Race And Abolition

Robert E. Park’s lasting influence on the establishment of American Sociology as a scientific discipline is uncontested. Yet his pioneering sociological approaches towards the study of ›race relations‹ have been rightly criticized as defending an ontological approach towards ›race‹ and racial hierarchies. This essay examines how the pre-scientific career of Park, first in colonial policy as a press-agent of the Congo Reform Association, and subsequently as an associate of Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute, has influenced the foundation of his conceptualization of ›race‹ and ›race relations‹. It is argued that Park established specific (pseudo-)romantic conceptions of superior whiteness and inferior blackness to counterbalance problematic features of modernity, and eventually entered a portentous romance with the racist social relations of the Jim Crow segregation system

The positioning of movements for social and political change as forms of postemancipation abolition democracy has a long history. Abolition has been the watchword under which initiatives proceed to eradicate the death penalty, human trafficking, nuclear weapons, the hegemony of Wall Street, prisons, police, the deportation of immigrants, and more. The essays in this forum examine nineteenth-century abolitionism’s complicated legacy through the prism of contemporary frameworks and agitations for justice and social transformation. The working papers reflect vital ongoing debates about abolition’s afterlives while meditating upon a series of pressing current concerns: migrant justice, the humanitarian rhetoric of some anti-racist initiatives, the activism of Erica Garner following the murder by police of her father, the racialization of madness and violence, the prison-abolition movement, and climate activism. By addressing the mobilization of rhetorics of slavery and abolition in our own vexed political moment, the contributors reveal that to think abolition now is necessarily to rethink abolition then.

This article connects not only the history of overlapping emancipations across Caribbean empires but also rethinks how slavery might have been popularly remembered and discussed in Spanish colonial territories that were never predominantly plantation societies.  The nineteenth-century history of Santo Domingo (from 1822-1844, part of Haiti, then the independent Dominican Republic for a time, then a colony of Spain once again, from 1861-1865) was very complex, and Dominican elites in these decades narrated their identity in contradistinction to Haiti.  The overwhelming weight of these elite narratives on the territory’s nineteenth-century historical record – as a poor and overwhelmingly rural space, few written records survive – has hindered discussion of popular Dominican thought about the end of slavery, independence, identity, and renewed Spanish colonial occupation of the territory.  The article considers an unprecedented event in Spanish colonial history, the re-annexation of Dominican territory in 1861. The Cuban Captain General at the time, Francisco Serrano, hoped the event would reinvigorate Spanish colonialism, forestall U.S. advancement in the Caribbean, and begin an experiment with free-labor empire. As the article argues, however, most Dominicans viewed the new occupation with tremendous trepidation.  Their vocabulary of resistance centered on an understanding of the necessity to defend emancipation, even in a space where slavery had long since disappeared. Over the next several years, Dominicans and Haitians fought together to defeat the new occupation in the shadow of slavery in Cuba and Puerto Rico.  Not long after, independence fighting began in the neighboring islands as well.

The presidential campaign of 1844 is a fascinating, but somewhat neglected chapter in American history. The concerted effort among conspicuous historical figures to gain collective support and ascend to public office has captivated historians and scholars for centuries. Yet as academics have endeavored to provide historical analyses of these campaigns, the tendency to overlook and even ignore minor characters has proven to be problematic. One such bypassed character is Joseph Smith, the founder of Mormonism, whose campaign was cut short by his assassination less than five months before the general election. While several historians, apologists, and polemicists have examined Smith’s life as a religious leader, relatively few have tackled Smith’s political ambitions at length, particularly his goal to end slavery. If such an analysis is to be made, it is necessary to appraise Smith’s abolitionist rhetoric, the development of his antislavery views, the reactions of his contemporaries, and the role Smith’s campaign played in the subsequent months and years following it.

This article studies from a longue durée perspective the articulation of anti-slavery sentiments and other socio-racial sensibilities within the Spanish Atlantic, from the first theological criticisms of the 16th century to the efforts to abolish slavery in Cuba, Puerto Rico and Spain, in the second half of the 19th century. We focus on the most significant cases of individuals who shared a white identity and who advocated against slavery, slave trade and socio-racial discrimination of Free Coloureds. We argue that the many egalitarian proposals made during the Spanish American revolutions and at the Cortes of Cádiz represent a second golden moment (after the ‘Mulatto Affaire’ during the French Revolution) in the struggle for the granting of political equality to subaltern sectors the Atlantic World. In the end, we expect to provide a clearer picture of how the socio-racial sensibilities contributed to accelerate, or to postpone, the introduction of abolitionist or equalitarian measures vis-à-vis the coloured subaltern sectors in the Spanish Atlantic in the Late Modern Age.

A RESURGENCE OF INTEREST in Frank J. Webb’s The Garies and Their Friends—the second novel by an African American and the first to portray northern racism—underscores the need for consideration of recently discovered biographical information about this enigmatic author. Previously unknown details about the lives of Frank J. Webb (1828–94) and his family and friends parallel some of his literary portrayals, subtly inform other scenes and characters, and generally help to illuminate the unique combination of biography, social history, and cre- ative imagination that constitute Webb’s complex literary achievement.

“Perfect Child, Perfect Faith” studies how the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, the abolitionist and integrationist community of Berea, Kentucky, the Oneida Perfectionists, and the United Society of Believers (better known as Shakers) raised their children in the nineteenth century. Each of these communities incorporated a specific interpretation of Christianity and rejected “traditional” culture and society in favor of their “perfected” alternative. For each of these groups, children acted as a space to write their own identity. Children embodied hope, patriotism, faith, obedience, and goodness. Exploring childhood and children's experience in history can be difficult as retrieving the voices of children can be a daunting task. They produced less sources and materials than their adult contemporaries. And even fewer of these sources have been preserved. This means that much of their experiences, as they happened, are lost to historians. However, many of these children grew up to write memoirs, diaries, and brief histories of their people, which have provided access to children’s experiences. In addition to relying on memoirs, the dissertation uses handbooks and guides on childrearing and practices produced by each of the communities. Finally, it considers non-textual sources, especially photography of families and children, as well as illustrations in literature and periodicals. To understand how the communities raised their child and why these children did not
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continue their original communal goals, the dissertation is organized into four categories: the symbolic meaning of the child, the definition and role of the family, educational practices, and the connections between work and play. Each section considers both the community’s view of the child and the child’s actual experience. Often a child’s reality differed dramatically from the ideals and expectations of his/ her community. The dissertation argues that Mormons, Bereans, Oneida Perfectionists, and Shakers failed to raise their children in radically different ways and instead raised them similar to nineteenth-century bourgeois America: as innocents with the possibility of perfecting the future.

Para un esclavo, ser el agente de su propia enunciación no significa ser el agente de su propia emancipación. Este importante matiz fue el que determinó en gran parte la última etapa de la vida del poeta esclavo Juan Francisco Manzano (1797-1854), “liberado” a instancias de un grupo de intelectuales cubanos en 1836. A cambio de su emancipación, Manzano se había comprometido a escribir su autobiografía, la única redactada por un esclavo en castellano y cuya primera parte terminó en 1839. La problemática de la vida de Manzano radica precisamente en el hecho de que debería su emancipación a los esfuerzos de este cenáculo de intelectuales criollos.
Si el estudio literario y poético de la obra de Manzano tiene una importancia considerable en sí, alcanza otra dimensión cuando se la analiza bajo una perspectiva histórica. La historiografía tradicional y “blanca” presenta la manumisión de Manzano como un gesto altruista y casi revolucionario que honraría a ciertos criollos reformistas de la primera mitad del siglo XIX. Algunos ven la liberación de Manzano como el primer ladrillo aportado al edificio abolicionista cubano. Sin embargo, esta manumisión, debido a su carácter excepcional, no permitía prever una posible futura igualdad entre negros, mulatos y blancos en Cuba. Al contrario, esta postura puntual ilustra más bien la actitud interesada de una élite reformista preocupada por hacer durar la esclavitud el mayor tiempo posible, en particular por medio de la política llamada del “buen trato”.

Twenty years after the police beating of Rodney King and the riots that swept across LA in response, racism is still a systemic problem in United States cities, as shown by the recent murder of Trayvon Martin. Martin’s needless death struck a nerve with thousands of people gathering for vigils and demonstrations across the country. The lives of Trayvon Martin and Rodney King are related through systemic anti-Black racism that shapes the urban form. Indeed, nationwide trends toward policing and fortified enclosure are the accumulated effects of Cold War military spending and domestic racial politicking. Together, they made law-and-order the nation’s de facto urban planning policy rather than a program of social investment in collective urban futures. Sanford, Florida no less than Los Angeles, has inherited this past. Ending declared and undeclared wars are the material conditions and means of peace-making that justice for Trayvon, and so many others, demands.

This essay appeared in the first learning week of an online course that I taught at Ashford University, “American History Since 1865.” It was written particularly to address questions and presumptions students make when starting this course that begins with Reconstruction. Many of them did not have the advantage of having taken the first half of American History, before 1865.

This chapter focuses on American exceptionalism and specifically the geopolitical imaginations of this national ideology. How do exceptionalist understandings of domestic and foreign space work to reproduce US nationalism and war-making abroad and to obscure state violence practiced domestically? How has the mass violence of a prison system whose population of 2.3 million people rivals that of Houston, Texas disappeared in plain sight? While the domestic practice of state violence is frequently treated as more legitimate than war-making because it is thought to be a condition and outcome for popular sovereignty, these practice and their legitimacy are hotly contested. A critical understanding of how the relative invisibility of domestic state violence constrains the imagination is imperative to building just, free, and peaceful futures internationally and domestically. Placing anti-racism and prison abolition at the center of organizing can link different arenas of antiviolence organizing by offering imperative theoretical vision and practical means for building non-killing futures.

Au cours du XIXème siècle et jusqu'au début du XXème, la population dite « de couleur », contrairement au rôle secondaire que les acteurs de l'époque s'efforcèrent de lui attribuer, par ses actes ou ses écrits, démontra une matérialité de tous les instants. Ce travail se propose de suivre une approche chronologique des moments historiques où les Noirs et les Mulâtres ont agi, ainsi que ceux où ils ont été agis par les Blancs, pour reprendre la formule de Frantz Fanon. Cette perspective dialectique et synchronique permettra d'apprécier le lent cheminement de la question « raciale » dans la Perle des Antilles. Alors que les esclaves et les libres « de couleur » n'eurent de cesse de lutter pour leur liberté et leurs droits, les élites créoles, dans leur rapport avec les autorités coloniales, s'employèrent à les faire peser sur la scène politique, tout au long du XIXème siècle, jusqu'à les inclure de façon artificielle dans leur vision de la nation cubaine, sans pour autant les reconnaître comme des citoyens à part entière. La genèse constituée par la révolution abolitionniste menée par le Noir libre José Antonio Aponte, qui se solda par sa décapitation en 1812, servira de point de départ à ce travail qui se conclura par le massacre des membres du Parti Indépendant de Couleur en 1912, dont l'ambition était de défendre les droits de la population « de couleur ».

This course aims to unearth and analyze the theoretical underpinnings of the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and the Movement for Black Lives (M4BL) policy platform. Since its emergence, BLM has articulated an intersectional critique of anti-black violence in the United States (and, to a certain extent, globally). BLM and the larger M4BL coalition provide an in-depth analysis of the specific ways structures of oppression such as white supremacy, patriarchy, and racial capitalism affect Black populations. By historically and theoretically situating BLM and the M4BL policy platform in the context of Black radical thought, including but not limited to abolitionist thought, intersectionality, and conceptualizations of racial capitalism, we will trace the ways BLM and M4BL adopt and build on various lineages of theoretical critique to diagnose contemporary structures of anti-black violence.

Mon propos, dans le cadre de ce travail, sera de tenter de saisir les enjeux de la réception et les stratégies de la diffusion d’une œuvre porteuse de modernité et de valeurs radicales. Il s’agira notamment de mesurer jusqu’à quel point les Créoles se sont appropriés les idées présentes dans le Traité de législation. Par l’analyse de l’écart entre l’« horizon d’attente » de Comte et la réception de son œuvre à Cuba, je tenterai de montrer que les réformistes créoles ont été les agents d’une médiation idéologique contradictoire et limitée.

This Essay theorizes and reimagines the place of courts in the contemporary struggle for the abolition of racialized punitive systems of legal control and exploitation. In the spring and summer of 2020, the killings of George Floyd, Breonna Taylor, and many other Black and Indigenous people sparked continuous protests against racist police violence and other forms of oppression. Meanwhile, abolitionist organizers and scholars have long critiqued the prison-industrial complex, or the constellation of corporations, media entities, governmental actors, and racist and capitalist ideologies that have driven mass incarceration. But between the police and the prison cell sits the criminal court. Criminal courts are the legal pathway from an arrest to a prison sentence—with myriad systems of control in between, including ones branded as “off-ramps”—and we cannot understand the present crisis without understanding how the criminal courts not only function to legitimate police and funnel people into carceral spaces but also contribute unique forms of violence, social control, and exploitation all their own, revealing the machinations of mass criminalization and injustice operating between the police encounter and the prison cell. Our central argument is that courts—with a focus here on the criminal trial courts and the workgroup of actors within them—function as an unjust social institution; we should therefore work toward abolishing criminal courts and replacing them with other institutions that do not inherently legitimate police, rely on jails and prisons, or themselves operate as tools of racial and economic oppression.

Drawing on legal scholarship and empirical social scientific research, Part I describes injustices perpetrated by criminal courts, detailing their role in the present crisis of mass criminalization through legal doctrine, racialized social control and violence, and economic exploitation. In Part II, we describe the contemporary abolition movement, briefly laying out its genesis and three guiding principles we view as typically considered in relation to policing and prisons: (1) power shifting, (2) defunding and reinvesting, and (3) transformation. Part III explores how these principles could operate in relation to the courts, drawing on analysis of existing grassroots efforts as well as offering new possibilities. In the short term, non-reformist reforms could make criminal courts a venue to unmask, and therefore aid in dismantling, police and prisons. Such reforms could complement the broader abolition movement and reduce the churn of people through the system. Ultimately, the goal would be to abolish criminal courts as systems of coercion, violence, and exploitation, and to replace them with other social institutions, such as community-based restorative justice and peacemaking programs while at the same time investing in the robust provision of social, political, and economic resources in marginalized communities.

Africa is deeply scarred by the capture and selling of million of its people over several centuries. This is true to a greater extent for Liberia, a country created as a haven from slavery for blacks from the Americas.

In many important ways, the effects of the slave trade were similar to those of Liberia's recent civil war. Both engendered pains, traumas and losses that cannot be ignored out of existence. Driven beneath the surface, they corrode our conscience and erode our humanity. By pretending they don't exist, we destroy our ability to tell right from wrong, victims from villains.

Echoes of the slavery era can be heard in the derogatory names Liberians call each other. They include Gio (name for the Dan ethnic group, which means "slaves"), Belle (name for the Kuwaa ethnic group, which means "savages") and ex-slaves (applied routinely to Liberians of African-American descent).

Liberians living today face the challenge of building peace by doing away with relations of great inequality. As this book shows, the first generation of Liberians, both repatriates and indigenous, worked together to do just that. Their story was reconstructed using original letters and other documents, books translated from many languages, oral histories, and a range of other sources.

https://knowyourself.press/shop?olsPage=products%2Fliberia-the-quest-for-freedom

Resumen Este artículo se propone contribuir al estudio de la construcción de la relación entre el rosismo y la población afroporteña, centrándose particularmente en las estrategias que empleó aquél-principalmente la prensa-para ganarse el apoyo de esta población. El trabajo parte de la hipótesis que el apoyo de los africanos y afrodescendientes, al igual que otros aspectos del régimen, también debió ser construido y negociado. Para estudiar dicha hipótesis se analiza en particular una coyuntura de crisis, el gobierno de Juan Ramón Balcarce en 1833, cuando Rosas sale del gobierno y se desata una lucha entre dos facciones federales que adquirió especial virulencia en la ciudad de Buenos Aires. La población de origen africano era una parte importante de los sectores subalternos de esta ciudad y por lo tanto conseguir su respaldo parece haber sido un objetivo de los contrincantes políticos del momento, especialmente-pero no únicamente-del rosismo. Dentro de esta población, el estudio se centra en la búsqueda del apoyo del regimiento de milicias de hombres de color libres denominado " Defensores de Buenos Aires ". Para dar cuenta de ello, en primer lugar, se evalúan los trabajos que han reparado en la relación de los afroporteños con el rosismo. En segundo lugar, se relata brevemente el contexto que derivó en la " Revolución de los Restauradores " en octubre de 1833 para luego exponer las menciones sobre el contacto entre la población afroporteña y las distintas facciones en la prensa y la correspondencia en dicho momento. Por último, se examinan los discursos de la prensa que pretendían representar la voz de los afroporteños, analizando las figuras y tópicos a los que se apelaba para obtener su apoyo y rastreando las referencias al Regimiento " Defensores de Buenos Aires ". Abstract This article aims to contribute to the study of the construction of the relationship between the rosismo and the afroporteña population, focusing particularly on the strategies employed to gain their support. The work develops from the hypothesis that this group's support, along with other aspects of the regime, had to be built and negotiated. In order to study this hypothesis, it analyzes a particular period of crisis, the government of Juan Ramón Balcarce in 1833, when Rosas leaves the government and a fight breaks out between two federal factions, which acquired special virulence in the city of Buenos Aires. The population of African origin was an important component of the subaltern sectors of the city, and therefore, to obtain their support seemed to be a central objective of the political opponents of the moment, especially-but not

In this article I discuss an important event in the emergence of discourses of racial identity and racial character within the early abolitionist movement: the posthumous publication of the Letters of the Late Ignatius Sancho, An African (1782). According to his editors, this publication was designed to decry the injustices of slavery by demonstrating Sancho’s intellectual accomplishments. In practice, however, it actually compromised Sancho’s bid for self-determined characterization in his correspondence. The wide range of personae that Sancho marshaled in his letters allowed him to create positions of agency and authority by inducing his correspondents to reconsider or act against their culture’s preconceptions. His multivalent self-characterization, however, was in the publication of his letters reduced to the singular identity of “An African”: a black man and a former slave whose example argued for abolition. Sancho was thus turned into the object of abolitionist argument; he became a specimen to illustrate and validate the larger abolitionist discourse, and in the process lost the character of an independent person.

Building on the suggestion by the editors of the Routledge Companion to World Literature (2011) to re-frame the fi eld of literary studies from a global and transnational perspective, this article suggests a new approach to the concept of ‘contact literature’. Reading American literature as ‘contact literature’ assumes that even if an American literary text is written in English, the other languages of the ‘contact zone’ in which the text originated and/or to which it alludes also impacted the writing process and therefore need to be included in the analysis. This new approach to the analysis of American literature is applied here to Sojourner Truth’s famous slave narrative, published in 1850. Since Truth spent the first 30 years of her life as a slave in a
predominantly Dutch-speaking environment in the Hudson Valley, analyzing her narrative as ‘contact literature’ implies a focus on Dutch cultural traces. This is done in two chapters — one dealing with Dutch language and literature, the other with Dutch Pietism and the slave narrative of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw — that present new perspectives on the impact of Dutch culture on Truth’s Narrative.

With the election of Barack Obama, much attention in Europe has focused on the possibility of the return of the good transatlantic relations that characterised the post-war period and was seriously damaged under Bush’s war on terror, unilateralism and imperialism. Much attention has also inevitably been focused on the fact that Obama is the first African-American president elected in a country that many view as historically and structurally racist. While Obama's election was seen to represent an end to both the damaging impact on transatlantic relations of the Bush era and to white supremacy in America, these two issues have rarely been connected. This chapter will look at the link between these by focusing on the “special relationship” between the United States and Britain, a relationship that has not only been the most enduring, if at times unequal and controversial, partnerships in the post-war era. Most notably between Churchill and FDR during the Second World War, Thatcher and Reagan during the Cold War and Blair and Bush during the War on Terror and invasion of Iraq. In spite of such cooperation, it is a relationship founded on colonialism and anti-colonialism, conflict and criticism – American criticism of British colonialism and, corresponding to it, British criticism of American racism. Far from representing pure anti-racism or anti-colonialism, British criticisms of American racism and American criticism of British colonialism have been deployed at crucial moments in which their relationship and relative geo-political power and influence was being contested or undergoing realignment, from the American Revolution through the cold war to the election of Obama.

This chapter examines the British response to the election of Obama in terms of the realignment of the special relationship and the place of both race and colonialism in the discussions about Obama’s election and relationship with Britain. More specifically, it looks at how this election has been celebrated in Britain as a victory over American racism, while his relationship to Britain has been criticised for his alleged anti-colonialism. I argue that this response to Obama reflects historical and current tensions over the colonialism and imperialism of and racism in both countries, the realignment of the special relationship and concerns about the image, influence and power of each country globally following the Bush-Blair years, as well as changes in the domestic politics of each country following their elections.

Most policy discussions around Latino boys aim to foster academic success without fully considering the way unequal outcomes are by design. The zero-sum nature of US education warrants a critical analysis and fundamental reimagining. I employ the lenses of critical social theory and critical discourse studies for a threefold purpose: (1) examine the (im)possibilities of academic success, (2) examine how discourses of practicality are weaponized against efforts to enact structural change, and (3) engage the concept, imagining otherwise, in the field of education. Special attention is given to contemporary educational and political events to highlight the importance of going beyond "practicality," abolishing all processes that generate unequal outcomes, and reimagining the forthcoming world of education. I call for a serious interrogation of educational structures, delving into a more critical and imaginative realm.

COVID-19 generated a strange paradox. Social suffering reached new heights, and simultaneously, we conceptualized new possibilities. Terms such as “reimagining” and “rethinking” became part of our everyday vocabulary, shaping new possibilities, especially in the field of education. Researchers have long demonstrated the way unequal structures produce unequal outcomes. Yet the very logic driving these inequalities has received much less attention in our imaginative spaces, that is, the zero-sum phenomenon. At its core, the zero-sum phenomenon is the way academic success is based on logics of competition, wherein the academic success of a few requires the nonsuccess of others. Simply consider selective enrollment, award distribution, and standardized testing. In a society in which race, gender, and social class are so intimately connected to notions of merit, it should come as no surprise that the zero-sum phenomenon consistently reproduces power and subordination. We, therefore, call on education scholars, practitioners, and activists to join us in reimagining the future of education, one that departs from exclusion and strives toward transformation.

How did witnesses of slavery relate their experiences and what effect did their reports have? This book examines travel accounts, fictions, poetry, and legal texts to analyze direct and indirect encounters with slavery in the antebellum United States. It discusses the rhetorical politics of British and American, and black and white, observations of slavery. The discussion raises critical questions about the role of witness and its link with political action, both in antebellum and contemporary America.

The CFP for this panel usefully suggested that the crisis of the world system marked by the 1970s might be useful for contemporary cultural studies, and it just so happens that I am in the first forays of a new project that proposes to chart the development of a “poetics of abolition” in the work of a number of poets writing between 1973 and the present. My contention is that poetry in this period—which Robert Brenner calls the “long downturn” (2006)—increasingly turns to abolition as a pressing political and aesthetic problem. “Abolition”—a conceptual site of contestation, as I’m using it here—can be found across a wide variety of poetic practices, where it serves as a structuring principle, shaping concept, overriding mood, or set of formal determinations.

The role of race and class within modern social analysis occupies a fiercely debated terrain throughout the Americas.  In Brazil, it is precisely this on-going struggle to theorize and historicize race and class which provides the intellectual rudder for those navigating historical social analysis.  Modern Brazilian history begins with an ending- the abolition of slavery.  It is, however, an abolition of unique construction.  The immediate reward for one's "freedom" ran along a continuum from complete marginalization from Brazilian society (as in the northeast sugar region) to re-incorporation into a re-constituted, raced-based division of labor (as in the western Sao Paulo coffee region).  The abolition of slavery not only did not emancipate the African.  In fact, it arguably placed before capital an even more compliant labor force.  To fully appreciate the interplay of race and class in modern Brazil one needs first to examine the origins and architecture of this re-constituted, race-based division of labor.

Tucson, Arizona is on the front lines of border militarization and the criminalization of migration. Residents there are crafting creative responses to the state and federal government’s increasingly punitive treatment of migration. This critical intervention piece focuses on the We Reject Racism campaign as an effort to build an antiracist city in conditions of steady police and military presence. It situates this campaign in a historical lineage of building open and sanctuary cities, and suggests that demilitarization and decriminalization should be recognized as central aspects of antiracist Right to the City organizing.

This article argues that a better understanding of the history and reception of W. E. B. Du Bois's abolition democracy helps elucidate contemporary debates by abolitionists about how to engage with the state. Methods: Through a close reading of Du Bois's Black Reconstruction I show how contemporary focus on abolition as abolishing the carceral state and building alternatives elides viewing abolition democracy as an engagement with and challenge to state power. Results: Viewing abolition democracy from this longer history allows scholars today to view debates among abolitionists themselves as a conflict between transforming how the state work and carving out autonomous spaces of freedom away from the state. Conclusion: By recognizing the confliced history between Du Bois's use of abolition democracy and its invocation by contemporary activists, I show how abolition itself is a fundamentally contested concept deployed for multiple political discourses and struggles.

This essay stresses the importance of the humoural medical tradition and its lay reiterations in popular eighteenth-century British works on slavery, abolition and illness. In particular, it examines the popular medical concept of ‘seasoning’ and how contemporaries applied it to enslaved African bodies. Seasoning became a common talking point during the British abolition debate as both sides stressed different aspects of humoural theory to make their arguments. While numerous historians have used seasoning as an analytical term to explore the impact of movement on the enslaved, this essay rehabilitates its historical medical meaning and traces how abolition politics affected that meaning.

SAMPLE PAGES ATTACHED HERE ON ACADEMIA.EDU

This article is a detailed teaching guide including Introduction, Key People/Places, Timeline, Themes (such as Causes & Effects, The North: Atlantic Slave Trade & Antislavery, Repression vs. Retention: African Ethnicity & Cultural Survivals, and Capitalism & Slavery), Bibliographic Essay, Discussion Questions, Glossary, and Bibliography. 

This document is over sixty pages; publication is forthcoming.

Extended introduction to Mandel's classic Old Left study of the tensions between abolition and the fledgling labor movement in the antebellum North. Includes biographical information on Mandel, a Cleveland-based labor and civil rights activist, a critical survey of Old Left perspectives on race, labor and the US Civil War, and  a critique of the attempt of 'whiteness' scholars to understand the rupture between northern laborers and the abolitionist movement. Worth reading alongside my 'Alternate Routes to Antislavery,' which develops some of the same ideas.