AM103 David Lambert 16 November 2015 Humanist vs quantification A cademic scholarship on transatlantic slavery can schematically be divided between two opposed theoretical camps first what may be called the ID: 688322
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Slide1
Slavery:Slave Narratives
AM103
David Lambert
16 November 2015Slide2Slide3
‘Humanist’ vs ‘quantification’‘[A]
cademic
scholarship on transatlantic slavery can schematically be divided between two opposed theoretical camps: first, what may be called the
“humanist
and narrative
historians”
who emphasize the human experience of slavery and the trade slave and whose focus is frequently the gradual abolition of slavery; and, second,
the “quantification historians”
who take a statistical and
macrohistorical
approach and avoid the human aspect, which they associate with a lack of critical
distance’.
Raphael
Hörmann
and
Gesa
Mackenthun
(
eds
),
Human
Bondage in the Cultural Contact
Zone
(2010
), p.
11.Slide4
Quantitative vs qualitative research
'Quantitative research is, as the term suggests, concerned with the collection and analysis of data in numeric form. It tends to emphasize relatively large-scale and representative sets of data, and is often, falsely in our view, presented or perceived as being about the gathering of "facts". Qualitative research, on the other hand, is concerned with collecting and
analysing
information in as many forms, chiefly non-numeric, as possible. It tends to focus on exploring, in as much detail as possible, smaller numbers of instances or examples which are seen as being interesting or illuminating, and aims to achieve "depth" rather than "breadth".'
L.
Blaxter
, C. Hughes and M. Tight,
How to Research
, 1996 , p. 61.Slide5
Enslaved Africans disembarked in the Americas, 1501-1866
Destination
Number
%
of Caribbean sub-total
% of
total for the Americas
British Caribbean
2,318,252
48.32%
22.00%
French Caribbean
1,120,216
23.35%
10.63%
Spanish Caribbean
805,424
16.79%
7.64%
Dutch Caribbean
444,728
9.27%
4.22%
Danish Caribbean
108,998
2.27%
1.03%
Caribbean
sub-total
4,797,618
100.00%
45.53%
Brazil
4,864,374
46.16%
Spanish Mainland
487,488
4.63%
North America
388,747
3.69%
The
Americas - total
10,538,227
100.00%Slide6Slide7Slide8
Olaudah Equiano, or,
Gustavus
Vassa
, the African Slide9
Lecture structureThe slave narrative: InfluencesThe rise of anti-slavery sentimentTypes of slave narratives
Olaudah
Equiano’s
Interesting Narrative
Later forms:
WPA
slave narratives
Neo-slave narrativesSlide10
Influences on the slave narrative: captivity narrativesSlide11
Influences on the slave narrative: petitionary appealsSlide12
Influences on the slave narrative: religious tractsSlide13
Olaudah Equiano, or,
Gustavus
Vassa
, the African Slide14
Influences on the slave narrative:anti-slavery politicsSlide15
Rise of anti-slavery sentimentThe British abolitionist movement emerged from the 1770s because of…
The
evangelical revival, within and beyond the Anglican Church
The Enlightenment (a belief in progress)
The development of Romanticism (ideas of the
‘noble savage’)
The growth of free-
tradismSlide16
Influences on the slave narrative:anti-slavery politicsSlide17
Early slave narratives (1770s-1820s): Tales of religious redemptionSlide18
Early slave narratives (1770s-1820s): Tales of religious redemptionSlide19
Later slave narratives (from 1820s): Antislavery propagandaSlide20
Later slave narratives (from 1820s): Antislavery propagandaSlide21
Later slave narratives (from 1820s): Antislavery propagandaSlide22
Non-anglophone slave narrativesSlide23
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of
Olaudah
Equiano
(1789)Slide24
‘The stench of the hold while we were on the coast was so intolerably loathsome, that it was dangerous to remain there for any time, and some of us had been permitted to stay on the deck for the fresh air; but now that the whole ship's cargo were confined together, it became absolutely pestilential. The closeness of the place, and the heat of the climate, added to the number in the ship, which was so crowded that each had scarcely room to turn himself, almost suffocated us. This produced copious perspirations, so that the air soon became unfit for respiration, from a variety of loathsome smells, and brought on a sickness among the slaves, of which many died, thus falling victims to the improvident avarice, as I may call it, of their purchasers. This wretched situation was again aggravated by the galling of the chains, now become insupportable; and the filth of the necessary tubs, into which the children often fell, and were almost suffocated. The shrieks of the women, and the groans of the dying, rendered the whole a scene of horror almost inconceivable’.
The Interesting Narrative of the Life
of
Olaudah
Equiano, Or
Gustavus
Vassa
…
, pp 51-52 (1794; 9
th
edition).Slide25
The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano (1789)
Themes:
Appeals to the audience
Details the violence of slavery, including sexual abuse
Separation of enslaved families and marriages
Challenges contemporary racist stereotypes
Details impact of slavery on
enslaved people
and owners
Journey from slavery to freedom parallels that from heathenism to Christianity
13 editions in first five years after publication. Republished New York in 1791, and translatedSlide26
WPA slave narratives
The
Works Progress Administration
(WPA) was part of the New Deal
Its Federal Writers’
Project
interviewed
surviving ex-slaves during
1936-38 across
seventeen states
Slave
Narrative
Collection consists of 2300+ interviews with former slavesMost are first-person accounts of slave life and the respondents’ reactions to bondage from early 1860s and beforeSlide27
Interview with George Johnson, Mound Bayou, Mississippi,
September 1941
Interviewer
:
I want you to tell me how you got your name
?
Mr
George Johnson
: I got my name from President Jeff Davis. He was president of the Southern Confederacy. He owned my grandfather and my father. Brought them from Richmond, Virginia. My grandfather was a blacksmith. My father was a young kid,
wasn't
grown. And my father had learned how to write a little bit in Richmond, Virginia, before they brought him down here. Grandpa used to keep chalk in his shop to mark ??? things; and my father take a piece put in his pocket and pass in front master
Jeff's
house he write on the sidewalk. And so one morning master Jeff come by and saw that writing on the walk, he go back and ask the cook, [old lady named (?)]
Meli
,
Meliza
:
“There's
writing on the sidewalk, who writing out there
?”Slide28
Neo-slave narratives‘[
T]
hese
texts illustrate the centrality of the history and the memory of slavery to our individual, racial, gender, cultural, and national identities. Further, they provide a perspective on a host of issues…trauma and traumatic memories; the legacy of slavery (and other atrocities) for subsequent generations; the interconnectedness of constructions of race and gender; the relationship of the body to memory; the agency of the
enslaved’.
Valerie Smith, 'Neo-slave narratives' in
The Cambridge Companion to the African American Slave
Narrative
(2007), pp 168-9.Slide29
Neo-slave narrativesSlide30
Neo-slave narrativesSlide31
(Neo-)slave narratives on film