Slave Resistance as Experience, Process, and Representation. Paperback, Captus
The Precariousness of Freedom: Slave Resistance as Experience, Process, and Representation places familiar and overlooked aspects of slave resistance (rebellions, running away) in conversation with understudied elements such as psychological states, slave dress, and theatrical performance. The nine chapters explore slave resistance across three centuries (seventeenth to nineteenth) and four empires (British, Dutch, French, and Spanish), presenting innovative comparative research that challenges established narratives and raises new questions through analyses of histories, artwork, and cultural artifacts. Encompassing various enslaved populations and their free allies, the chapters incorporate the exploration of children, adults, women, men, groups, and individuals, African-born people, and black Creoles. Together, the contributors, comprising both established and emerging scholars, define resistance as not just outward activities and actions like a rebellion, mutiny, or the acts of fleeing from one’s enslavement, but as conscious and unconscious choices manifested in personal and political practices through dress, hairstyles, and adornment.
Resistance exists in the internal worlds and psychology of the enslaved, in their expressions of positivity, love, anger, aggression, and sadness, which white enslavers strove to document in fugitive slave advertisements and manuscripts in order to remain in control and immobilize the enslaved. In this ground-breaking book, contributors analyze slave resistance and its representation within the infrastructures of incarceration, colonial legislation, and print culture, while also exploring the customs of plantation slavery and the cultural significance of slave dress and theatrical performance.
Part I explores the life of Joe, an enslaved African-born man in Quebec City. This section examines aspects of fleeing, dress, cultural practices, and literacy in cities like Curaçao, New York, and Quebec. Challenging the notions of the Transatlantic Slavery Experience, this section seeks to define the meaning of resistance, expanding on region-specific factors such as the geography, climate, and population ratio of black slaves to white slave owners.
Part II delves into the nature of slave resistance and efforts to suppress it across various climates and regions, exploring the legal, social, and domestic dimensions of resistance. This section aims to answer how the legal, judicial, social, and domestic aspects of slave resistance worked. Contributors examine the micro- and macro-level enactment of fleeing from specific white slave owners across various regions and distinguish between different forms of escape.
Part III explores the artistic and cultural representation of slave resistance created by enslaved black people and white slave owners within the context of transatlantic slavery. Together, these chapters question the role and utility of visual images, material culture, and performance in allowing enslaved individuals to resist enslavement through bodily performance, flight, and the and the ability to use forced acquisition of European culture, language, and society to resist white oppression.