Enslavement and resistance: a spatial approach

Class PPT

This week please choose 1 (very short, easy!) primary source and 1 secondary reading:

Primary source exercise: Choose ONE interesting excerpt from:

Louis Perez Jr, ed. Slaves, Sugar and Colonial Society: Travel Accounts of Cuba, 1801-1899

We will analyse it together in class; note the page number and think about: What was the relationship between travel and slavery? How did travellers describe and experience Cuban spaces and journeys? What did they see and what did they fail to see? What was their racial, class and identity positioning?

Then choose ONE of:

• Finch, Aisha. Rethinking Slave Rebellion in Cuba: La Escalera and the Insurgencies of 1841-1844. University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Chapter 2, “Rural Slave Networks and Insurgent Geographies,” pp. 51-78 [and e-book at library]

• Mariana Muaze, Inside the Big House: Slavery, Rationalisation of Domestic Slavery and the Construction of a New <em>Habitus </em>on Brazilian Coffee Plantations during the Second Slavery," in Global Plantations in the Modern World: Sovereignties, Ecologies, Afterlives (Palgrave Macmillan 2023), pp. 155-176.
• Flavio Santos dos Gomes, "Quilombos of Rio de Janeiro in the Nineteenth Century," in Freedom by a Thread: The History of Quilombos in Brazil, eds. Joao Jose Reis and Flavio dos Santos Gomes (Diasporic Africa Press, 2017) [first published in Portuguese in 1996]

Seminar Questions

• How did enslavers use space to subjugate enslaved people?
• How was this spatial subjugation different for men and women? Africans and Creoles? Plantations versus cities?
• How did the enslaved forge alternative uses and interpretations of space and of movement?
• How can historians use spatial history to offer new accounts of the history of slavery?

Further reading:

• Camp, Stephanie, Closer to Freedom:Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. UNC Press, Introduction (key text on enslavers' and enslaved people's uses of space)
• Camillia Cowling, "The People of All Kinds who Walk Along the Lines": The Precarious Mobilities of Unfree Workers on Cuba's Early Railroads," Slavery & Abolition, 44:3 (2023): 456-7
• Julius Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of Revolution, chapter 2 (e books @ library) (classic reference on Caribbean mobilities)
• Zephyr Frank, "Layers, Flows, and Intersections: Jeronymo Jose de Mello and Artisan Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1840s-1880s," Journal of Social History, 41:2 (2007) [hard to tell from the title but this is a really interesting piece about how slaveholding, wealth, social status can be 'mapped' onto the city streets (using GIS mapping techniques) over time - good for those planning essays on Brazilian urban slavery in general, as well as spatial history]

• Lorena Tezanos Toral, "The Architecture of Nineteenth-Century Cuban Sugar Mills: Creole Power and African Resistance in Late Colonial Cuba," PhD diss., CUNY, 2015, chapter 5, "Appropriation and Resistance: The Afro-Cuban Lived Experience," 195-132.
• Katherine McKittrick, ed., Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle [again, US- focused but useful overview of field of black feminist geographies]
• Mimi Sheller and John Urry, "The New Mobilities Paradigm," Environment and Planning A 38:2 (2006) [a useful think piece]
• Camillia Cowling, "Teresa Mina's Journeys: 'Slave-Moving', Mobility, and Gender in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Cuba." Atlantic Studies, 18:1 (2021): 7-30
• Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard University Press, 2013), chapter 3, "The Steamboat Sublime"