Slavery Behind the Wall: An Archaeology of a Cuban Coffee Plantation

Theresa A. Singleton, "Slavery Behind the Wall: An Archaeology of a Cuban Coffee Plantation"


2015 | ISBN-10: 0813060729 | 224 pages | PDF | 3 MB

Cuba had the largest slave society of the Spanish colonial empire and thus the most plantations. The lack of archaeological data for interpreting these sites is a glaring void in slavery and plantation studies. Theresa Singleton helps to fill this gap with the presentation of the first archaeological investigation of a Cuban plantation written by an English speaker. At Santa Ana de Biajacas, where the plantation owner sequestered slaves behind a massive masonry wall, Singleton explores how elite Cuban planters used the built environment to impose a hierarchical social order upon slave laborers. Behind the wall, slaves reclaimed the space as their own, forming communities, building their own houses, celebrating, gambling, and even harboring slave runaways. What emerged there is not just an identity distinct from other NorthAmerican and Caribbean plantations, but a unique slave culture that thrived despite a spartan lifestyle. SingletonAEs study provides insight into the larger historical context of the African diaspora, global patterns of enslavement, and the development of Cuba as an integral member of the larger Atlantic World.

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How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses [Repost]

How Race Is Made: Slavery, Segregation, and the Senses by Mark M. Smith


English | Feb. 20, 2006 | ISBN: 080783002X | 208 Pages | PDF | 1.28 MB

For at least two centuries, argues Mark Smith, white southerners used all of their senses–not just their eyes–to construct racial difference and define race. His provocative analysis, extending from the colonial period to the mid-twentieth century, shows how whites of all classes used the artificial binary of "black" and "white" to justify slavery and erect the political, legal, and social structure of segregation. Based on painstaking research, How Race Is Made is a highly original, always frank, and often disturbing book. After enslaved Africans were initially brought to America, the offspring of black and white sexual relationships (consensual and forced) complicated the purely visual sense of racial typing. As mixed-race people became more and more common and as antebellum race-based slavery and then postbellum racial segregation became central to southern society, white southerners asserted that they could rely on their other senses–touch, smell, sound, and taste–to identify who was "white" and who was not. Sensory racial stereotypes were invented and irrational, but at every turn, Smith shows, these constructions of race, immune to logic, signified difference and perpetuated inequality. Smith argues that the history of southern race relations and the construction of racial difference on which that history is built cannot be understood fully on the basis of sight alone. In order to come to terms with the South"s past and present, Smith says, we must explore the sensory dynamics underpinning the deeply emotional construction of race. How Race Is Made takes a bold step toward that understanding.

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Hell Without Fires: Slavery, Christianity, and the Antebellum Spiritual Narrative

Hell Without Fires: Slavery, Christianity, and the Antebellum Spiritual Narrative (History of African-American Religions) by YOLANDA PIERCE


English | Mar. 12, 2005 | ISBN: 081302806X | 168 Pages | PDF | 590.86 KB

Hell Without Fires examines the spiritual and earthly results of conversion to Christianity for African-American antebellum writers. Using autobiographical narratives, the book shows how black writers transformed the earthly hell of slavery into a "New Jerusalem," a place they could call home.             Yolanda Pierce insists that for African Americans, accounts of spiritual conversion revealed "personal transformations with far-reaching community effects. A personal experience of an individual"s relationship with God is transformed into the possibility of liberating an entire community." The process of conversion could result in miraculous literacy, "callings" to preach, a renewed resistance to the slave condition, defiance of racist and sexist conventions, and communal uplift.             These stories by five of the earliest antebellum spiritual writers–George White, John Jea, David Smith, Solomon Bayley, and Zilpha Elaw–create a new religious language that merges Christian scripture with distinct retellings of biblical stories, with enslaved people of African descent at their center. Showing the ways their language exploits the levels of meaning of words like master, slavery, sin, and flesh, Pierce argues that the narratives address the needs of those who attempted to transform a foreign god and religion into a personal and collective system of beliefs. The earthly "hell without fires"–one of the writer"s characterizations of everyday life for those living in slavery–could become a place where an individual could be both black and Christian, and religion could offer bodily and psychological healing.             Pierce presents a complex and subtle assessment of the language of conversion in the context of slavery. Her work will be important to those interested in the topics of slave religion and spiritual autobiography and to scholars of African American and early American literature and religion.                

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