3:35-5:30P     M     BH137

Topic: Slave Life and Culture
A portion of the above section reserved for majors

This course is designed to give students an exposure to the major
issues involved in the contemporary study of slave life and culture in
the Americas. It is designed to be both comparative and
interdisciplinary. As opposed to focusing on issues like the structure
of the slave trade, the profitability of slavery, or the ideological
underpinnings of the West's movement for abolition, this course
concentrates its efforts on the human experience of slavery. While
ample time will be dedicated to providing students with a view of the
major scholarly interpretations that shape the study of slave life and
culture in the Americas, the bulk of this course centers on a
discussion of slavery from the vantage point of those who lived it.
Among the topical concerns of this course include; the question of
African cultural retention and/or deculturation, women, children and
families, interpreting cultural expression, the urban and rural slave
experience, slave narratives, the socio-cultural consequences of the
Haitian Revolution throughout the Americas, folklore, music and dance,
slave resistance, mechanisms of social control, religious expression,
and literary depictions of slave life and culture. Geographically,
examples will be drawn from Cuba, Brazil, Haiti, the United States,
Central America, Barbados, Spanish Florida, Mexico, Jamaica, Colonial
British America, Peru, Columbia, and Venezuela.

Readings: This course will be grounded on a selection of some of the
most creative secondary works produced in the latter part of the
twentieth century and a representative number of primary documents.
Some of the texts under consideration include;

Adams, Edward C.L. Tales of the Congaree (North Carolina, 1987)

Alleyne, Mervyne. The Roots of Jamaican Culture (London: Pluto Press,
1988).

Degler, Carl. Neither Black Nor White: Slavery and Race Relations  in
Brazil and the United States (Macmillan, 1971).

Gaspar, David Barry and Darlene Clark Hine. Eds. More than Chattel:
Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Indiana, 1996)

Gomez, Michael. Exchanging Our Country Marks: The Transformation of
African Identities in the Colonial and Antebellum South (North
Carolina, 1998).

Howard, Philip. Changing History: Afro-Cuban Cabildos and Societies of
Color in the Nineteenth Century (Louisiana State University, 1998).

Hunefeldt, Christine. Paying the Price of Freedom: Family and Labor
Among Lima's Slaves' 1800-1854 (University of California, 1994).

Jones, Noreece. Born a Child of Freedom, Yet a Slave: Mechanisms of
Control and Strategies of Resistance in Antebellum South Carolina
(University Press of New England, 1990).

Karasch, Mary. Slave Life in Rio de Janeiro, 1808-1850 (Princeton,
1987).

Manzano, Juan Francisco. The Autobiography of Slave/Autobiografia de
un esclavo: A Bilingual Edition. Trans., Evelyn Picon Garfield (Wayne
State University Press, 1996).

Marshall, Paule. Praisesong for the Widow (Plume 1983).

McDonald, Roderick. The Economy and Material Culture of Slaves: Goods
and Chattels on the Sugar Plantations of Jamaica and Louisiana (Baton
Rouge and London: Louisiana State University Press, 1993).

Mintz, Sidney W. and Richard Price. The Birth of African American
Culture: An Anthropological Perspective (Beacon, 1976).

Moreno Fraginals, Manuel.Ed. Africa in Latin America: Essays in
History, Culture, and Socialization. (New York: Holmes and Meier,
1984).

Olmstead, Frederick Law. The Cotton Kingdom: A Traveller's
Observations on Cotton and Slavery in the American Slave States (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1953 [1861]).

Palmer, Colin. Slaves of the White God: Blacks in Mexico, 1570-1650
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1976).

Reis, Joao Jose. Slave Rebellion in Bahia: The Muslim Uprising of 1835
in Bahia. Trans Arthur Brakel (The Johns Hopkins University Press,
1993).

Stuckey, Sterling. Going Through the Storm: The Influence of African
American Art in History (Oxford, 1994) and Slave Culture: Nationalist
Theory and The Foundations of Black America (Oxford, 1987)