Academic literature on the topic 'Enslaved'

Abstract: Using a feminist hermeneutic, this essay analyzes three examples of kyriarchal relationships in the New Testament found in stories of women who were enslavers who enslaved women. The first example is from Galatians where Paul rereads the story of Sarah and Hagar and uses the enslaver/enslaved relationship as an allegory. The second example is found in Acts 12, which is the clearest case of a woman enslaver who enslaved a woman: Mary and Rhoda. Finally, I analyze the character of Lydia found in Acts 16 and argue that she is also an enslaver who enslaved women. Each of these biblical characters was entangled in the kyriarchal pyramid of antiquity through their own oppression due to gender, yet they participated in kyriarchy due to status and class. Adding evidence from material culture, I analyze an example of a woman who enslaved another woman as depicted on an ancient funerary monument. This essay also considers the ethical ramifications of biblical texts that endorse slavery and have been used to support white supremacy and systemic oppression.

Abstract Since Stephanie Camp wrote of the “rival” geography that enslaved people created on slave labor plantations, few studies outside the field of architectural history have used the built environment as a source to understand the lives of enslaved people and the mindsets of enslavers in the United States. This article takes adolescent outbuildings in Louisiana (garçonnières) as a starting point to understand how white parents taught and reinforced ideas of dominance over both the environment and enslaved people and simultaneously rooted young white sons to a slave labor plantation “home.” Using architectural evidence, alongside testimony left behind by both enslavers and the enslaved, this article argues that by moving young male enslavers out of the main plantation house and into a separate building, white enslaving parents created a “risk space” for sexual violence within the sexualized geography of the slave labor plantation. The garçonnière, with its privacy and age-and gender-specificity, constituted just one space of increased risk for enslaved women on Louisiana slave labor plantations from a violence that was manipulated within the built environment.

AbstractThis article examines the medical career of an enslaved physician in Virginia named Nassaw from the mid eighteenth-century until the period of the American Revolution. I develop a taxonomy of Nassaw’s labours as a nurse caring for the sick, a healer administering medicines at the behest of his enslaver and as a doctor in his own right making medical judgements as he treated his patients. Nassaw is in some ways comparable to other enslaved healers of African descent in the Atlantic world, including well-known Mohanes and ritual specialists in Brazil and Latin America. However, due to his role as a physician employed by his slaveholder to principally heal other enslaved people, Nassaw struggled to find satisfaction in his labours as a healer as other enslaved people rightly perceived him as an agent of their enslaver whose medical work healed their bodies while extending their oppression. I argue that Nassaw became frustrated and depressed, and turned to drinking because of his inability to pursue or experience what Sharla M. Fett terms a ‘relational vision of health’ in the Chesapeake. Moreover, I interpret his drinking as a rebuke to the racist pretensions of his enslaver – who instructed him in pharmacy and surgery – who aimed to transform Nassaw into an Enlightened ‘black exhibit’ by training him to be a doctor. I conclude by returning to how precisely different Nassaw was from other enslaved healers in the Chesapeake like Tom of Nomini Hall or Romeo, and make the case that Nassaw deserves a place in histories of slavery and medicine precisely because he was an enslaved plantation doctor rather than a popular healer or conjuror.

ABSTRACT This article offers a new history of slavery in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania: how enslaved men and women were brought to Bethlehem, who owned these enslaved men and women, how some became free, and whether the lives of enslaved Moravians differed from those of free Moravians. The prevailing account states that the Moravian congregation itself purchased enslaved men and women soon after Bethlehem was settled to augment its labor force. But most Afro-Moravians got to Bethlehem, this article shows, through a haphazard process that the congregation did not manage: enslavers (Moravians elsewhere) sent men, women, and children to Bethlehem or brought them when they moved to the backcountry community. Moravian authorities claimed that there was “no difference” in Bethlehem between these enslaved people and White Moravians. The archive that the congregation produced tends to reinforce that view: church registers, membership catalogs, diaries, and memoirs are mostly silent, for instance, about individuals’ legal status. But amplifying voices that have been overlooked of enslaved and free Afro-Moravians, as well as exploring the neglected 1780 Register of enslaved persons in Northampton County, reveals that differences based on race shaped the lives of people of African descent in Bethlehem and Northampton County’s other Moravian communities.

In 1549, Juana Gelofa Pelona, an enslaved African woman, was a witness in a legal case in the city of Santo Domingo, on the island of Hispaniola. The defendant, Francisco Bravo, was accused of killing his wife, Catalina de Tinoco, and presented Juana as his witness to testify on his behalf. Both Francisco and Catalina had been Juana’s enslavers; and, Catalina's family, in whose possession Juana had lived for multiple generations, warned her not to testify in favor of Francisco. Nonetheless, she testified with conviction, despite being threatened and punished severely by her new enslavers who resolved to sell her to another enslaver in a different city to avoid her continuous defiance of Catalina’s family in court. This article proposes that Juana orchestrated her own sale to rid herself of her new owners who wanted to convince her at all cost not to say what she knew. The article also documents aspects of everyday life in sixteenth-century Santo Domingo by highlighting details shared by the witnesses,

In genealogy, tracing names and dates is often the initial goal, but, for many, desire soon turns to learning about the embodied lives of those who came before them. This type of texture is hard for any genealogist to locate, but excruciatingly hard for those seeking to trace family histories that include ancestors who were enslaved in the northern parts of the colonies that would become the United States. Often, records thin to nearly nothing and frame all lived experiences through the lens of an enslaver. This is true especially of public records, created, maintained, and curated by the state apparatus. By adhering to the proposition that even materials that do not immediately reveal much about Black life may be useful if we consider what is missing and left out, this article suggests that these types of documents might help breathe some fullness into the individual and collective lives of those Black ancestors whose humanity the state denied. Emerging from a larger project to locate stories and histories of Black residents of one of the first colonized spaces in British North America, this article focuses on the ways in which the publicly available Massachusetts pre-1850 Vital Records—which have specific “Negroes” sections—serve as an unexpected source of useful, if fragmentary, evidence of not only individual lives, but collective histories of the communities in which Black ancestors lived. Highlighting creative approaches to analyzing these particular vital records, and centering women’s lives throughout, this article demonstrates what is possible to learn about patterns of childbearing, relationships between and among enslaved persons owned by different families, the nature of religious lives or practices, relationships between enslavers and enslaved, and the movements, over time, of individuals and families. Alongside these possibilities, the violence, limitations, and challenges of the vital records are identified, including issues related to Afro-indigenous persons, the conflation of birth and baptismal records, and differential access to details of the lives of enslaved men vs. women.

Abstract The Epistle of Jude has been examined by biblical scholars for a variety of reasons in recent decades, but one still underexplored interpretative avenue is Jude’s treatment of enslavement. In this article, I argue that Jude pulls from the same conceptual toolbox as many other texts of the Roman republican and imperial eras in its depiction of believers as enslaved people (δοῦλοι) and Jesus as an enslaver (κύριος; δɛσπότης). After placing these three terms in the context of ancient enslavement, I offer three examples of Jude’s participation in a broader discourse of enslavement: (1) the importance of loyalty and disloyalty to Jesus the κύριος; (2) the capability of the enslaver to harm and control the bodies of the enslaved, and (3) the presumption of the benevolence of the κύριος in offering mercy. This reading of Jude highlights how deeply embedded even a short New Testament text can be in the vocabulary, stereotypes, and normalization of violence of Roman enslavement.

Abstract The 1833 Slavery Abolition Act provided for the gradual emancipation of eight hundred thousand human beings. It also confirmed the sovereignty of King-in-Parliament over all people residing in British dominions and resolved a long-standing dispute over whether enslaved people were private property or royal subjects entitled to legal safeguards. This debate first emerged in the late eighteenth century but acquired additional urgency following the 1807 abolition of the slave trade, when attempts to mitigate slavery through the enactment of ameliorative statutes and procedural reforms encouraged enslaved people to petition magistrates for redress in cases of abuse. Slaves vigorously defended their newly granted rights to bodily protection, sustenance, and family preservation through the instigation of legal complaints against overseers, managers, and slave owners. By the 1820s, enslaved litigants across Britain’s empire were publicly and collectively petitioning colonial magistrates to intercede on their behalf. The judicialization of quotidian battles over the terms of enslavement refashioned colonial social relations, affirmed enslaved people’s status as British subjects, and generated volumes of case files that circulated back to the metropole, where the Colonial Office cited them in critical assessments of slave law and where abolitionists used them to press for immediate emancipation. Enslaved people’s legal activism was operationally antislavery; it eroded the power of colonial enslavers and prodded Parliament to pass the 1833 Abolition Act.

Abstract: Histories of maritime marronage in the Lesser Antilles—the Danish, Dutch, English, French, and Swedish islands in the eastern Caribbean—have often centered on young enslaved men escaping alone aboard intercontinental vessels anchored in the region's port towns. Scholars have paid less attention to the enslaved men, women, and children who escaped their enslavers on one of the many small open boats that were decisive for sustaining life in the region. The ubiquity of small-boat infrastructure in the Lesser Antilles, the complex legal regime put in place to regulate it, and the affordances—that is, the possibilities of action—provided by small watercraft demonstrate the importance of small-boat flight to slavery's fugitives in the Lesser Antilles. Enslaved people—rural and urban, young and old—knew that they had to collaborate to realize the fugitive force of canoes and other small boats scattered along island shorelines. Indeed, maritime marronage was more often carried out in groups than alone. Through time and political turbulence, the small boat allowed enslaved people to pursue dreams of freedom that had an archipelagic character: proximity facilitated knowledge of conditions on nearby islands and sustained or reestablished friendship and family ties.

This study uses two complementing data types to a). challenge the standard definition of the direct enslaver-enslaved form of bondage in rural Bergen County, New Jersey, and b). hypothesize about the formation of a free Black community around Dunkerhook Road in the same location. The first data type, labeled the “social record,” is the combination of nineteenth-century membership records from the Church of Paramus and personal documents, such as diaries and genealogical data. These data are comparatively analyzed against “official” tax and will data. This study proposes that some of New Jersey’s enslaved Black population were part of a complex social web sharing or renting their bodies and labor to maintain conservative rural Dutch culture. This system benefited white families such as the Zabriskies, Terhunes, and Hoppers during New Jersey’s slow path to emancipation. The surveillance of Black lives by the Dutch family network and limited employment opportunities for the formerly enslaved are possible factors contributing to the rise of the free African American community on Dunkerhook Road, New Jersey.