My Brother Slaves

My Brother Slaves fills a long-standing void in the history of slavery. For decades after slavery became a popular topic of inquiry for US historians in the 1950s and 1960s, the monographs that emerged almost exclusively addressed the experience of enslaved men, even while they purported to describe the lives of slaves more generally. Then in 1985, Deborah Gray White called attention to the neglect of women in the history of slavery with her now-classic Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South. In the three decades since the publication of White’s book, numerous other studies focused on enslaved women have been produced. Yet sixty years of work on slavery in the United States has heretofore yielded no books that consciously treat the subject of what it meant to be male and enslaved. As White, Stephanie Camp, Kenneth Greenberg, and others have demonstrated, looking at slavery through the lens of gender can markedly change our view of the lived experience of enslaved people. My Brother Slaves paints a picture of a slave society highly segregated by sex, in which particular notions of masculinity enabled male slaves to build a unified community that facilitated bold and effective resistance against slavery. In exploring male slaves’ conceptions of masculinity, My Brother Slaves moves beyond previous arguments that tied the manhood of enslaved men strictly to the role of provider for and protector of their families. Lussana argues that enslaved men measured masculinity at least as frequently through their interactions with one another as they did in their relationships with their families. Following White’s overall point about the importance of single-sex relationships for female slaves, Lussana posits that bonds with each other were likely the most significant relationships in the lives of enslaved men. In Lussana’s words, “Homosocial company was integral to the gendered identity and self-esteem of enslaved men” (18).

Brother · Friendship · Masculinity · Political science · Resistance (ecology) · Social science · Sociology · The Void · White (mutation) · Anthropology · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Gender Studies · Historical Studies and Socio-cultural Analysis · History · Law · Philosophy · Race, History, and American Society