Book Description
Shows that the law of freedom, not slavery, determined the way that race developed over time in three slave societies.
Author : Alejandro de la Fuente
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 297 pages
File Size : 30,86 MB
Release : 2020-01-16
Category : History
ISBN : 1108480640
Shows that the law of freedom, not slavery, determined the way that race developed over time in three slave societies.
Author : Alejandro de la Fuente
Publisher : Cambridge University Press
Page : 297 pages
File Size : 10,22 MB
Release : 2020-01-16
Category : History
ISBN : 1108600395
How did Africans become 'blacks' in the Americas? Becoming Free, Becoming Black tells the story of enslaved and free people of color who used the law to claim freedom and citizenship for themselves and their loved ones. Their communities challenged slaveholders' efforts to make blackness synonymous with slavery. Looking closely at three slave societies - Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana - Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela J. Gross demonstrate that the law of freedom - not slavery - established the meaning of blackness in law. Contests over freedom determined whether and how it was possible to move from slave to free status, and whether claims to citizenship would be tied to racial identity. Laws regulating the lives and institutions of free people of color created the boundaries between black and white, the rights reserved to white people, and the degradations imposed only on black people.
Author : Susan Eva O'Donovan
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 381 pages
File Size : 34,8 MB
Release : 2010-04-10
Category : History
ISBN : 0674041607
Becoming Free in the Cotton South challenges our most basic ideas about slavery and freedom in America. Instead of seeing emancipation as the beginning or the ending of the story, as most histories do, Susan Eva O’Donovan explores the perilous transition between these two conditions, offering a unique vision of both the enormous changes and the profound continuities in black life before and after the Civil War.This boldly argued work focuses on a small place—the southwest corner of Georgia—in order to explicate a big question: how did black men and black women’s experiences in slavery shape their lives in freedom? The reality of slavery’s demise is harsh: in this land where cotton was king, the promise of Reconstruction passed quickly, even as radicalism crested and swept the rest of the South. Ultimately, the lives former slaves made for themselves were conditioned and often constrained by what they had endured in bondage. O’Donovan’s significant scholarship does not diminish the heroic efforts of black Americans to make their world anew; rather, it offers troubling but necessary insight into the astounding challenges they faced.Becoming Free in the Cotton South is a moving and intimate narrative, drawing upon a multiplicity of sources and individual stories to provide new understanding of the forces that shaped both slavery and freedom, and of the generation of African Americans who tackled the passage that lay between.
Author : Michelle M. Wright
Publisher : Duke University Press
Page : 300 pages
File Size : 16,19 MB
Release : 2004
Category : History
ISBN : 9780822332886
DIVA theoretical troubling of the assumptions of uniformity in Blackness, comparing writings by and about African diasporic subjects from the U.S., Britain, France, and Germany./div
Author : Judith Kelleher Schafer
Publisher : LSU Press
Page : 234 pages
File Size : 11,77 MB
Release : 2003-05-01
Category : History
ISBN : 9780807128800
Louisiana state law was unique in allowing slaves to contract for their freedom and to initiate a lawsuit for liberty. Judith Kelleher Schafer describes the ingenious and remarkably sophisticated ways New Orleans slaves used the legal system to gain their independence and find a voice in a society that ordinarily gave them none. Showing that remaining free was often as challenging as becoming free, Schafer also recounts numerous cases in which free people of color were forced to use the courts to prove their status. She further documents seventeen free blacks who, when faced with deportation, amazingly sued to enslave themselves. Schafer’s impressive detective work achieves a rare feat in the historical profession—the unveiling of an entirely new facet of the slave experience in the American South.
Author : James Sidbury
Publisher : Oxford University Press
Page : 304 pages
File Size : 19,62 MB
Release : 2007-09-27
Category : History
ISBN : 0199886415
The first slaves imported to America did not see themselves as "African" but rather as Temne, Igbo, or Yoruban. In Becoming African in America, James Sidbury reveals how an African identity emerged in the late eighteenth-century Atlantic world, tracing the development of "African" from a degrading term connoting savage people to a word that was a source of pride and unity for the diverse victims of the Atlantic slave trade. In this wide-ranging work, Sidbury first examines the work of black writers--such as Ignatius Sancho in England and Phillis Wheatley in America--who created a narrative of African identity that took its meaning from the diaspora, a narrative that began with enslavement and the experience of the Middle Passage, allowing people of various ethnic backgrounds to become "African" by virtue of sharing the oppression of slavery. He looks at political activists who worked within the emerging antislavery moment in England and North America in the 1780s and 1790s; he describes the rise of the African church movement in various cities--most notably, the establishment of the African Methodist Episcopal Church as an independent denomination--and the efforts of wealthy sea captain Paul Cuffe to initiate a black-controlled emigration movement that would forge ties between Sierra Leone and blacks in North America; and he examines in detail the efforts of blacks to emigrate to Africa, founding Sierra Leone and Liberia. Elegantly written and astutely reasoned, Becoming African in America weaves together intellectual, social, cultural, religious, and political threads into an important contribution to African American history, one that fundamentally revises our picture of the rich and complicated roots of African nationalist thought in the U.S. and the black Atlantic.
Author : Jan Hoffman French
Publisher : Univ of North Carolina Press
Page : 273 pages
File Size : 30,31 MB
Release : 2009
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0807832928
Anthropologists widely agree that identities_even ethnic and racial ones_are socially constructed. Less understood are the processes by which social identities are conceived and developed. Legalizing Identities shows how law can successfully serve
Author : Clare Corbould
Publisher : Harvard University Press
Page : 295 pages
File Size : 46,50 MB
Release : 2009-07-31
Category : Social Science
ISBN : 0674053656
In 2000, the United States census allowed respondents for the first time to tick a box marked “African American” in the race category. The new option marked official recognition of a term that had been gaining currency for some decades. Africa has always played a role in black identity, but it was in the tumultuous period between the two world wars that black Americans first began to embrace a modern African American identity. Following the great migration of black southerners to northern cities after World War I, the search for roots and for meaningful affiliations became subjects of debate and display in a growing black public sphere. Throwing off the legacy of slavery and segregation, black intellectuals, activists, and organizations sought a prouder past in ancient Egypt and forged links to contemporary Africa. In plays, pageants, dance, music, film, literature, and the visual arts, they aimed to give stature and solidity to the American black community through a new awareness of the African past and the international black world. Their consciousness of a dual identity anticipated the hyphenated identities of new immigrants in the years after World War II, and an emerging sense of what it means to be a modern American.
Author : Baratunde Thurston
Publisher : Harper Collins
Page : 279 pages
File Size : 27,75 MB
Release : 2012-01-31
Category : Biography & Autobiography
ISBN : 0062098047
New York TimesBestseller Baratunde Thurston’s comedic memoir chronicles his coming-of-blackness and offers practical advice on everything from “How to Be the Black Friend” to “How to Be the (Next) Black President”. Have you ever been called “too black” or “not black enough”? Have you ever befriended or worked with a black person? Have you ever heard of black people? If you answered yes to any of these questions, this book is for you. It is also for anyone who can read, possesses intelligence, loves to laugh, and has ever felt a distance between who they know themselves to be and what the world expects. Raised by a pro-black, Pan-Afrikan single mother during the crack years of 1980s Washington, DC, and educated at Sidwell Friends School and Harvard University, Baratunde Thurston has more than over thirty years' experience being black. Now, through stories of his politically inspired Nigerian name, the heroics of his hippie mother, the murder of his drug-abusing father, and other revelatory black details, he shares with readers of all colors his wisdom and expertise in how to be black. “As a black woman, this book helped me realize I’m actually a white man.”—Patton Oswalt
Author : Kevin Everod Quashie
Publisher : Rutgers University Press
Page : 246 pages
File Size : 43,30 MB
Release : 2004
Category : History
ISBN : 9780813533674
Ultimately moves beyond these to propose a new cultural aesthetic that aims to center black women and their philosophies. Book jacket.