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Term Two: Week 5: Slave culture

Gobbets
  • Northup Ch 15
  • Ball Ch 9 & 14
  • Kemble extracts
Other Sources

Thomas Wentworth Higginson, Negro Spirituals (1867)

Harris, Joel Chandler, Nights with Uncle Remus 

Questions

How much slave culture was permissible on the plantations? How did slaves defend their culture from whites? What was the meaning of slave songs? Why were dances and parties so important to slave life?

Core Reading
  • Blassingame, John W., The slave community: plantation life in the antebellum South. 
  • White, Shane and Graham, ' "Us likes and Mixtery": Listening to American American Slave Music' S & A, 20 (1999) 22-48
E-resources
Further reading
  • Owens, L., This species of property: slave life and culture in the old South.(1 copy in SRC)
  • Levine, Lawrence W., Black culture and black consciousness: Afro-American thought from slavery to freedom. (3 copies in SRC)
  • Stuckey, Sterling, Slave culture, nationalist theory and the foundations of black America 
  • Tate, Thad, Race and family in the colonial South
  • Singleton, Theresa, I too am America: Contributions to African American Archaeology
  • Gomez, Michael, Exchanging our Country Marks: The Transformation of African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South
  • Weinstein, Allen, American Negro slavery (pt 3)
  • Harris, J. William, [ed.], Society and culture in the slave South. 
  • Palmie, Stephen, [ed], Slave cultures and the cultures of slavery.
  • Joyner, Charles, Down by the riverside: a South Carolina slave community. 
  • Webber, Thomas, Deep like the rivers, education in the slave quarter community (pt 2/3)
  • Hudson, L, Working towards freedom, slave society and domestic economy in the Am. South 
  • Abrahams, Roger, Singing the master, the emergence of African American culture in the plantation South 
  • Abrahams, Roger, Afro-American folktale: stories from black traditions in the New World 
  • Fisher, Miles, Negro slave songs in the US 
  • Work, John, American negro songs and spirituals 
  • Crowley, Daniel, African folklore in the New World 
  • Dorson, Richard, American Folklore 
  • Finnegan, Ruth, Oral Literature in Africa 
  • Peterson, K. & Rutherford, A (eds), Cowries & Kobos: The W. African Oral Tale and Short Story 
  • Puckett, Neubel, Folk beliefs of the Southern Negro 
  • Shaw, Arnold, Black popular music in America 
  • Sidron, Ben, Black Talk 
  • Small, C, Music of the Common Tongue: Survival & Celebration in African American Music 
  • Jackson, Bruce, The negro and his folklore 
  • Botkin, Bruce, Treasury of American Folklore 
  • Harris, Joel Chandler, Brer Rabbit