Aiming For Pensacola: Fugitive Slaves On The Atlantic And Southern Frontiers

Resistance and Interracialism on the Southern Frontier Matthew Clavin\u27s Aiming for Pensacola fills an important fissure in the literature about slave resistance in the Deep South. Clavin argues that despite the fact that slavery was entrenched in the culture of the Deep South, enslaved Afric...

The Internal Foe: Rethinking Slave Resistance in Antebellum America

Non

Slavery, Subversion and Subalternity: Gender and Violent Resistance in Nineteenth-Century Bahia

1999-01-01

A Study of West African Slave Resistance from the Seventeenth to Nineteenth Centuries

Accompanying the dawn of the twenty-first century, there has emerged a new era of historical thinking that has created the need to reexamine the history of slavery and slave resistance. Slavery has become a controversial topic that historians and scholars throughout the world are reevaluating. In this modern period, which is finally beginning to honor the ideas and ideals of equality, slavery is the black mark of our past; and the task now lies before the world to derive a better understanding of slavery. In order to better understand slavery, it is crucial to have a more acute awareness of those that endured it. Throughout the period of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade in West Africa, slaves consistently resisted slavery as both a condition and as an institution. Slaves represented various ages, tribes, sexes, regions, but resistance was its one true constant theme that crossed all other categories. Examining the different stages of slave resistance during the height of the Trans-Atlantic slave trade in Africa, and the diverse ways in which Africans stood against the practice of slavery, researchers will better understand not only the people who endured slavery, but the institution of slavery itself

Routes of freedom: slave resistance and the politics of literary geography

This dissertation integrates rhetorical, historical, and spatial analysis in an effort to expand our understanding of the cultural work performed by antebellum narratives that take slavery in the United States as their subject matter. Specifically, it focuses on the complicated relationship between place and human praxis as revealed in five texts: The Confessions of Nat Turner, Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Dred, Martin R. Delany’s Blake, Frederick Douglass’s “The Heroic Slave,” and Herman Melville’s Benito Cereno. In my attention to literary geographies, I trace spatial patterns in which considerations of organized resistance and slave rebellion are repeatedly placed in “wild-spaces” such as the Great Dismal Swamp, the Red River region of Louisiana, and the open ocean. Exploring their strict alignment with considerations of violence, I argue that these wild-spaces do not function as passive settings, supporting and paralleling narrative events or themes. Instead they can be seen to drive narrative action as they carry with them powerful cultural associations that translate into plot momentum. My methodological approach employs two general steps. First I document how antislavery writers developed a historically resonant narrative landscape to defuse criticism and buttress their rhetorical indictments of slavery. Second, I investigate how these writers negotiated the complicated demands of such landscapes in order to supplement moral interpretations with creative imaginings of how alternative forms of slave resistance might play out. By isolating the ties between literary landscapes and the narratives’ imaginings of slave resistance, we are able to see the intensely pragmatic, real world problem-solving in which these writers were engaged. Such a methodology highlights the formative function of place in literary output, while also providing insight into obstacles to real-world reform. I conclude that the narratives I examine served as a forum for cultural experimentation as their writers attempted to work through social and political problems that had no easy or ready solutions. Considerations of place are shown to be essential to antislavery writers’ attempts to see through the shadow of slavery to its end, and, in doing so, point the way forward