CONSUMERISM, SOCIAL PRACTICE, AND SLAVERY: CONSUMER PRACTICES AMONG ENSLAVED LABORERS AT POPLAR FOREST PLANTATION (1828-1861)

This dissertation is a study of the intersections of slavery, daily practice, and consumerism of enslaved laborers at antebellum Poplar Forest plantation in Central Virginia. Key developments in the antebellum period, including expanded transportation options, industrialization, and increased slave leasing shaped the enslaved laborer’s lives. These factors resulted in increased access to the market economy for many enslaved laborers, which transformed social and economic relationships between whites and African Americans and among African Americans as well. The conditions that shaped this process varied according to regional differences, the forms of labor in which the enslaved were engaged, and the individual practices of slave owners. My work centers itself within the growing field of consumerism studies, which have been useful to scholars of slavery and post-emancipation African American communities, but have not been applied to slavery in the antebellum period of Central Virginia. By employing consumer strategies to negotiate the experiences of slavery and craft identities that resisted the imposed definition of “slave,” enslaved laborers gained a measure of control over their daily lives and degrees of personal empowerment. Enslaved men and women adapted to the uncertain realities of antebellum slavery by acquiring and using goods to shape their identities and to promote and maintain health and well-being for themselves and their families. This study demonstrates that control and empowerment were situational for enslaved laborers and they came with costs and benefits

Federal Register

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Maritime expressions:a corpus based exploration of maritime metaphors

This study uses a purpose-built corpus to explore the linguistic legacy of Britain’s maritime history found in the form of hundreds of specialised ‘Maritime Expressions’ (MEs), such as TAKEN ABACK, ANCHOR and ALOOF, that permeate modern English. Selecting just those expressions commencing with ’A’, it analyses 61 MEs in detail and describes the processes by which these technical expressions, from a highly specialised occupational discourse community, have made their way into modern English. The Maritime Text Corpus (MTC) comprises 8.8 million words, encompassing a range of text types and registers, selected to provide a cross-section of ‘maritime’ writing. It is analysed using WordSmith analytical software (Scott, 2010), with the 100 million-word British National Corpus (BNC) as a reference corpus. Using the MTC, a list of keywords of specific salience within the maritime discourse has been compiled and, using frequency data, concordances and collocations, these MEs are described in detail and their use and form in the MTC and the BNC is compared. The study examines the transformation from ME to figurative use in the general discourse, in terms of form and metaphoricity. MEs are classified according to their metaphorical strength and their transference from maritime usage into new registers and domains such as those of business, politics, sports and reportage etc. A revised model of metaphoricity is developed and a new category of figurative expression, the ‘resonator’, is proposed. Additionally, developing the work of Lakov and Johnson, Kovesces and others on Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT), a number of Maritime Conceptual Metaphors are identified and their cultural significance is discussed