85 p., This thesis examines the practice of Obeah--an Afro-Caribbean system of healing, harming, and divination through the use of spiritual powers--within two slave communities in Berbice and Demerara (British Guiana). This study is based primarily on legal documents--including testimony from more than a dozen slaves--generated during the criminal trials of two men accused of practicing Obeah in 1819 and 1821-22. In contrast to most previous studies of Obeah, which have been based largely on descriptions provided by British observers, this project takes advantage of this complex, overlapping body of evidence to explore the social dynamics of Obeah as experienced by enslaved men and women themselves, including Obeah practitioners, their clients, and other witnesses. This study reveals that Obeah rituals could be extremely violent, that Obeah practitioners were feared as well as respected among their contemporaries, that the authority of Obeah practitioners was based on demonstrable success, and that slave communities in general were complex social worlds characterized by conflict and division as well as by support and unity--conclusions that combine to produce a fresh, humane vision of Afro-diasporan culture and community under slavery.
Prime Minister Baldwin Spencer on Saturday. August 1 urged citizens to ensure that the horrible and dehumanising system of slavery is never allowed to happen again while encouraging closerunity between the Caribbean Community (CARICOM) and Africa. "Therefore celebrating our Emancipation should inspire us to unite as citistens of the Caribbean to ensure that we never allow ourselves to be subjected to any form of slavery^'Spencer said in a message marking the 175th anniversary of the end of slavery.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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319 p., Africans in Jamaica developed and exhibited a multiplicity of cultural identities and a complex set of relationships amongst themselves, reflective of their varied cultural, political, social, and physical origins. In the context of late-18th and early-19th century Buff Bay, Jamaica, most Africans were enslaved by whites to serve as laborers on plantations. However, a smaller group of Africans emerged from enslavement on plantations to form their own autonomous Maroon communities, alongside the plantation context and within the system of slavery. These two groups, enslaved Africans and Maroons, had a very complex set of relationship and identities that were fluid and constantly negotiated within the Jamaican slave society that was in turn hostile to both groups.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
560 p, Describes the ways Jews imagined and treated Blacks during the first three centuries of the Atlantic slave trade and European colonialism. Using many previously unexamined sources, it goes beyond mere inter-ethnic polemics to lay out for the first time the scope of Jewish anti-Blackness in places such as Portugal, the Ottoman Empire, Italy, Amsterdam and the Caribbean. Readers will see that Jewish attitudes and behavior remained barely distinguishable from general European trends, hardly benign, but far less intense.
Here is a big bomb. What people need to do is to examine the number of people who list themselves as Negro in Central and South American countries. Then cultural shock sets in. Spain imported in its possessions, Negroes by the thousands. Mexico, Peru, Panama, Columbia, and Argentina, all had large Negro populations. Today many of these Negroes have assimilated into the population, and are no longer distinguished as Negroes.
211 p., Explores the similarities and differences which characterize the depiction of people of color in certain representative 19th century Cuban and Brazilian slavery novels as a function of the authorial approach of each territory's literary tradition toward the issues of slavery, racial prejudice, and people of color. The selected texts, derived from the peak periods in slavery literature of each territory, include Francisco , by Anselmo Snárez y Romero; Sab , by Gertrudis Gómez de Avellaneda; Cecilia Valdés , by Cirilo Villaverde; A escrava Isaura , by Bernardo Guimarães; O mulato , by Aluísio Azevedo; and Bom-Crioulo , by Adolfo Caminha. While the present study explores the enslavement, abuse, and discrimination of people of color as a consequence of a deep-seated discourse of power, privilege and racial superiority, it focuses more extensively on the representation of people of color, particularly in their capacity to constructively appropriate the cultural values of the white dominant group and recognize their identity as ambiguous.
225 p., Drawing attention to poets whose writing on this subject has received little critical attention, this study examines contemporary poetry of the black Atlantic in particular focusing on work by Kwame Dawes, David Dabydeen, Lucille Clifton, and Elizabeth Alexander. In exploring poetic treatment of the Middle Passage, primarily through the lyric, epic, and long poem, the author identifies four interrelated poetics that reveal the dynamism of this legacy: lamentation, retribution, rupture, and re-membering. While critical analysis of texts that rewrite slave experiences has tended to focus on narrative, and that primarily on plantation slavery, "Sea of Bones" advocates attention to the way black Atlantic poetry renders the Middle Passage as a complicated and haunting personal heritage.
One way the Spanish used to make money like the British in New York was to rent slaves which was called Half Slavery to Freedom. In New York, the master would allow the slave to be free as long as the slave paid a yearly fee to the master. In the Spanish possessions, a slave master would rent his slaves to people who had need of their labor. This means the master did not have to be accountable, or responsible for the upkeep of the slave or the actions of the slave. Either way it was dehumanizing for the slave.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
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2 vols. (564 p.), Drawing heavily on Inquisition sources, this book rereads race, religion and politics among three newly and incompletely Christianized groups in the 17th-century Iberian Atlantic world: Judeoconversos, Afroiberians and Amerindians.
