Canadian borderlands, and black seamen working on ships entering Southern ports. The eight opinions issued in the case, as Charles Warren noted, raised fundamental constitutional questions concerning whether U.S. congressional or state authority was exclusive or concurrent over persons moving in interstate and international business, reflecting wider sectional struggles fostering the Civil War. ¹ More recently, Mary Bilder and others examined connections among indentured contract labor, race‐based American slavery, and the Court's antebellum Commerce Clause decisions to establish that foreign immigrants were commercial objects subject to regulation through the Constitution's Commerce Clause. ² Southerners and Northern pro‐slavery supporters argued, however, that fugitive slaves and free blacks crossing interstate and international borders were “persons” who could be regulated or altogether excluded under state police powers. ³     

Rethinking “Resistant Accommodation”: Toward an Archaeology of African-American Lives in Southern New England, 1638–1800

Scholarship concerning the lives of enslaved African Americans in southern New England has shifted rapidly from outdated models of acculturation to conflict-driven models of domination and resistance. With the assumption of conflict as the outcome of all power relations, both economic production and historical contextuality have been overlooked, with slavery systems in New England simply equated with other regions of the Atlantic world, rather than compared and contrasted. This essay reconsiders contests over power in seventeenth- and eighteenth-century New England. Drawing on the work of Greene (1966), Piersen (1988), and others, I argue that the system of slavery in the region may represent an anomalous case in terms of the means of control or the means of resistance. By examining demographic patterns, economic production, and agricultural landscapes in Rhode Island's East Bay, I argue that there may be more to be learned from William D. Piersen's (1988, p. 143) concept of resistant accommodation as a middle ground between the two extremes of the theoretical spectrum. The essay concludes with suggestions for further research on the archaeology of African-American lives in the region.     

Sailors and Slaves: The ‘Poor Enslaved Tar’ in Naval Reform and Nautical Melodrama

This article explores the rhetorical comparison of naval sailors' exploitation to that of African slaves in pre- and early-Victorian discourses on naval reform. It is structured around an analysis of J.T. Haines's nautical melodrama My Poll and My Partner Joe (first performed 1835), in which the hero, having been press-ganged by the navy, risks his life freeing enslaved Africans on the Middle Passage even though he considers himself a slave to his nation. This plot was both timely and provocative: first performed in the immediate aftermath of the illegalization of slavery in Britain's colonies, it dramatizes an analogy between slaves and sailors that was contested by campaigners for naval reform and their opponents. Ultimately, My Poll and My Partner Joe palliates radical commentary on sailors' rights, in its second and third acts, as the sailor patriotically celebrates his freedom in antithesis to African slavery. Rather than read its denouement simply as romantic escapism, I argue that it proposes resolutions to conflicts that had arisen in British understandings of slavery and freedom, and racial and national identity, as a result of the debate on naval reform. To researchers of imperial, humanitarian, and working-class cultures and identities of the nineteenth century, this article reveals the underlying importance of ‘race’ and slavery to debates on maritime labour. It further highlights the complex, dialectical character of pre- and early-Victorian representations of sailors – on the stage and beyond it.     

Lincoln,Race, and the Spirit of ’76

Abstract

This essay examines how Lincoln dealt with race, slavery, and emancipation in antebellum America. It argues that despite a few controversial statements and policies regarding black Americans, Lincoln sought to preserve the American union and its system of self-government by reclaiming the ideals of the Declaration of Independence. Unlike U.S. Senator Stephen A. Douglas, who exploited white bigotry in his promotion of local “popular sovereignty” as a solution to the slavery controversy, Lincoln highlighted the natural rights of blacks as a way to prevent the spread of slavery and thereby save what he would later call “the last best hope of earth.”     

“The Cause of This Blackness”: The Early American Republic and the Construction of Race

Abstract

Race is routinely defined as “socially constructed,” from which it follows that there was a time before its construction. What that time looked like, and how Africans were then viewed by white Americans, is difficult to perceive from a vantage point within the paradigm of race. This essay considers important but neglected cultural referents to argue that a binary distinction between black and white did not emerge on theoretical grounds until the 1780s, when Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia shrewdly redirected growing challenges to slavery into quasi-metaphysical reflections on the gulf between whites and blacks.     

From Body Reform to Reforming the Body Politic: Transcendentalism and the Militant Antislavery Career of Thomas Wentworth Higginson

Second‐generation Transcendentalist minister Thomas Wentworth Higginson played a leading role in the latter stages of the struggle against slavery. A principal member of the Boston Vigilance Committee, which resisted attempts to capture fugitive slaves, Higginson also provided support for John Brown’s assault at Harpers Ferry and served as colonel of the Union’s first regiment of African Americans during the Civil War. Building on recent scholarship that portrays Transcendentalists as sympathetic to the antislavery cause, this essay argues that Higginson’s militant approach to abolitionism drew directly on key components of Transcendentalism. It thereby offers a fresh interpretation of the emergence of antislavery violence in the 1850s, while underscoring a fundamental connection between the philosophy of Transcendentalism and radical abolitionism.     

Liberal Policy Debates and Their Consequences for African Americans

Marilyn E. Lashley and Melanie Njeri Jackson (Eds.), African Americans and the New Policy Consensus: Retreat of the Liberal State.     

British Romantic Poets and the African Plight

The enslavement of Africans did strike the young, hopeful and radical Romantic poets of nineteenth-century England as the most blatant example of human oppression and the clearest example of humans being deprived of liberty. Although their poetry refers to and draws on the imagery of African slavery, the major poetic figures of the Romantic Movement in England rarely spoke directly against the slave trade and colonial slavery. Thus the issue of slavery, the transatlantic trade, and Britain's role in it, though well established in the nineteenth-century historical context, remained a subject only partially explored by the English Romantic poets, who were, at the time, more preoccupied with British domestic policy and the enslavement of their own nation.     

Dancing for the King of Congo from Early Modern Central Africa to Slavery-Era Brazil

Breathtaking parades of black kings and their courts enlivened the streets of cities in Europe and the Americas between the fifteenth and the eighteenth centuries. Sumptuously dressed queens and kings and their resplendent attendants processed to the sound of music, lifted, temporarily, from the grim the life of enslavement or institutionalized inferiority many of them lived in the age of Atlantic slavery. Drawing from a recent analysis of a prominent ritual performance from the central African kingdom of Kongo called sangamento, this article offers a new interpretation of the black kings festivals, beyond their interpretation as carnivalesque pomp emulating and destabilizing European rule. On both shores of the Atlantic, the performances combined African and European regalia and pageantry to express and enact central African collective identity, political power, and social unity. Restaging performances and reshaping ideas honed in the Kongo, enslaved central Africans not only preserved the memory of their region of origins, but also crafted empowered responses to enslavement and the colonial system at large.     

Strontium isotopic reconstruction of the composition of an urban free black population from the 19th century United States

The Industrial Revolution in the United States had a tremendous impact on society, altering not only economics but also the distribution of it population. It was also during this period that increasing numbers of African Americans gained their freedom from slavery. Released from overt bondage, free African Americans sought the opportunities denied to them for over two centuries, initiating a large scale movement of people to the burgeoning urban centers of industry. The individuals interred in the Newburgh Colored Burial Ground (1830–1870) represent one small segment of this process. Strontium isotopic analyses are utilized in order to discuss the demographic composition of Newburgh’s free black population during this time period. In particular, we examine the relative contribution of migration and natural increase, and whether there are significant sex-specific differences in the formation of the population. The results suggest that Newburgh’s free black population was composed predominantly of individuals born in the immediate region. Additionally, there were a greater percentage of non-local males than females. While historical data suggests that females had greater job opportunities in the north relative to males, the growing industrial economy Newburgh may very well have fostered greater male mobility.     

Between friendship and justice: on Lincoln’s political thought

Reading Aristotle and applying his notion of philia, or political friendship, across 26 centuries sheds significant light into Abraham Lincoln’s career. It is precisely in Lincoln’s embodiment of the Aristotelian notion of friendship that we come to understand his unique greatness. Perhaps he alone of all Americans proved capable of such extraordinary feats as leading the Republican party to victory in 1860, holding the Union together through the secession crisis and four long years of bloody civil war, ending slavery without white backlash, and offering reconciliation with the incredible magnanimity expressed in the ringing phrases of the Second Inaugural address. The basis of Lincoln’s preternatural political genius proved to be his ability to comprehend all sides, a comprehension that can only come from a profound belief in the importance of friendship. Americans, Lincoln argued throughout a terrible war as he had his entire life, were not enemies but friends who shared a commitment to nature and nature’s law as expressed in the Declaration.     

Black-Atlantic counterfactualism: speculating about slavery and its aftermath

This paper critically examines the role of counterfactual thought and argument in a series of interconnected contexts that span what Paul Gilroy termed the ‘black Atlantic’ and what Ali Mazrui described as ‘Global Africa’. The paper aims to show that a more or less explicit use of conjecture and speculative reasoning has characterised attempts to represent and demand recognition for the horror, inhumanity and injustice of the trans-Atlantic slave trade and New World slavery, and their legacies. To do so, the paper examines a number of interrelated examples, including the campaign for reparations for slavery in the USA; African demands for reparations for slavery, colonialism and neo-colonialism that draw on ideas about the continent's ‘underdevelopment’; and speculative writing that imagines alternate historical geographies of slavery. The paper argues that their concerns with Atlantic slavery and its consequences evince a particular way of engaging with the past that might, at first sight, appear to be aligned with a broader temporal sensibility associated with notions of ghostly return, haunting and trauma. The paper argues, however, that such an assumption is mistaken and that the presence of counterfactualism here illustrates a rather different philosophy of history at work. By highlighting forms of making the past present that are speculative rather than spectral, the paper aims to open up new lines of geographical enquiry that will enhance understanding of Atlantic slavery and its aftermath.     

‘Taken captive by the mystery of the Great River’: towards an historical geography of British geography and Atlantic slavery

By examining the case of James MacQueen (1778–1870), this paper initiates a research agenda that contributes to what David N. Livingstone has argued remains the most pressing task for historians of geography: to write ‘the historical geography of geography’. Born in Scotland in 1778, MacQueen was one of the many ‘arm-chair’ geographers whose efforts at synthesising contemporary and historical sources were a significant feature of the encounter between Europe and the rest of the world. Indeed, although he never visited Africa, his speculations about the course and termination of the River Niger turned out to be broadly correct. What makes MacQueen a particularly significant figure was the original source of his theory: enslaved Africans in a Caribbean plantation-colony. In this light, a remark that MacQueen's imagination was ‘taken captive by the mystery of the Great River’ carries a dark double-meaning, because ‘captive’ knowledge was the very source of MacQueen's interest in African geography. Beginning with MacQueen's time in Grenada, the paper explores a series of personal relations, textual traces and West African ethno-histories to reveal how his geographical knowledge and expertise were bound up with Atlantic slavery. This shows not only how the colonial economy, centred on the Caribbean, underwrote the production of geographical knowledge about Africa, but also how British geographical discourse and practice might be probed for traces of Atlantic slavery and enslaved African lives. More generally, the case of James MacQueen illuminates a broader field of relationships between Atlantic slavery, West African exploration, and the development of modern British geography in the late eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries. Examining these relationships is key to writing a ‘historical geography of British geography and Atlantic slavery’ and contributes to postcolonial histories of the discipline by revealing the tangled relationships that bound geography and slavery, knowledge and subjugation, that which ‘captivates’ and those held ‘captive’.     

Enslaved African Women in Nineteenth-Century Iran: The Life of Fezzeh Khanom of Shiraz

Fezzeh Khanom (c. 1835–82), an African woman, was a slave of Sayyed ‘Ali-Mohammad of Shiraz, the Bab. Information about her life can be recovered from various pious Baha'i histories. She was honored, and even venerated by Babis, though she remained subordinate and invisible. The paper makes the encouraging discovery that a history of African slavery in Iran is possible, even at the level of individual biographies. Scholars estimate that between one and two million slaves were exported from Africa to the Indian Ocean trade in the nineteenth century, most to Iranian ports. Some two-thirds of African slaves brought to Iran were women intended as household servants and concubines. An examination of Fezzeh Khanom's life can begin to fill the gaps in our knowledge of enslaved women in Iran. The paper discusses African influences on Iranian culture, especially in wealthy households and in the royal court. The limited value of Western legal distinctions between slavery and freedom when applied to the Muslim world is noted.     

Paracordyline aureonemoralis (Lomandraceae): an Eocene monocotyledon from South Australia

A monocotyledonous leaf macrofossil taxon from Golden Grove in Adelaide, South Australia is recognised as being close to several extant Australasian species of Cordyline, especially those in the C. stricta (Sims) Endl. / C. fruticosa (L.) A. Chev. complex. The fossil is assigned to the form genus Paracordyline, known previously from the Oligocene Kerguélen Islands. However, as the Golden Grove taxon differs markedly from the Kerguélen species, it is considered to be a new species, P. aureonemoralis Conran & Christophel.