Enslavement and resistance: a spatial approach
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Class PPT
This week please choose 1 (very short, easy!) primary source and 1 secondary reading:
Primary source exercise: Choose ONE interesting excerpt from:
Louis Perez Jr, ed.
We will analyse it together in class so you don't need to take lots of time reading it; please note the page number and think about: What was the relationship between travel and slavery? How did travellers describe and experience Cuban spaces and journeys? What did they see, and what did they fail to see? What was their racial, class and identity positioning? How did the travellers actually move around - and how much of this mobility was accessible for enslaved men and women?
Then choose ONE of:
-
Finch, Aisha. Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841-1844. University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Chapter 2, 鈥淩ural Slave Networks and Insurgent Geographies,鈥� pp. 51-78 [and e-book at library]
- Mariana Muaze, in Global Plantations in the Modern World: Sovereignties, Ecologies, Afterlives (Palgrave Macmillan 2023), pp. 155-176.
- Flavio Santos dos Gomes, "Quilombos of Rio de Janeiro in the Nineteenth Century," in , eds. Joao Jose Reis and Flavio dos Santos Gomes (Diasporic Africa Press, 2017) [first published in Portuguese in 1996]
Seminar Questions
- How did enslavers use space to subjugate enslaved people?
- How was this spatial subjugation different for men and women? Africans and Creoles? Plantations versus cities?
- How did the enslaved forge alternative uses and interpretations of space and of movement?
- How can historians use spatial history to offer new accounts of the history of slavery?
Further reading:
- Camp, Stephanie, . UNC Press, Introduction (key text on enslavers' and enslaved people's uses of space)
- Nancy Naro, . Especially chapters 2 (Ordering the Wilderness) and 3 (Fazenda Spaces and Social Relations)
- Sandra Lauderdale Graham House and Street: The Domestic World of Servants and Masters in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro. University of Texas Press, 1992.
- Julius Scott, , chapter 2 (e books @ library) (classic reference on Caribbean mobilities)
- Zephyr Frank, "," Journal of Social History, 41:2 (2007) [hard to tell from the title but this is a really interesting piece about how slaveholding, wealth, social status can be 'mapped' onto the city streets (using GIS mapping techniques) over time - good for those planning essays on Brazilian urban slavery in general, as well as spatial history]
- Vincent Brown, Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War; see also accompanying interactive
- Lorena Tezanos Toral, "The Architecture of Nineteenth-Century Cuban Sugar Mills: Creole Power and African Resistance in Late Colonial Cuba," PhD diss., CUNY, 2015, chapter 5, "Appropriation and Resistance: The Afro-Cuban Lived Experience," 195-132.
- Katherine McKittrick, ed., [US- focused but useful overview of field of Black feminist geographies]
- Aisha Finch,
-
Camillia Cowling,
"Teresa Mina's Journeys: 'Slave-Moving', Mobility, and Gender in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Cuba." Atlantic Studies, 18:1 (2021): 7-30 - Camillia Cowling, Slavery & Abolition, 44:3 (2023): 456-7
- Walter Johnson, (Harvard University Press, 2013), chapter 3, "The Steamboat Sublime"
For some interdisciplinary approaches to thinking about space, place, and mobilities:
- Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction