Class PPT

This week please choose 1 primary source and 1 secondary reading.

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?

Primary source exercise: EITHER:

Choose ONE interesting image from:

Dale Tomich et al, Reconstructing the Landscapes of Slavery.: A Visual History of the Plantation in the Nineteenth-Century Atlantic World. Take a note of the page number for us to analyse together in class. Think about questions like: How do the authors use the image to explore enslavers' use of space during the second slavery? How effective is the authors' analysis? What is left out of the images? How might we use other kinds of sources to explore these 'silences'?

OR: 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]

• 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)
• 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]
• Julius Scott, The Common Wind: Afro-American Currents in the Age of Revolution, chapter 2 (e books @ library) (classic reference on Caribbean mobilities)

Further reading:

• 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
• 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"