Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World

Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World

  • Author: Scully, Pamela; Paton, Diana; Peabody, Sue
  • Publisher: Duke University Press
  • ISBN: 9780822335818
  • eISBN Pdf: 9780822387466
  • Place of publication:  Durham , United States
  • Year of digital publication: 2005
  • Month: October
  • Pages: 392
  • DDC: 306.3/62/097
  • Language: English
This groundbreaking collection provides the first comparative history of gender and emancipation in the Atlantic world. Bringing together essays on the United States, Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, West Africa and South Africa, and the Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean, it shows that emancipation was a profoundly gendered process, produced through connections between race, gender, sexuality, and class. Contributors from the United States, Canada, Europe, the Caribbean, and Brazil explore how the processes of emancipation involved the re-creation of gender identities—the production of freedmen and freedwomen with different rights, responsibilities, and access to citizenship.

Offering detailed analyses of slave emancipation in specific societies, the contributors discuss all of the diverse actors in emancipation: slaves, abolitionists, free people of color, state officials, and slave owners. Whether considering the construction of a postslavery masculine subjectivity in Jamaica, the work of two white U.S. abolitionist women with the Freedmen’s Bureau after the Civil War, freedwomen’s negotiations of labor rights in Puerto Rico, slave women’s contributions to the slow unraveling of slavery in French West Africa, or the ways that Brazilian abolitionists deployed representations of femininity as virtuous and moral, these essays demonstrate the gains that a gendered approach offers to understanding the complex processes of emancipation. Some chapters also explore theories and methodologies that enable a gendered reading of postslavery archives. The editors’ substantial introduction traces the reasons for and patterns of women’s and men’s different experiences of emancipation throughout the Atlantic world.

Contributors. Martha Abreu, Sheena Boa, Bridget Brereton, Carol Faulkner, Roger Kittleson, Martin Klein, Melanie Newton, Diana Paton, Sue Peabody, Richard Roberts, Ileana M. Rodriguez-Silva, Hannah Rosen, Pamela Scully, Mimi Sheller, Marek Steedman, Michael Zeuske

  • Contents
  • Acknowledgments
  • Maps
  • Introduction: Gender andSlave Emancipation in Comparative Perspective
  • Part I: Men, Women, Citizens
    • Masculinity, Citizenship, and the Production ofKnowledge in the Postemancipation Cape Colony, 1834–1844
    • Négresse, Mulâtresse, Citoyenne: Gender and Emancipationin the French Caribbean, 1650–1848
    • Acting as Free Men: Subaltern Masculinities andCitizenship in Postslavery Jamaica
    • Women and Notions of Womanhood inBrazilian Abolitionism
    • A Nation’s Sin: White Women and U.S. Policytoward Freedpeople
  • Part II: Families, Land, and Labor
    • Family Strategies, Gender, and the Shift toWage Labor in the British Caribbean
    • Gender and Emancipationin French West Africa
    • Two Stories of Gender and Slave Emancipation inCienfuegos and Santa Clara, Central Cuba: A Microhistorical Approachto the Atlantic World
    • Libertos and Libertas in the Constructionof the Free Worker in Postemancipation Puerto Rico
  • Part III: The Public Sphere in the Age of Emancipation
    • Philanthropy, Gender, and the Production ofPublic Life in Barbados, ca. 1790–ca. 1850
    • Young Ladies and Dissolute Women: Conflicting Viewsof Culture and Gender in Public Entertainment, Kingstown, St. Vincent,1838–1888
    • Mulatas, Crioulos, and Morenas: Racial Hierarchy, GenderRelations, and National Identity in Postabolition Popular Song:Southeastern Brazil, 1890–1920
    • The Rhetoric of Miscegenation and theReconstruction of Race: Debating Marriage, Sex, and Citizenship inPostemancipation Arkansas
    • Gender and the Politics of the Household inReconstruction Louisiana, 1865–1878
  • Bibliographic Essay
  • Contributors
  • Index

Subjects

SUBSCRIBE TO OUR NEWSLETTER

By subscribing, you accept our Privacy Policy