Women, Slavery, and the Archive: Innovations in Slavery Studies and Contemporary Connections

“Women, Slavery, and the Archive: Innovations in Slavery Studies and Contemporary Connections” Early scholarship on slavery, abolition, and the British empire largely ignored the contribution of women of any race to the African Institution. British women who participated in boycotts, produced literary texts against African enslavement, and did the legwork of circulating petitions were relegated to footnotes until well into the twentieth century when women scholars began to create space in the canon for the unrecognized or under-recognized women writers. These new avenues of research evolved through decades to become more inclusive, more critical, and more ground-breaking in bringing the past into the present. I identify four important shifts in our understanding of British enslavement and abolition over the long eighteenth century: 1. recognition of (white) women’s work in the abolitionist campaigns; 2. recognition of the labor of enslaved women and their contributions to resistance; 3. recognition of women’s involvement in supporting as well as resisting slavery; 4. recognition of the erasure of people, and the violence of the archive that only validates recorded experiences. Recovering these various kinds of erasures has opened possibilities for new methods of analysis. The legacy of this work not only opened slavery studies to new methodologies of gender and intersectional analyses, but it also opened the archive to productive critique. The new avenues for slavery studies recovers the voices of silenced women and empowers scholar who wish to challenge established narratives. By reviewing the scholarly legacy of transatlantic slavery studies, we can also better appreciate the influence on the immediate present. Contemporary work on Black Lives Matter (abolition), 1619 Project, and the attempts to ban critical race theory address the importance of the transitions in scholarship and how their legacies can reshape the future

PROBING THE BROAD-SPECTRUM THERAPEUTIC POTENTIAL OF AIP II MIMICS TO COMBAT LYSOZYME MEDIATED STAPHYLOCOCCAL INVASION ON CONTACT LENS

Objective: Molecular recognition of AIP II mimics as a global inhibitor against the AgrC variants and to undertake a real-time clinical applications to treat the lysozyme mediated (tear protein) S. aureus adherence on contact lens.Methods: Structure activity relationship of the mimic peptides against the receptor AgrC variants were studied to score the global inhibitor. Further, the activity of the mimics as inhibitors was validated through in vitro and in vivo analysis.Results: Inhibition of agr expression of interstrains by the mimic compounds gained insight to recognize a global inhibitorâ€. Further, the in vitro data were designed in such a way to provide a natural eye environment (artificial tears) to see the effect of mAIP IIa (IC50) showed a greater significance of eradicating the clinical isolate, S. aureus biofilm and various other secreted toxins.Conclusion: The mimic peptide (mAIPII a) revealed to be a potential mimic of AIPII to show a broad range inhibition of all AgrC variants without any cytotoxic effects.Â

Rethinking the fall of the planter class

This issue of Atlantic Studies began life as a one-day conference held at Chawton House Library in Hampshire, UK, and funded by the University of Southampton. The conference aimed, like this issue, to bring together scholars currently working on the history of the British West Indian planter class in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries and to discuss how, when, and why the fortunes of the planters went into decline. As this introduction notes, the difficulties faced by the planter class in the British West Indies from the 1780s onwards were an early episode in a wider drama of decline for New World plantation economies. The American historian Lowell Ragatz published the first detailed historical account of their fall. His work helped to inform the influential arguments of Eric Williams, which were later challenged by Seymour Drescher. Recent research has begun to offer fresh perspectives on the debate about the decline of the planters, and this collection brings together articles taking a variety of new approaches to the topic, encompassing economic, political, cultural, and social histor