Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World

Edited collections can sometimes disappoint as little more than a rather disparate set of specialist articles. One of the great strengths of this book is that it is much more than a sum of its parts. The excellent essays on specific regions are framed by an extended introduction and a useful bibliographic essay covering the field as a whole. The introduction effectively delineates the ways in which emancipation was a highly gendered process and stands in its own right as a key intervention into the study of slavery and emancipation in comparative perspective.Much recent scholarship on the Atlantic world has focused on its Anglophone dimension; this book begins to do justice to the diversity of that world by including essays on Britain’s Cape Colony and French West Africa; on islands of the French, British, and Spanish Caribbean; and on the United States and Brazil. By bringing together such work, generally published in different journals and read by separate scholarly communities, it encourages readers to look beyond their usual national, imperial, and linguistic horizons to gain comparative insights and consider new approaches. In this spirit, and aware that it is not possible in a short review to do justice to all its wonderful contributions, I have chosen to look briefly at the four pieces of most obvious interest to HAHR readers. By suggesting the issues these raise for me as a historian of British slavery and emancipation, I hope to encourage others to read the collection as a whole and place their own work within a richer cross-cultural framework.Roger A. Kittleson points out that while historians have acknowledged women’s high level of active participation in Brazilian abolition, they have not explored the symbolic importance of constructions of elite womanhood to the movement. Turning the movement into a feminized charitable and moral crusade, he argues, effectively grounded it in the established social order, while distancing it from partisan parliamentary politics. His interpretation highlights, for me, the need for more attention to the dynamics of gender in the antislavery movements in Britain and the U.S. as well; although we are aware of women’s contributions, the gendered rhetoric of male campaigners has received far less attention.Other chapters are particularly interesting on questions of sources and research methodology. Martha Abreu’s chapter on Brazil moves us from elite discourse to popular song and from the pre- to the postemancipation period. It explores the sexual and erotic identities of black and “mixed” men and women in these songs and stresses the “ambiguities of the genre” (p. 69), in response to previous scholarship that has, she states, tended to interpret them either as promoting racist stereotypes or, conversely, as providing early examples of Brazilian racial democracy. Her suggestion that some of these songs may have provided Afro-Brazilians with ways of asserting their own identities encourages us to set her study alongside work from other regions on popular culture in the African diaspora.In contrast, two other chapters draw creatively on official legal records to examine the agency of black people in the transition from slavery to emancipation. Michael Zeuske, writing on Cuba, charts his own shift from a structural-regional approach focused on race and class analysis, one that made use of national archive materials that highlighted black male agency, to a microhistorical approach encompassing gender analysis and drawing heavily on local archival sources that made black women visible as actors. He concludes that in the first stage of emancipation, characterized by the process of manumission and the emergence of free families, women played a crucial role. In the second stage, involving the universal acquisition of political freedom and full citizenship within the Cuban state, men took the lead. A new convert to gender history, his acknowledgement that gender “has transformed [his] understanding of periodization, sources, and institutions” (p. 189) could stand as a testimony to the value of this book as a whole.Ileana Rodriguez-Silva’s chapter on Puerto Rico, where the historical context of emancipation was very different, examines the work contracts made between ex-slaves and employers during the three-year period of apprenticeship that followed the passage of the Abolition Act in 1873. Such sources provide evidence that former slaves sought to use the legal system to their own benefit, manipulating white elites’ ideas about appropriate roles for men and women in postemancipation society in order to move jobs, improve living conditions, and consolidate families. These two studies address the question raised in postcolonial scholarship concerning the possibility of using the “colonial archive” to access the experiences of subaltern groups.Overall, this is an indispensable collection, lucidly written and coherently arranged, which will be of immense value to all scholars and students of slavery and emancipation in the Atlantic world, whatever their particular regional speciality. It could not, of course, hope to be comprehensive, but I am sure that its fascinating content and sophisticated approach will inspire much further innovative research. This is a model of what an edited collection can achieve

Atlantic World · Diversity (politics) · Economic Justice · Emancipation · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Sociology · Anthropology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · History · Law