Abstracts
Global Comparisons in Slavery: Dynamics
of Labor and Culture
Patrick Manning
I'm attempting to take the cue from the conference
announcement, that the emphasis is to be on comparisons of the
legacy of slavery in Asia, the Pacific, and Europe. I propose
to review some major developments in studies of slavery in the
Atlantic (especially through comparisons and comparative studies),
and suggest how the extension of such studies might play out
in studies of other parts of the world. I'll also give my thoughts
on what is known now about the links of Atlantic slavery to
slavery in Asia and the Pacific, and offer some hints about
slavery as a world-wide system of labor. And I will seek to
balance issues of labor and culture. The only way to address
this much terrain is to select carefully in which specifics
to propose as representative of the larger questions, so it
will present an interesting challenge.
Making History during the Harlem Renaissance
Clare Corbould
Stories about the past are crucial to identity. In Harlem during
the interwar years, a vibrant black counterpublic sphere emerged
that was based in large part on a rewriting of the distant African
past. Using a methodology since dubbed “contributionist,”
these makers of history emphasized the glories of Africa’s
heritage and the contribution made by that continent to world
civilization. They sought thereby to overturn widespread assumptions
in the United States that black history began at the Virginian
coast where the first slave ship arrived.
For many of the artists and writers associated with the movement
known as the Harlem Renaissance, this celebratory approach to
history was inadequate. It was not a framework that lent itself
to telling stories of slavery, and especially the slave trade,
except by focusing on rebellions. I examine how through novels,
poetry, drawing, painting and sculpture, writers and artists
found ways to represent a past still experienced as traumatic,
and yet from which they drew strength.
While for some, slavery was a tale of neverending misery, others
focused on the culture of resistance established by slaves in
the United States and elsewhere in the African diaspora. I examine
the strategies of historicization that they employed in order
to find ways to tell those stories about the slave past that
were too important to ignore in favour of a more simple vision
of a glorious, ancient African past.
Aphra Behn: Slavery Abolitionist or
Sympathist?
Elizabeth Landford
Ever since Aphra Behn published her novella, Oroonoko
in 1688 , scholars have been divided as to whether her work
reveals abolitionist or sympathist views towards the colonial
slave trade. Behn has become something of an enigma in the world
of literature, as she has created an immensely influential work
that continues to remain shrouded in mystery hundreds of years
after it was first published.
Scholars have historically raised strong arguments
both for and against Behn’s oft-disputed reputation as
one of the earliest slavery abolitionists. Clearly, as one of
the first paid women writers she was accustomed to breaking
with convention. In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf
wrote that
‘all women together ought to let flowers
fall upon the tomb of Aphra Behn, for it was she who earned
them the right to speak their minds.’
We may never discover whether Behn’s intentions in writing
Oroonoko were admirable or deplorable. However, the novella
itself preserves intriguing passages that continue to taunt
modern readers with their ambiguity.Ultimately, the question
of Behn’s personal sympathies is overshadowed by her greatest
achievement, as she has dynamically opened the channels of slavery
discourse in a manner that has remained topical for hundreds
of years.
Legacies of
subordination: wife capture in Sama tales of the past
Jennifer Gaynor
Before the decline of piracy in 19th century Southeast
Asia, coastal people were frequently prey to capture and sale
in the slave markets of the region. Yet other forms of slavery,
such as debt bondage, existed alongside chattel slavery, and
other forms of capture also created stark forms of social subordination.
This talk looks at one such form of capture and subordination,
the kidnapping of women by ethnic others. Evidence of this practice
during armed conflict in 1950's Indonesia points us away from
analyses of post-independence rebellion focused on the state,
failed integration and control of territory, toward the need
to examine efforts to control people and expand support for
the movement. Through illustration, I shall explain the social
logic of this practice, which subordinated individual women
as well as their expansive kin groups. As in the work of Meillassoux
(1991) and Bohannan (1963), and contra Miers and Kopytoff (1977),
the capture of women here is a kind of anti-kinship.
I argue that this practice represents a continuity
in the forms and methods of social subordination, evidence for
which is found in Sama tales of the past. Despite their wide
dispersion among Sama people across the archipelago, different
versions of these tales share striking thematic and structural
similarities regarding wife theft and relocation. Unlike the
foundational tales of other groups, these stories take place
in inter-ethnic social fields, often depicting coercion by others
and flight by Sama people. Some oral and manuscript versions,
moreover, use literary devices to euphemize this subordination,
turning the stories into allegories about status recognition
and social reproduction. In contrast with the conference description,
such reframing suggests that while slavery may leave indelible
marks, they may become very difficult to read, and that rather
than reclaiming their "slave ancestry," certain locally-grounded
processes of narrative reframing and circulation may in fact
obscure a history of subordination. Perhaps nothing throws this
into sharper relief than a lone document, produced in the recent
past, in which an aged Sama man—call him an organic intellectual—claims
not his high status lineage, but, indeed, reclaims instead his
slave ancestry.
Souls, settlers and saints:
the contested enterprise of plantation landscape in the Spice
Islands
Phillip Winn
Following Dutch conquest in 1621, the Banda Islands
in eastern Indonesia was the site for one of the world’s
earliest plantation enterprises, combining slavery with visions
of a European settler-colony. The perkerniersstelsel or ‘nutmeg-planter
system’ remained unique in Southeast Asia and involved
an entire landscape given over to divided segments of occupation
and control.
I will interrogate aspects of the systematised rationality that
was applied in the Banda Islands and its capacity to transform
human relations to, and understandings of, place. In particular,
I present some key historical and contemporary contestations
in envisaging landscape. These involve both the Europeans (and
their offspring), in addition to the descendants of the slaves
and other forms of unfree labour that were present in the islands
(such as convicts and indentured workers) who now predominate
in the islands’ population.
Following the nationalization of the nutmeg groves under Sukarno,
and attempts at partial privatization under Suharto, the Indonesian
state continues to grapple with the complex legacy of the Banda
Islands, where plantation instrumentality became thoroughly
enmeshed with cultural relations to place. A new challenge looms
under the rubric of ‘world heritage’ – yet
another enterprise to envisage landscape, and one which threatens
to exalt the former plantations at the expense of contemporary
life.
Slavery on the Australian Frontier
Peter Read
Accusations of slavery in Aboriginal far northern
pastoral stations reached a crescendo in the early nineteen
thirties. They coincided with several other major concerns by
Australian and international bodies such as the Anti-Slavery
Society and the Society for the Protection of Native Races.
These other concerns included accusations of police killings
and brutality, biased court procedures and failure to police
the boundaries of reserves. By the beginning of the Second World
War almost all these latter injustices had been addressed to
a greater or less degree.
But conditions on the pastoral stations did not
improve. Why not?
Historical representation and
recording of child slaves on the sugar plantations of the British
West Indies
Jerome Teelucksingh
My proposed paper will examine the historical
representation and recording of child slaves on the sugar plantations
of the British West Indies. Children in slavery were usually
a result of one or both parents being slaves, be it in the field,
factory or
plantation. Certain questions will be addressed were they accorded
special status ? How important was the role of children during
slavery ? The historiography on the British West Indian slavery
tends to overlook or downplay the prevalence of child slavery
on the plantations. Female slaves were viewed by planters primarily
as potential child-bearers and they were thus treated differently
from their male counterparts.
Like poor galley slaves': convict transportation
and the slavery question
Hamish Maxwell-Stewart
Despite the fact that convicts were not chattel
slaves there has been a long history of attempts to draw parallels
between these two types of enforced migration and labour exploitation.
This paper will examine some of the analogies that have been
drawn by convicts, observers of penal transportation and subsequent
historians. It will argue that while there are important distinctions
between the two conditions, comparative analysis is both warranted
and highly informative.
Slave traders, Abolitionists, and
Convict Transportation
Emma Christopher
In 1790 the arrival of the Second Fleet in New
South Wales shocked the fledgling colony to the core. The people
were diseased, naked and starving, and right away the allegations
as to their condition centred on the fact that the fleet had
been contracted by the London slave trading firm of Camden,
Calvert and King. What is more, the ship with the worst death
rate of all was captained by a former slave trader, Donald Trail.
An observer wrote to William Wilberforce stating that “the
slave trade is merciful compared with what I have seen in this
fleet.”
Back in Britain, however, Wilberforce was seemingly
reluctant to get involved. When Trail eventually stood trial
for the murder of convicts and crew on board his vessel, it
was because of the campaigning of another man. Wilberforce and
other abolitionists were in court when Trail was tried, but
they were there to see the prosecution of John Kimber, who was
charged with having murdered a slave girl on his ship Recovery.
Using trial transcripts, newspaper reports, and
print imagery, this paper will examine not just these two trials,
but the larger attitudes of the abolitionists towards convict
transportation to Australia. It will examine how humanitarianism,
Enlightenment theories, racial thinking, and simple expedience
intertwined to form the abolitionists’ policy towards
these two very different forms of forced migration in the twenty
years from 1788-1808.
Images of Slavery in Post-Emancipation
Society: Martinique’s Statue to the Empress Josephine
Laurence Brown
Erected in 1859 and decapitated in 1991, the statue to the Empress
Josephine in the Savane of Fort-de-France is one of Martinique’s
best-known landmarks. This paper uses the construction of the
statue to explore the tensions shaping the rememberance of slavery
in post-emancipation Martinique. Like images of General Lee
across the US south, the monument to Josephine was erected to
celebrate the aristocratic values and paternalism of the white
plantocracy, as well as to physically represent the restoration
of order and racial hierarchy in the wake of emancipation. However,
such a visual representation of slavery took on new meanings
in the extreme political and social conflicts which racked Martinique
during the 1850s.
Legacies of the Amistad
Maria Suzette Fernandes Dias
Treated by some historians as a footnote to the
history of Trans-Atlantic slavery, viewed by others “an
icon representing the struggle for equality” (Snediker),
the Amistad incident has aroused, in the recent years, a lot
of public interest … and considerable controversy over
its interpretation. By presenting the different visual and textual
legacies of the Amistad, this paper will examine the challenges
involved in visually representing, historicising and fictionalising
slavery and the looming danger of losing the past to the ideological
requirements of agencies that shape historical memory.
