Dispossessing Massa: Fugitive Slaves and the Politics of Slavery After 1850

This article investigates how Norwegian immigrants expressed their sense of belonging during the antebellum period. By focusing on the concept of “belonging” rather than “adjustment,” the article attempts an interpretation sensitive to how antebellum immigrants themselves perceived the process of adaptation to American society. The Civil War is usually referred to as a sort of watershed in Norwegians' adjustment to American society, and consequently scholars have downplayed the extent to which antebellum Norwegian immigrants expressed belonging in the United States prior to the Civil War. Identifying three main categories of expressions of belonging available to antebellum Norwegian immigrants – namely land ownership, place attachment, and settler ideology – the article concludes that even if these immigrants did not readily identify themselves as Americans, they became firmly attached to their new home.     

Without Due Process: Albert E. Pillsbury and the Hoar Anti‐Lynching Bill

The United States has never passed a federal anti‐lynching bill. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries numerous petitions and protests against lynching called for federal intervention where states, particularly in the South, were failing to prosecute lynchers effectively. This essay looks at the most significant of these calls for anti‐lynching legislation, the anti‐lynching bill of 1901, drawn up by former Massachusetts Attorney General Albert E. Pillsbury. Sponsored by Senator George Frisbie Hoar (R, MA), the bill was the template for subsequent attempts to pass federal anti‐lynching legislation. This essay analyzes the bill, why it failed at the time and illustrates how it served as a template for future attempts to pass federal anti‐lynching legislation in the United States.     

Over two centuries: Black people in nineteenth-century Hawaiʻi

ABSTRACT

This article charts the history of Black people in nineteenth-century Hawai?i, an Indigenous and non-White society that prohibited slavery. Far from the Black Atlantic, African-descended people in the Pacific found acceptance and refuge. Since the late 1700s, Black mariners and notable figures – including former slaves from the US as well as Cape Verdeans – arrived in a non-slave society which was in the process of adopting race. Largely unrecognized, they worked in concert with Native Hawaiians – as spouses, educators, attorneys, and advisors to the monarchs – to influence and resist the development of American racial ideologies. Combining Hawaiian language sources, missionary journals, and ship logs with the scant existing historiography, this article accounts for Black people in the Hawaiian Islands during its tumultuous shift from an independent nation to a US Territory – a period and people neglected in twentieth-century scholarship on the Black Pacific.     

Boekbesprekings/Book reviews

Abstract

The departure point of this article is the postmodern critique of my book, The Dead Will Arise. The object of the article is not however to defend either the book itself or the 'constructionist’ school of historiography to which it apparently belongs. The first part of the article seeks to clarify the epistemological basis on which constructionist historians claim the right to engage with and interpret the past. In the process of doing so, it establishes a conceptual framework capable of defining relevance in the context of post-democratic South African historiography. It argues that historians have a duty to prioritise the ‘scars’ and ‘pitfalls’ of South African history failing which they become mere lapdogs, decorative but irrelevant. It is further argued that, although historians have the right to study whatever they choose, there is something intrinsically wrong with institutional mechanisms which produce nothing but lapdogs, and that university history departments need to take more of a lead.     

‘It is because of our Islam that we are there’: The Call of Islam in the United Democratic Front Era

Abstract

This article examines the South African Islamic anti-apartheid organisation, the Call of Islam, in order to understand how progressive South African ‘ulama navigated the contested territory of Islam through an interpretation of the Qur'an that demanded a Muslim alliance with the oppressed in the anti-apartheid struggle and a South African Islam. The emergence of the United Democratic Front (UDF) in 1983 in reaction to the apartheid government's Tricameral Parliament created a space in which South African Muslims could enter the national anti-apartheid struggle according to their religious rather than ethnic identity. To illustrate the historical development of the Call of Islam and its affiliation with the UDF, the article will first outline the formation of the UDF in the Western Cape, the geographical area with the largest concentration of Muslims in South Africa. The focus will then turn to the impact of the UDF on the Cape's Muslim community, particularly the divide that developed amongst its ‘ulama over the stance of Muslim participation in the anti-apartheid struggle. The following section will analyse the emergence of the Call and how the questions of its founders concerning the religious Other led to an examination of Islam in its South African context. The final section will then look at the sources that the Call used to show it was indeed because of their South African Islam that they affiliated with the UDF and the oppressed.     

‘Our Boys With the Maple Leaf on Their Shoulders and Straps’: Masculinity,the Toronto Press,and the Outbreak of the South African War, 1899

Abstract

Coverage of the South African War by the Toronto daily press at its outbreak in late 1899 was implicitly gendered. Placed within the context of nineteenth-century connections between manhood and war, claims of ineffective soldiering, poor shooting ability, and indecisive political action were also implicit attacks on the manhood and character of Canadian politicians at home and the Boer enemy in South Africa. Representations of soldiers, enemies, and politicians in the press also expose connections between war and gender and allow historians to question how war is sold and characterized to the nation through ideas about masculinity.     

De victorias o derrotas: El metro,de Donato Ndongo-Bidyogo

El metro (2007), the most recent novel by the Equatoguinean author Donato Ndongo, ends with the failure of the immigrant experience for its African protagonist. I argue that the blurring of gender difference and a relationship with the world based on male competition leads to this ending of the novel in a fundamental manner. This text reflects an identity conflict in an African male individual, Lambert Obama Ondo, who relates to white men in terms of victory or defeat. Both black and white women have a subsidiary role. In this scenario, there is no possibility of conquest for Lambert, since he comes from a poor country and cannot count on a corrupt government to confront neocolonial exploitation. Finally, as an illegal Black African immigrant in Spain who has to endure racism and social vulnerability, he will not have a chance for a sound victory over white men. He will end being a victim, but at least a heroic one.     

Commemorating a Rural African-American Family at a National Battlefield Park

The Robinson House site is situated within the Manassas National Battlefield Park in northern Virginia. The original Robinson House was constructed in the 1840s and was occupied until 1936 by the same free African-American family. The National Park Service recognizes and interprets the Robinson House since it was part of the Civil War battlefield landscape during the First and Second Battles of Manassas. The original house went through a series of structural additions and alterations in the late 1800s and early 1900s. The house stood until 1993 when arsonists burned it, causing 60% damage to the structure. Today, the east chimney and the stone foundations remain. Amidst the many Civil War monuments at the battlefield park the interpretation of a century of occupation by the Robinson family through the remaining foundations adds meaning and depth to the area's local history. The Robinson House remains symbolize an African-American family's way of life as well as their struggle to survive during Reconstruction and the Jim Crow era. The foundations and site are a steadfast symbol of African-American cultural persistence that has prevailed for over 100 years on a battlefield landscape.     

“From the cradle to the grave”: Jim Williams,black manhood,and militia activism in Reconstruction South Carolina

The life of Jim Williams, an African American militia captain hanged by the Ku Klux Klan in South Carolina in 1871, illuminates the history of martial black manhood during Reconstruction. Service in state militias seemed to afford black men the opportunity to assert a new kind of manhood, grounded in a desire to defend black communities and exercise political rights gained after emancipation. But conservative white southerners met these assertions of black manhood with a campaign of vigilantism. Racist violence by conservative white southerners worked to reverse the support militias had received from white Republicans, and the militias were disbanded and blamed for the very violence they suffered. This article explores Williams’s story, analyzes both officers and troops of black militia companies in the South Carolina upcountry, and charts how real and rhetorical violence silenced the militias’ assertions of a new form of black manhood and freedom.     

Outside the Economy: Women’s Work and Feminist Economics in the Construction and Critique of National Income Accounting

Concerns about women’s work were present at the advent of the modern method of national income accounting, and they have featured prominently in the most radical critiques of this method. During and after the Second World War, Phyllis Deane, a young researcher working under the supervision of Richard Stone, Austin Robinson and Arthur Lewis, grappled with the conceptual difficulties involved in measuring the ‘national’ incomes of mostly rural subsistence colonies in British central Africa. In constructing her estimates, Deane relied heavily on a multidisciplinary survey of nutrition conducted in interwar Nyasaland. Deane’s work was essentially an exercise in reductionism and bounding; she sought to extract from these data a single monetary estimate of production. Yet Deane also proved unwilling to exclude too much. She broke with her advisors’ favoured convention that activities not involved in market exchange should be excluded from the national income. Successive national income accountants around the world would reach disparate conclusions on method, particularly on the question of the ‘production boundary’—that is, the dividing line between those productive activities that would be included in the national income and those that would not. This issue became most contentious in the sphere of ‘non-monetary’ or ‘subsistence’ production performed mostly by female producers. While some statisticians included firewood collection, beer brewing and cooking, many others thought such activities beyond the bounds of ‘the economy’. Early decisions about the status of non-monetary production influenced the international standards enshrined in the United Nations System of National Accounts, first published in 1953. Beginning in the 1970s, second-wave feminists criticised the invisibility of women’s work in national income estimates. These critiques helped spur the inclusion of non-monetary activities in the accounts of many nations. Yet by the 1990s, many feminist critics—most notably New Zealand-born political economist Marilyn Waring—sought to move beyond GDP as a measure of welfare. These feminists called instead for greater reliance on measures such as the Human Development Index and time-use surveys. These measures may have appeared new, but they required the same multidisciplinary and intensive methods as Nyasaland’s interwar nutrition survey, which had served as the substrate for the earliest calculation of a ‘colonial national’ income. Drawing upon archives in the United Kingdom, Malawi and the United States, this paper argues that feminist economists and women’s work were central to both the post-war construction and the late-twentieth century critique of national income.