Enslavement and resistance: a spatial approach

News this week: have you thought about applying for our (new and improved) History MA? Have a look at our History MA Course OverviewLink opens in a new window, GuidanceLink opens in a new window on completing postgraduate applications, and information on fundingLink opens in a new window for PGT students.

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 so you don't need to take lots of time reading it; please 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? How did the travellers actually move around - and how much of this mobility was accessible for enslaved men and women?

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 Habitus 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)
• Nancy Naro, A Slave's Place, a Master's World: Fashioning Dependency in Rural Brazil. Especially chapters 2 (Ordering the Wilderness) and 3 (Fazenda Spaces and Social Relations)
• Sandra Lauderdale Graham House and Street: The Domestic World of Servants and Masters in Nineteenth-Century Rio de Janeiro. University of Texas Press, 1992.
• 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]
• Vincent Brown, Tacky's Revolt: The Story of an Atlantic Slave War; see also accompanying interactive map

• 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 [US- focused but useful overview of field of Black feminist geographies]
• Aisha Finch, "Scandalous Scarcities: Black Slave Women, Plantation Domesticity, and Travel Writing in Nineteenth‐Century Cuba". Journal of historical sociology, 2010 23 (1)

• Camillia Cowling,

  "Teresa Mina's Journeys: 'Slave-Moving', Mobility, and Gender in Mid-Nineteenth-Century Cuba." Atlantic Studies, 18:1 (2021): 7-30
• 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
• Walter Johnson, River of Dark Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (Harvard University Press, 2013), chapter 3, "The Steamboat Sublime"

For some interdisciplinary approaches to thinking about space, place, and mobilities:

• Tim Cresswell, Place: A Short Introduction