Manhood Enslaved
Manhood Enslaved

Author: Kenneth Edward Marshall

Publisher: University Rochester Press

Published: 2011

Total Pages: 222

ISBN-13: 1580463932

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Manhood Enslaved reconstructs the lives of three male captives to bring greater intellectual and historical clarity to the muted lives of enslaved peoples in eighteenth- and early nineteenth-century central New Jersey, where blacks were held in bondage for nearly two centuries. The book contributes to an evolving body of historical scholarship arguing that the lives of bondpeople in America were shaped not only by the powerful forces of racial oppression, but also by their own notions of gender. The book uses previously understudied, white-authored, nineteenth-century literature about central New Jersey slaves as a point of departure. Reading beyond the racist assumptions of the authors, it contends that the precarious day-to-day existence of the three protagonists -- Yombo Melick, Dick Melick, and Quamino Buccau (Smock) -- provides revealing evidence about the various elements of "slave manhood" that gave real meaning to their oppressed lives. Kenneth E. Marshall is Assistant Professor of History at the State University of New York at Oswego.

Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South
Contesting Slave Masculinity in the American South

Author: David Stefan Doddington

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2018-07-12

Total Pages: 259

ISBN-13: 1108423981

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Highlights competing masculine values in slave communities and reveals how masculinity shaped resistance, accommodation, and survival.

Slavery, Fatherhood, and Paternal Duty in African American Communities over the Long Nineteenth Century
Slavery, Fatherhood, and Paternal Duty in African American Communities over the Long Nineteenth Century

Author: Libra R. Hilde

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2020-10-01

Total Pages: 411

ISBN-13: 1469660687

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Analyzing published and archival oral histories of formerly enslaved African Americans, Libra R. Hilde explores the meanings of manhood and fatherhood during and after the era of slavery, demonstrating that black men and women articulated a surprisingly broad and consistent vision of paternal duty across more than a century. Complicating the tendency among historians to conflate masculinity within slavery with heroic resistance, Hilde emphasizes that, while some enslaved men openly rebelled, many chose subtle forms of resistance in the context of family and local community. She explains how a significant number of enslaved men served as caretakers to their children and shaped their lives and identities. From the standpoint of enslavers, this was particularly threatening--a man who fed his children built up the master's property, but a man who fed them notions of autonomy put cracks in the edifice of slavery. Fatherhood highlighted the agonizing contradictions of the condition of enslavement, and to be an involved father was to face intractable dilemmas, yet many men tried. By telling the story of the often quietly heroic efforts that enslaved men undertook to be fathers, Hilde reveals how formerly enslaved African Americans evaluated their fathers (including white fathers) and envisioned an honorable manhood.

My Brother Slaves
My Brother Slaves

Author: Sergio Lussana

Publisher: University Press of Kentucky

Published: 2016-05-20

Total Pages: 239

ISBN-13: 0813166969

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Trapped in a world of brutal physical punishment and unremitting, back-breaking labor, Frederick Douglass mused that it was the friendships he shared with other enslaved men that carried him through his darkest days. In this pioneering study, Sergio A. Lussana offers the first in-depth investigation of the social dynamics between enslaved men and examines how individuals living under the conditions of bondage negotiated masculine identities. He demonstrates that African American men worked to create their own culture through a range of recreational pursuits similar to those enjoyed by their white counterparts, such as drinking, gambling, fighting, and hunting. Underscoring the enslaved men's relationships, however, were the sex-segregated work gangs on the plantations, which further reinforced their social bonds. Lussana also addresses male resistance to slavery by shifting attention from the visible, organized world of slave rebellion to the private realms of enslaved men's lives. He reveals how these men developed an oppositional community in defiance of the regulations of the slaveholder and shows that their efforts were intrinsically linked to forms of resistance on a larger scale. The trust inherent in these private relationships was essential in driving conversations about revolution. My Brother Slaves fills a vital gap in our contemporary understanding of southern history and of the effects that the South's peculiar institution had on social structures and gender expression. Employing detailed research that draws on autobiographies of and interviews with former slaves, Lussana's work artfully testifies to the importance of social relationships between enslaved men and the degree to which these fraternal bonds encouraged them to resist.

Rethinking Rufus
Rethinking Rufus

Author: Thomas A. Foster

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2019-05-01

Total Pages: 193

ISBN-13: 0820355224

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Rethinking Rufus is the first book-length study of sexual violence against enslaved men. Scholars have extensively documented the widespread sexual exploitation and abuse suffered by enslaved women, with comparatively little attention paid to the stories of men. However, a careful reading of extant sources reveals that sexual assault of enslaved men also occurred systematically and in a wide variety of forms, including physical assault, sexual coercion, and other intimate violations. To tell the story of men such as Rufus-who was coerced into a sexual union with an enslaved woman, Rose, whose resistance of this union is widely celebrated-historian Thomas A. Foster interrogates a range of sources on slavery: early American newspapers, court records, enslavers' journals, abolitionist literature, the testimony of formerly enslaved people collected in autobiographies and in interviews, and various forms of artistic representation. Foster's sustained examination of how black men were sexually violated by both white men and white women makes an important contribution to our understanding of masculinity, sexuality, the lived experience of enslaved men, and the general power dynamics fostered by the institution of slavery. Rethinking Rufus illuminates how the conditions of slavery gave rise to a variety of forms of sexual assault and exploitation that affected all members of the community.

Dismantling Black Manhood
Dismantling Black Manhood

Author: Daniel P. Black

Publisher: Taylor & Francis

Published: 1997

Total Pages: 200

ISBN-13: 0815328575

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Drawing on documents between 1794 and 1863, shows how the forms and symbols of manhood in pre-colonial West Africa were destroyed by slavery, and how male slaves strove to redefine what it meant to be an adult male in the absence of the communal discussion. Captivity is shown to have erased not only the rites of manhood the functions and activities by which men fulfilled the social roles as warrior, husband, father, and protector. The reconstructed notions included such aspects as sexual performance, absolute patriarchal domination of the household, and the devaluation of and commitments that impinge on independence. They seemed to be largely in place by the time slavery ended, and African-American men carried them into their new status. Annotation copyrighted by Book News, Inc., Portland, OR

Southern Manhood
Southern Manhood

Author: Craig Thompson Friend

Publisher: University of Georgia Press

Published: 2004

Total Pages: 256

ISBN-13: 9780820324234

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Spanning the era from the American Revolution to the Civil War, these nine pathbreaking original essays explore the unexpected, competing, or contradictory ways in which southerners made sense of manhood. Employing a rich variety of methodologies, the contributors look at southern masculinity within African American, white, and Native American communities; on the frontier and in towns; and across boundaries of class and age. Until now, the emerging subdiscipline of southern masculinity studies has been informed mainly by conclusions drawn from research on how the planter class engaged issues of honor, mastery, and patriarchy. But what about men who didn’t own slaves or were themselves enslaved? These essays illuminate the mechanisms through which such men negotiated with overarching conceptions of masculine power. Here the reader encounters Choctaw elites struggling to maintain manly status in the market economy, black and white artisans forging rival communities and competing against the gentry for social recognition, slave men on the southern frontier balancing community expectations against owner domination, and men in a variety of military settings acting out community expectations to secure manly status. As Southern Manhood brings definition to an emerging subdiscipline of southern history, it also pushes the broader field in new directions. All of the essayists take up large themes in antebellum history, including southern womanhood, the advent of consumer culture and market relations, and the emergence of sectional conflict.

Setting Slavery's Limits
Setting Slavery's Limits

Author: Christopher H. Bouton

Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield

Published: 2019-11-20

Total Pages: 207

ISBN-13: 1498579469

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Using slave trials from antebellum Virginia, Christopher H. Bouton offers the first in-depth examination of physical confrontations between slaves and whites. These extraordinary acts of violence brought the ordinary concerns of enslaved Virginians into focus. Enslaved men violently asserted their masculinity, sought to protect themselves and their loved ones from punishment, and carved out their own place within southern honor culture. Enslaved women resisted sexual exploitation and their mistresses. By attacking southern efforts to control their sexuality and labor, bondswomen sought better lives for themselves and undermined white supremacy. Physical confrontations revealed the anxieties that lay at the heart of white antebellum Virginians and threatened the very foundations of the slave regime itself. While physical confrontations could not overthrow the institution of slavery, they helped the enslaved set limits on their owners’ exploitation. They also afforded the enslaved the space necessary to create lives as free from their owners’ influence as possible. When masters and mistresses continually intruded into the lives of their slaves, they risked provoking a violent backlash. Setting Slavery’s Limits explores how slaves of all ages and backgrounds resisted their oppressors and risked everything to fight back.

Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs
Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, and Anxious Patriarchs

Author: Kathleen M. Brown

Publisher: UNC Press Books

Published: 2012-12-01

Total Pages: 518

ISBN-13: 0807838292

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Kathleen Brown examines the origins of racism and slavery in British North America from the perspective of gender. Both a basic social relationship and a model for other social hierarchies, gender helped determine the construction of racial categories and the institution of slavery in Virginia. But the rise of racial slavery also transformed gender relations, including ideals of masculinity. In response to the presence of Indians, the shortage of labor, and the insecurity of social rank, Virginia's colonial government tried to reinforce its authority by regulating the labor and sexuality of English servants and by making legal distinctions between English and African women. This practice, along with making slavery hereditary through the mother, contributed to the cultural shift whereby women of African descent assumed from lower-class English women both the burden of fieldwork and the stigma of moral corruption. Brown's analysis extends through Bacon's Rebellion in 1676, an important juncture in consolidating the colony's white male public culture, and into the eighteenth century. She demonstrates that, despite elite planters' dominance, wives, children, free people of color, and enslaved men and women continued to influence the meaning of race and class in colonial Virginia.

Becoming Human
Becoming Human

Author: Zakiyyah Iman Jackson

Publisher: NYU Press

Published: 2020-05-19

Total Pages: 329

ISBN-13: 1479873624

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Winner, 2021 Gloria E. Anzaldúa Book Prize, given by the National Women's Studies Association Winner, 2021 Harry Levin Prize, given by the American Comparative Literature Association Winner, 2021 Lambda Literary Award in LGBTQ Studies Argues that Blackness disrupts our essential ideas of race, gender, and, ultimately, the human Rewriting the pernicious, enduring relationship between Blackness and animality in the history of Western science and philosophy, Becoming Human: Matter and Meaning in an Antiblack World breaks open the rancorous debate between Black critical theory and posthumanism. Through the cultural terrain of literature by Toni Morrison, Nalo Hopkinson, Audre Lorde, and Octavia Butler, the art of Wangechi Mutu and Ezrom Legae, and the oratory of Frederick Douglass, Zakiyyah Iman Jackson both critiques and displaces the racial logic that has dominated scientific thought since the Enlightenment. In so doing, Becoming Human demonstrates that the history of racialized gender and maternity, specifically anti-Blackness, is indispensable to future thought on matter, materiality, animality, and posthumanism. Jackson argues that African diasporic cultural production alters the meaning of being human and engages in imaginative practices of world-building against a history of the bestialization and thingification of Blackness—the process of imagining the Black person as an empty vessel, a non-being, an ontological zero—and the violent imposition of colonial myths of racial hierarchy. She creatively responds to the animalization of Blackness by generating alternative frameworks of thought and relationality that not only disrupt the racialization of the human/animal distinction found in Western science and philosophy but also challenge the epistemic and material terms under which the specter of animal life acquires its authority. What emerges is a radically unruly sense of a being, knowing, feeling existence: one that necessarily ruptures the foundations of "the human."