Examines in the transnational conversation on the place of Afro-descendants in the republican nation-state that occurred in New-World historical literature during the 19th century. Tracing the evolution of republican thought in the Americas from the classical liberalism of the independence period to the more democratic forms of government that took hold in the late 1800s, the pages that follow will chart the circulation of ideas regarding race and republican citizenship in the Atlantic World during the long nineteenth century, the changes that those ideas undergo as they circulate, and the racialized tensions that surface as they move between and among Europe and various locations throughout the Americas. Focusing on a diverse group of writers--including the anonymous Cuban author of Jicoténcal; the North Americans Thomas Jefferson, James Fenimore Cooper, and Mary Mann; the Argentines Domingo Faustino Sarmiento and Eduarda Mansilla de García; the Dominican Manuel de Jesús Galván; the Haitian Émile Nau; and the Brazilian Euclides da Cunha.
233 p., Analyzes three contemporary novels by Black women authors to argue that their daughter-protagonists gain a sense of their own subjectivities as women of African descent through their imaginative and creative responses to their respective muted paternal histories and legacies. These responses motivate the creation of ritualistic art forms rooted in communal practices such as storytelling, sculpting, music, dance-drama, folk medicine, and traditional cuisine. Maps the centrality of family, community, rituals, and art to the development of female subjectivity as represented in Marilene Felinto's As mulheres de Tijucopapo / The Women of Tijucopapo , Edwidge Danticat's The Dew Breaker , and Gayl Jones's Corregidora.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
274 p., Explores a broad range of power relationships and struggles for authority in the early 19th century British Atlantic, focusing on the Caribbean colony of Berbice. I aim to understand how enslaved people and their enslavers negotiated their relationships and forged their lives within multiple, interconnected networks of power in a notoriously brutal society. Focuses on politics and culture writ large and small, zooming in to see the internal conflicts, practices, and hierarchies that governed individual plantations, communities, and families; and zooming out to explore the various ways that imperial officials, colonial administrators, and metropolitan antislavery activists tried to shape Caribbean area slavery during the era of amelioration-a crucial period of transformation in the Atlantic world. Sources used include travel narratives, trial records, missionary correspondence, and official government documents. Most important are the records of the Berbice fiscals and protectors of slaves, officials charged with hearing enslaved peoples' grievances and enforcing colonial laws.
