App Store

Google Play

SE - Details page - Device banner - 894x1036

Kliv in i en oändlig värld av stories

Lyssna när som helst, var som helst

Over the long nineteenth century, African-descended peoples used the uncertainties and possibilities of emancipation to stake claims to freedom, equality, and citizenship. In the process, people of color transformed the contours of communities, nations, and the Atlantic World. Although emancipation was an Atlantic event, it has been studied most often in geographically isolated ways. The justification for such local investigations rests in the notion that imperial and national contexts are essential to understanding slaving regimes. Just as the experience of slavery differed throughout the Atlantic World, so too did the experience of emancipation, as enslaved people’s paths to freedom varied depending on time and place.

With the essays in this volume, historians contend that emancipation was not something that simply happened to enslaved peoples but rather something in which they actively participated. By viewing local experiences through an Atlantic framework, the contributors reveal how emancipation was both a shared experience across national lines and one shaped by the particularities of a specific nation. Their examination uncovers, in detail, the various techniques employed by people of African descent across the Atlantic World, allowing a broader picture of their paths to freedom.

Contributors: Ikuko Asaka, Caree A. Banton, Celso Thomas Castilho, Gad Heuman, Martha S. Jones, Philip Kaisary, John Garrison Marks, Paul J. Polgar, James E. Sanders, Julie Saville, Matthew Spooner, Whitney Nell Stewart, and Andrew N. Wegmann.

University of Georgia Press

Race in the Atlantic World, 1700–1900 Ser.

Race and Nation in the Age of Emancipations

Marcus P. Nevius

City of Refuge is a story of petit marronage, an informal slave’s economy, and the construction of internal improvements in the Great Dismal Swamp of Virginia and North Carolina. The vast wetland was tough terrain that most white Virginians and North Carolinians considered uninhabitable. Perceived desolation notwithstanding, black slaves fled into the swamp’s remote sectors and engaged in petit marronage, a type of escape and fugitivity prevalent throughout the Atlantic world. An alternative to the dangers of flight by way of the Underground Railroad, maroon communities often neighbored slave-labor camps, the latter located on the swamp’s periphery and operated by the Dismal Swamp Land Company and other companies that employed slave labor to facilitate the extraction of the Dismal’s natural resources. Often with the tacit acceptance of white company agents, company slaves engaged in various exchanges of goods and provisions with maroons—networks that padded company accounts even as they helped to sustain maroon colonies and communities.

In his examination of life, commerce, and social activity in the Great Dismal Swamp, Marcus P. Nevius engages the historiographies of slave resistance and abolitionism in the early American republic. City of Refuge uses a wide variety of primary sources—including runaway advertisements; planters’ and merchants’ records, inventories, letterbooks, and correspondence; abolitionist pamphlets and broadsides; county free black registries; and the records and inventories of private companies—to examine how American maroons, enslaved canal laborers, white company agents, and commission merchants shaped, and were shaped by, race and slavery in an important region in the history of the late Atlantic world.

City of Refuge: Slavery and Petit Marronage in the Great Dismal Swamp, 1763–1856

Robin Mitchell

Even though there were relatively few people of color in postrevolutionary France, images of and discussions about black women in particular appeared repeatedly in a variety of French cultural sectors and social milieus. In Vénus Noire, Robin Mitchell shows how these literary and visual depictions of black women helped to shape the country’s postrevolutionary national identity, particularly in response to the trauma of the French defeat in the Haitian Revolution.

Vénus Noire explores the ramifications of this defeat in examining visual and literary representations of three black women who achieved fame in the years that followed. Sarah Baartmann, popularly known as the Hottentot Venus, represented distorted memories of Haiti in the French imagination, and Mitchell shows how her display, treatment, and representation embodied residual anger harbored by the French. Ourika, a young Senegalese girl brought to live in France by the Maréchal Prince de Beauvau, inspired plays, poems, and clothing and jewelry fads, and Mitchell examines how the French appropriated black female identity through these representations while at the same time perpetuating stereotypes of the hypersexual black woman. 

Finally, Mitchell shows how demonization of Jeanne Duval, longtime lover of the poet Charles Baudelaire, expressed France’s need to rid itself of black bodies even as images and discourses about these bodies proliferated. The stories of these women, carefully contextualized by Mitchell and put into dialogue with one another, reveal a blind spot about race in French national identity that persists in the postcolonial present.

Vénus Noire: Black Women and Colonial Fantasies in Nineteenth-Century France

In Search of Liberty explores how African Americans, since the founding of the United States, have understood their struggles for freedom as part of the larger Atlantic world. The essays in this volume capture the pursuits of equality and justice by African Americans across the Atlantic World through the end of the nineteenth century, as their fights for emancipation and enfranchisement in the United States continued. This book illuminates stories of individual Black people striving to escape slavery in places like Nova Scotia, Louisiana, and Mexico and connects their eff orts to emigration movements from the United States to Africa and the Caribbean, as well as to Black abolitionist campaigns in Europe. 

By placing these diverse stories in conversation, editors Ronald Angelo Johnson and Ousmane K. Power-Greene have curated a larger story that is only beginning to be told. By focusing on Black internationalism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, In Search of Liberty reveals that Black freedom struggles in the United States were rooted in transnational networks much earlier than the better-known movements of the twentieth century.

In Search of Liberty: African American Internationalism in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World

Andrew N. Wegmann

For decades, scholars have conceived of the coastal city of New Orleans as a remarkable outlier, an exception to nearly every “rule” of accepted U.S. historiography. A frontier town of the circum-Caribbean, the popular image of New Orleans has remained a vestige of North America’s European colonial era rather than an Atlantic city on the southern coast of the United States. 

Beginning with the French founding of New Orleans in 1718 and concluding with the outbreak of the American Civil War in 1861, An American Color seeks to correct this vision. By tracing the impact of racial science, law, and personal reputation and identity through multiple colonial and territorial regimes, it shows how locally born mulâtres in French New Orleans became part of a self-conscious, identifiable community of Creoles of color in the United States. An American Color places this local history in the wider context of the North American continent and the Atlantic world. This book shows that New Orleans and its free population of color did not develop in a cultural, legal, or intellectual vacuum. More than just a study of race and law, this work tells a story of humanity in the Atlantic world, a story of how a people on the French colonial frontier in the mid-eighteenth century became unlikely, accepted parts of a vast political, social, and racial United States without ever leaving home.

An American Color: Race and Identity in New Orleans and the Atlantic World

Michael Lawrence Dickinson

Beginning in the late seventeenth century and concluding with the abolition of the Atlantic slave trade, Almost Dead reveals how the thousands of captives who lived, bled, and resisted in the Black Urban Atlantic survived to form dynamic communities. 

Michael Lawrence Dickinson uses cities with close commercial ties to shed light on similarities, variations, and linkages between urban Atlantic slave communities in mainland America and the Caribbean. The study adopts the perspectives of those enslaved to reveal that, in the eyes of the enslaved, the distinctions were often of degree rather than kind as cities throughout the Black Urban Atlantic remained spaces for Black oppression and resilience. The tenets of subjugation remained all too similar, as did captives’ need to stave off social death and hold on to their humanity. Almost Dead argues that urban environments provided unique barriers to and avenues for social rebirth: the process by which African-descended peoples reconstructed their lives individually and collectively after forced exportation from West Africa. This was an active process of cultural remembrance, continued resistance, and communal survival. It was in these urban slave communities—within the connections between neighbors and kinfolk—that the enslaved found the physical and psychological resources necessary to endure the seemingly unendurable. Whether sites of first arrival, commodification, sale, short-term captivity, or lifetime enslavement, the urban Atlantic shaped and was shaped by Black lives.

Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, 1680-1807

Bonnie A. Lucero

Women’s reproduction, including conception, pregnancy, childbirth, breastfeeding, and other physical acts of motherhood (as well as the rejection of those roles), played a critical role in the evolution and management of Cuba’s population. While existing scholarship has approached Cuba’s demographic history through the lens of migration, both forced and voluntary, Race and Reproduction in Cuba challenges this male-normative perspective by centering women in the first book-length history of reproduction in Cuba.

Bonnie A. Lucero traces women’s reproductive lives, as well as key medical, legal, and institutional interventions influencing them, over four centuries. Her study begins in the early colonial period with the emergence of the island’s first charitable institutions dedicated to relieving poor women and abandoned white infants. The book’s centerpiece is the long nineteenth century, when elite interventions in women’s reproduction hinged not only on race but also legal status. It ends in 1965 when Cuba’s nascent revolutionary government shifted away from enforcing antiabortion laws that had historically targeted impoverished women of color.

Questioning how elite demographic desires—specifically white population growth and nonwhite population management—shaped women’s reproduction, Lucero argues that elite men, including judges, physicians, philanthropists, and public officials, intervened in women’s reproductive lives in racially specific ways. Lucero examines how white supremacy shaped tangible differences in the treatment of women and their infants across racial lines and outlines how those reproductive outcomes were crucial in sustaining racial hierarchies through moments of tremendous political, economic, and social change.

Race and Reproduction in Cuba

Richard Price

Sally Price

For more than four centuries, communities of maroons (men and women who escaped slavery) dotted the fringes of plantation America, from Brazil through the Caribbean to the United States. Today their descendants still form semi-independent enclaves—in Jamaica, Brazil, Colombia, Belize, Suriname, Guyane, and elsewhere—remaining proud of their maroon origins and, in some cases, faithful to unique cultural traditions forged during the earliest days of Afro-American history. 

In 1986, expelled by the military regime of Suriname, anthropologists Richard and Sally Price turned to neighboring Guyane (French Guiana), where thousands of Maroons were taking refuge from the Suriname civil war. Over the next fifteen years, their conversations with local people convinced them of the need to replace the pervasive stereotypes about Maroons in Guyane with accurate information. In 2003, Les Marrons became a local best seller. In 2020, after a series of further visits, the Prices wrote a new edition taking into account the many rapid changes. 

Available for the first time in English, Maroons in Guyane reviews the history of Maroon peoples in Guyane, explains how these groups differ from one another, and analyzes their current situations in the bustling, multicultural world of this far-flung outpost of the French Republic. A gallery of the magnificent arts of the Maroons completes the volume.

Maroons in Guyane: Past, Present, Future

Léon Chautard

In September 1857, Léon Chautard, Charles Bivors, and Hippolyte Paon arrived in Salem, Massachusetts. These refugees from the French Revolution of 1848 were “homeless, penniless, friendless, strangers in a strange land, among a people of strange speech,” as one of their advocates, the abolitionist William Lloyd Garrison, later put it. The only thing they had was a story to tell—an affecting, yet thrilling story of revolutionary upheaval, forced exile, and hairbreadth escapes over three continents.

Following the June Days uprising in Paris, the three French socialists had been transported first to Algeria, then to Cayenne. After years of hard labor, they had escaped the penal colony and made their way to the United States via British Guiana. These experiences brought them into close contact with the colonial frontiers and slave societies of the Americas. In Salem, Chautard soon published an account of their trials under the title Escapes from Cayenne (1857). His pamphlet, which has long sunk into oblivion, deserves rediscovery. 

Escapes from Cayenne sheds light on the ideological connections between the European “spirit of 1848” and U.S. radical abolitionism and reveals the scope of cosmopolitan solidarities available to fugitives of different national and racial origins in the mid-nineteenth-century Atlantic world. Written in English by a Frenchman, and reminiscent of literary traditions such as the slave narrative and the picaresque novel, it is a tale of adventure as well as a passionate cri de cœurfor universal justice.

Escapes from Cayenne: A Story of Socialism and Slavery in an Age of Revolution and Reaction

Claire Bourhis-Mariotti

Covering the whole of the nineteenth century, Wanted! A Nation! reveals how Haiti remained a focus of attention for white as well as Black Americans before, during, and even after the Civil War. Before the Civil War, Claire Bourhis-Mariotti argues, the Black republic was considered by free Black Americans as a place where full citizenship was at hand. Haiti was essentially viewed and concretely experienced as a refuge during moments when free Black Americans lost hope of obtaining rights in the United States. Haiti is also at the heart of this book, as Haitian leaders supported the American emigration to Haiti (in the 1820s and early 1860s), opposed the American geostrategic and diplomatic diktats in the 1870s and 1880s, and finally offered an international platform to Frederick Douglass at the 1893 Columbian World’s Fair, thus helping Black people who faced discrimination at home to fight first against slavery and the slave trade, and then for equal rights. 

By spanning the entire nineteenth century, Wanted! A Nation! presents a complex panorama of the emergence of African American identity and argues that Haiti should be considered as an essential prism to understand how African Americans forged their identity in the nineteenth century. Drawing on a variety of sources, Wanted! A Nation! goes far beyond the usual framework of national American history and contributes to the writing of an Atlantic and global history of the struggle for equal rights.