Browsing by Subject "Slavery"

Now showing 1 - 5 of 5
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    Enlightened institutions: science, plantations, and slavery.
    (2012-08) Otremba, Eric
    My project examines confluences between the scientific, progressive, and reforming ideas associated with the early English Enlightenment, and the concurrent proliferation of Caribbean slave plantations. More specifically, it argues that Britain’s West Indian sugar estates were major sites of early Enlightenment thought and practice, and were imagined as such by both Caribbean planters and English reformers during this period. From the mid-seventeenth century until the American Revolution, two of the most significant developments within the English Atlantic were the proliferation of Enlightenment ideas on reason, order, and progress, and the simultaneous expansion of slave-based work regimes. Yet despite this concurrence historians have almost always treated these topics separately, juxtaposing them as opposing forces within early modern thought. This approach has stymied historians when seeking to explain how a terror-based, exploitative labor system could prosper during the period of Enlightenment. Such a problem has forced historians either to ignore slavery’s role within Enlightenment narratives, or to characterize slavery as the Enlightenment’s shadow-double with expressions like “The Peculiar Institution” or “The American Paradox.” I address this problem through a study of early English sugar plantations, showing how these estates were appraised by England’s intellectual community in the seventeenth century. In doing so, I demonstrate how both slavery and the Enlightenment shared common roots within the expansionist discourse of English natural science during this period. Within this discourse, the dual categories of knowing and dominating were understood as positive synergic outcomes of an ethos which stressed both a systematic exploration of knowledge, and an enforced rational application of that knowledge towards various worldly problems. In particular, this ethos advocated using new discoveries and innovations to streamline artisanal industries and to more thoroughly organize English labor routines, all for the sake of national plenty and profit. Because of this focus, natural scientists of this period perceived little moral, scientific, or economic distinction between the coercive practices of the West Indies and other developmental or experimental projects within British dominions. Instead, Caribbean plantations were simply understood as another example of this period’s strivings towards moral, natural, and economic improvement—hallmarks of early Enlightenment thought.
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    Enslavement at Fort Snelling: Challenging Colonialism at One of Minnesota's Most Celebrated Historic Sites
    (2024) Minor, Sophie
    Following nearly 20 years of archaeological excavation, Historic Fort Snelling, a tourist destination located near St. Paul Minnesota, was finally opened to the public in the Fall of 1970. Although the archaeological project was exhaustive and the reconstruction of the buildings was meticulous, the historical narrative presented at the site was inaccurate and incomplete. Hiding behind the façade of scholarly objectivity, the Minnesota Historical Society (MNHS) presented a Euro-American fantasy as fact and participated in the continued colonization of American Indians, African Americans, and other marginalized communities. The current study challenges the historic and contemporary interpretation at the site through the use of Black Feminist Thought and African Diaspora Archaeology. This dissertation details the ways in which the artifacts retrieved from earlier archaeological projects might be reinterpreted to challenge current and past interpretation at the site.
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    Jim's Secrets: What Mark Twain Knew But Huck Finn Didn't
    (Journal of Opinions, Ideas & Essays (JOIE), 2013-08) Griffin, Edward
    Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, persistently attacked since 1885 as vulgar and inelegant, has more recently been condemned as elitist, sexist, and racist. The charge of racism turns not only on the pervasive use of the “n” word, but also on a misunderstanding of Jim, the runaway slave, as a minstrel-show stereotype of the powerless simpleton. Urging a reconsideration of Jim’s role in light of the literary and psychological features of the captivity narrative, this essay argues that Mark Twain builds the novel around two related forms of captivity: Jim’s slavery in the first part of the novel and, in the second part, the joint captivity of Jim and Huck by the Duke and the King. The first half turns on two competing plans: Huck’s and Jim’s. Huck’s is a juvenile plan, open-ended and in search of thrilling adventures. Jim’s is an adult plan with specific ends in view: escaping from from slavery at the risk of his life and eventually freeing his wife and children. Huck Finn would like to diminish Jim’s manhood, but Mark Twain will not allow it. And when Mark Twain realizes that if he defeats Jim’s plan he will be writing a tragedy, he searches for a comic ending--with the ostensibly insuperable difficulties resolved--by turning to parody and by using all the trappings of the traditional captivity narrative for social satire until, when all seems lost, by supplying Tom Sawyer to provide a deeply ambiguous tragi-comic rescue. The final section of the essay provides a brief meditation on that ambiguous resolution.
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    Performing Bodies and Performative Texts: the bodily culture of the Antebellum United States and fleshy writing
    (2013-07) Woo, Jewon
    "Performing Bodies and Performative Texts" explores the reciprocal relations between black and white Americans in antebellum culture as both performers and observers. This dissertation covers the roughly twenty-year span, from the Amistad revolt in 1839 to the beginning of the Civil War in 1861, when the lived experiences of slaves were introduced ever more audibly and visibly through live testimonials at antislavery fairs in the North. Looking at sentimental novels, slave narratives, and the popular press in this period, I introduce the concept of "fleshy writing" as it helps us understand the bodily performances of racially and sexually embodied subjectivity.
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    Writing beyond Redress: Slavery and the Work of Literature
    (2019-07) Gildersleeve, Courtney
    Writing beyond Redress: Slavery and the Work of Literature is a comparative study of literary works by Afro-Caribbean writers which illuminate the entanglements of slavery, imperialism, and imprisonment. Spanning a period from the early nineteenth century to the early twenty-first century, the project traces in literary writing a dialectic of confinement and emancipation in the long fight against the system of slavery and its attendant ideologies. Each chapter focuses on a primary text that foregrounds either a specific site of confinement during slavery, or an instantiation of its afterlife: the prison (The Memoir of General Toussaint Louverture, by Louverture himself), the sugar plantation (Autobiografía de un esclavo, Juan Francisco Manzano), the isolated peasant village (Gouverneurs de la rosée, Jacques Roumain), and the immigration detention center (Brother, I’m Dying, Edwidge Danticat). Calling us to rethink the labor involved in the act of writing and the stakes—including physical risk—of speaking from within and against systems of oppression, these texts illuminate the inhibitions of speech and activity that slavery and the institutions that arose in its aftermath were designed to maintain. Confronting, too, the often dissimulating uses of language by the dominant society, these texts reimagine the potency of the written word to combat social wrongs and to forge other possible forms of social being. While writing alone cannot redress the damages of slavery, at the same time, writing must be claimed for the ongoing work of emancipation.