Slavery in black and white: the racialisation of (male) slavery in Frederick Douglass’s Narrative and/vs. Toni Morrison’s A Mercy

This article revisits Frederick Douglass’s 1845 slave narrative as illustrative of the ‘birth’ of whiteness as ideology and, in particular, of the subordination of class to race interests in antebellum America. To do so, it compares Douglass’s text to Toni Morrison’s A Mercy (2008), which traces the origins of the slave trade back to the seventeenth century, when American slavery was not fully ‘racialised’ yet. While Morrison focuses on the earliest stage of the increasing (class) animosity among different types of servants and slaves, black and white, Douglass’s nineteenth-century Narrative already reveals the explicitly racialised association of human bondage with non-whiteness. I argue that Morrison’s novel may thus be interpreted as a ‘prequel’ to Douglass, whose Narrative illustrates the increasing racialisation of slavery throughout the nineteenth century, but also elaborates on its class and gender biases. In this sense, the essay concludes that Douglass shows how the assertion by white workers, especially males, of their racial and gender supremacy over both black men and women entailed, paradoxically enough, their class subjugation, which, if not in form, ended up transforming them into virtual ‘slaves’.     

Taking center stage: Early modern women’s tragedies on the contemporary stage

Abstract

From wife murder to cloak-and-dagger plays, female bodies, minds, and financial status are, for the most part, disempowered and abused by male protagonists with societal compliance. Since the 2000s, coinciding with the approval of the Ley Integral contra la Violencia de Género (2004), a wave of stage adaptations emerged in Spain that questioned the marginalization of women characters in the comedia. I claim that this trend in performance has become a sociocultural phenomenon that uses the symbolic capital of the comedia to raise awareness of women’s misrepresentation and gender violence and inequality.     

Peopling the Recent Past in the Serra de L’Altmirant: Shepherds and Farmers at the Margins

The region of the Serra de l’Altmirant in southeastern Spain, through its upland location and its rocky and scrub landscape, is strongly perceived as marginal–this mainly in contrast with the nearby fertile coastal plains between Valencia and Denia, busy with orange and vine production especially. A progressive colonization of the lower part of the Serra by weekend homes is starting to counter this image of marginality, but at the same time such constructions threaten the residual archaeology of a different type of human upland exploitation, namely pastoralism and hunting. Abandoned terraces, cisterns, store buildings and larger corrals are evident even on the exposed plateau and testify to a period in which the Serra was active and integral to farmers and shepherds from the villages of the adjoining valleys and plains. This paper discusses the nature of this activity, as recorded through archaeological and ethnographic investigation, and considers also the materials and outlook of Manolo, the last shepherd-in-residence on the Serra.     

Urbanization in Iron Age Europe: Trajectories,Patterns, and Social Dynamics

The development of the first urban centers is one of the most fundamental phenomena in the history of temperate Europe. New research demonstrates that the earliest cities developed north of the Alps between the sixth and fifth centuries BC as a consequence of processes of demographic growth, hierarchization, and centralization that have their roots in the immediately preceding period. However, this was an ephemeral urban phenomenon, which was followed by a period of crisis characterized by the abandonment of major centers and the return to more decentralized settlement patterns. A new trend toward urbanization occurred in the third and second centuries BC with the appearance of supra-local sanctuaries, open agglomerations, and finally the fortified oppida. Late Iron Age settlement patterns and urban trajectories were much more complex than traditionally thought and included manifold interrelations between open and fortified sites. Political and religious aspects played a key role in the development of central places, and in many cases the oppida were established on locations that already had a sacred character as places for rituals and assemblies. The Roman conquest largely brought to an end Iron Age urbanization processes, but with heterogeneous results of both abandonment and disruption and also continuity and integration.