Slaves on the Margins and Cultural Resistance

Slaves on the Margins

Required:
 Jane Landers, “Garcia Real de Santa Teresa de Mose: A Free Black Town in Spanish Colonial Florida,” American Historical Review, 95:1 (Feb. 1990), pp. 9-30. BB
 Michael Jarvis, “Maritime Masters and Seafaring Slaves in Bermuda, 1680-1783.” BB
 Arnold Sio, “Marginality and Free Colored Identity in Caribbean Slave Society,” in Slavery and Abolition (Sept. 1987).
Recommended:
 Gad Heuman, Between Black and White: Race, Politics and the Free Coloreds in Jamaica (1981).
 Emma Christopher, Slave Ship Sailors and their Captive Cargos (2006).
 W. Jeffrey Bolster, Black Jacks: African American Seamen in the Age of Sail (1997).

To Think About ~ In these readings, how do we see slaves negotiating their situations on the margins of empire? In particular, how did they parlay their ambiguous status into opportunities? How do they push the boundaries of slavery as an institution?



Cultures of Resistance

Required:
 John Thornton, Africans and Afro-Americans in the Atlantic World, Ch. 10.
 Walter Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market (1999). BB
Recommended:
 Eugene Genovese, From Revolt to Revolution.
 Jane Landers, ed. Slave, Subjects and Subversives: Blacks in Colonial Latin America.
 Richard Price, Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas (1973)
 Joao J. Reis, Slave Rebellion in Brazil: The Muslim Uprising of 1835 in Bahia (1993).
 Stuart Schwarz, “Resistance and Accommodation in 18th Century Brazil,” Hispanic American His. Review (1977).

To Think About ~ What modes of resistance do these historians identify? How do they situate slaves’ actions from passive resistance, to spontaneous uprisings, to carefully planned revolts? How important do they see slaves’ resistance in shaping how slave masters defined the institution of slavery over time?