The Horrible Gift of Freedom

The Horrible Gift of Freedom
Author: Marcus Wood
Publisher: Race in the Atlantic World, 17
Total Pages: 482
Release: 2010
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780820334271

By taking a new look at the role of the visual arts in promoting the "great emancipation swindle," Wood brings into the open the manner in which the slave power and its inheritors have single-mindedly focused on celebratory cultural myths that function to diminish both white culpability and black outrage.

Politics of Memory

Politics of Memory
Author: Ana Lucia Araujo
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 304
Release: 2013-05-07
Genre: History
ISBN: 113631315X

The public memory of slavery and the Atlantic slave trade, which some years ago could be observed especially in North America, has slowly emerged into a transnational phenomenon now encompassing Europe, Africa, and Latin America, and even Asia – allowing the populations of African descent, organized groups, governments, non-governmental organizations and societies in these different regions to individually and collectively update and reconstruct the slave past. This edited volume examines the recent transnational emergence of the public memory of slavery, shedding light on the work of memory produced by groups of individuals who are descendants of slaves. The chapters in this book explore how the memory of the enslaved and slavers is shaped and displayed in the public space not only in the former slave societies but also in the regions that provided captives to the former American colonies and European metropoles. Through the analysis of exhibitions, museums, monuments, accounts, and public performances, the volume makes sense of the political stakes involved in the phenomenon of memorialization of slavery and the slave trade in the public sphere.

Potential History

Potential History
Author: Ariella Aïsha Azoulay
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 657
Release: 2019-11-19
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1788735714

A passionately urgent call for all of us to unlearn imperialism and repair the violent world we share, from one of our most compelling political theorists In this theoretical tour-de-force, renowned scholar Ariella Aïsha Azoulay calls on us to recognize the imperial foundations of knowledge and to refuse its strictures and its many violences. Azoulay argues that the institutions that make our world, from archives and museums to ideas of sovereignty and human rights to history itself, are all dependent on imperial modes of thinking. Imperialism has segmented populations into differentially governed groups, continually emphasized the possibility of progress while it tries to destroy what came before, and voraciously seeks out the new by sealing the past away in dusty archival boxes and the glass vitrines of museums. By practicing what she calls potential history, Azoulay argues that we can still refuse the original imperial violence that shattered communities, lives, and worlds, from native peoples in the Americas at the moment of conquest to the Congo ruled by Belgium's brutal King Léopold II, from dispossessed Palestinians in 1948 to displaced refugees in our own day. In Potential History, Azoulay travels alongside historical companions—an old Palestinian man who refused to leave his village in 1948, an anonymous woman in war-ravaged Berlin, looted objects and documents torn from their worlds and now housed in archives and museums—to chart the ways imperialism has sought to order time, space, and politics. Rather than looking for a new future, Azoulay calls upon us to rewind history and unlearn our imperial rights, to continue to refuse imperial violence by making present what was invented as “past” and making the repair of torn worlds the substance of politics.

Before-and-After Photography

Before-and-After Photography
Author: Jordan Bear
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 237
Release: 2020-09-25
Genre: Art
ISBN: 1000211479

The before-and-after trope in photography has long paired images to represent change: whether affirmatively, as in the results of makeovers, social reforms or medical interventions, or negatively, in the destruction of the environment by the impacts of war or natural disasters. This interdisciplinary, multi-authored volume examines the central but almost unspoken position of before-and-after photography found in a wide range of contexts from the 19th century through to the present. Packed with case studies that explore the conceptual implications of these images, the book’s rich language of evidence, documentation and persuasion present both historical material and the work of practicing photographers who have deployed – and challenged – the conventions of the before-and-after pairing. Touching on issues including sexuality, race, environmental change and criminality, Before-and-After Photography examines major topics of current debate in the critique of photography in an accessible way to allow students and scholars to explore the rich conceptual issues around photography’s relationship with time andimagination.

The Colonial Art of Demonizing Others

The Colonial Art of Demonizing Others
Author: Esther Lezra
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 196
Release: 2014-03-21
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1317800834

The Colonial Art of Demonizing Others examines European mistranslations and misrepresentations of black freedom dreams and self-activity as monstrous in the period of modern imperial consolidation –roughly from 1750 to 1848. This book argues that Europe’s archives of self-understanding are haunted by the traces of Black radical resistance. Just as Europe’s economy came to depend upon the raw materials, markets, and labor it secured from the colonies, European culture came to be based on fantasies and phobias derived from the unruly and unmanageable aftershocks of colonial violence and counter-insurgency. Rather than assert that European nationalist and abolitionist discourses are on the side of emancipatory movements, the book shows the limits of the promise of that discourse, and the continuation of those limitations that makes the continued pursuit of that promise a questionable activity. This book does not wish to salvage the emancipatory promises of European discourse, but considers the more difficult and uncomfortable question of why emancipatory movements represented the struggles of anticolonial and radical blackness the way they did. The Colonial Art of Demonizing Others privileges the political reading not only of literary texts but also of historical documents and visual culture.

The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination

The Haitian Revolution in the Literary Imagination
Author: Philip Kaisary
Publisher: University of Virginia Press
Total Pages: 301
Release: 2014-02-21
Genre: Literary Criticism
ISBN: 0813935482

The Haitian Revolution (1791–1804) reshaped the debates about slavery and freedom throughout the Atlantic world, accelerated the abolitionist movement, precipitated rebellions in neighboring territories, and intensified both repression and antislavery sentiment. The story of the birth of the world’s first independent black republic has since held an iconic fascination for a diverse array of writers, artists, and intellectuals throughout the Atlantic diaspora. Examining twentieth-century responses to the Haitian Revolution, Philip Kaisary offers a profound new reading of the representation of the Revolution by radicals and conservatives alike in primary texts that span English, French, and Spanish languages and that include poetry, drama, history, biography, fiction, and opera. In a complementary focus on canonical works by Aimé Césaire, C. L. R. James, Edouard Glissant, and Alejo Carpentier in addition to the work of René Depestre, Langston Hughes, and Madison Smartt Bell, Kaisary argues that the Haitian Revolution generated an enduring cultural and ideological inheritance. He addresses critical understandings and fictional reinventions of the Revolution and thinks through how, and to what effect, authors of major diasporic texts have metamorphosed and appropriated this spectacular corner of black revolutionary history.

Alienation and Resistance

Alienation and Resistance
Author: Laura Findlay
Publisher: Cambridge Scholars Publishing
Total Pages: 305
Release: 2020-05-22
Genre: Performing Arts
ISBN: 1527553256

This collection draws together recent work by new and emerging scholars which examines the representation of alienation and resistance in texts and images, both modern and traditional. The essays collected here incorporate both “high” and “low” culture, covering a wide range of disciplines from traditional literary sources to the more modern mediums of film and comic. Informing each of the contributions is one overriding question: what are the roles, forms, and conditions of alienation and resistance in our culture and its diverse media? The contributors to this collection find examples of both alienation and resistance everywhere, from sixteenth century drama to contemporary fiction, from American comics to Eastern European cinema, from representations of the body to the site of the body itself. In seeking out these representations of alienation and resistance, the essays begin also to probe the limits and limitations of such terms. As such, the collection as a whole offers both a broad overview of the field of play as it stands today and makes tentative suggestions as to potential paths of future inquiry.

The Ragged Road to Abolition

The Ragged Road to Abolition
Author: James J. Gigantino, II
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2014-10-22
Genre: History
ISBN: 0812246497

Contrary to popular perception, slavery persisted in the North well into the nineteenth century. This was especially the case in New Jersey, the last northern state to pass an abolition statute, in 1804. Because of the nature of the law, which freed children born to enslaved mothers only after they had served their mother's master for more than two decades, slavery continued in New Jersey through the Civil War. Passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865 finally destroyed its last vestiges. The Ragged Road to Abolition chronicles the experiences of slaves and free blacks, as well as abolitionists and slaveholders, during slavery's slow northern death. Abolition in New Jersey during the American Revolution was a contested battle, in which constant economic devastation and fears of freed blacks overrunning the state government limited their ability to gain freedom. New Jersey's gradual abolition law kept at least a quarter of the state's black population in some degree of bondage until the 1830s. The sustained presence of slavery limited African American community formation and forced Jersey blacks to structure their households around multiple gradations of freedom while allowing New Jersey slaveholders to participate in the interstate slave trade until the 1850s. Slavery's persistence dulled white understanding of the meaning of black freedom and helped whites to associate "black" with "slave," enabling the further marginalization of New Jersey's growing free black population. By demonstrating how deeply slavery influenced the political, economic, and social life of blacks and whites in New Jersey, this illuminating study shatters the perceived easy dichotomies between North and South or free states and slave states at the onset of the Civil War.

Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground

Slavery and Freedom on the Middle Ground
Author: Barbara Jeanne Fields
Publisher: Yale University Press
Total Pages: 288
Release: 1987-01-01
Genre: History
ISBN: 9780300040326

Examines the history of slavery in Maryland and discusses the conditions of life of Maryland's slaves and free Blacks.

Blind Memory

Blind Memory
Author: Marcus Wood
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 380
Release: 2000
Genre: Art
ISBN: 9780415926980

Throughout this important volume, the author provides an invaluable addition to the limited literature now available on the visual images associated with slavery and abolition, integrated into a sophisticated analysis of their meaning and legacy today. of color images. 150 illustrations.