Representations of Slave Women in Discourses on Slavery and Abolition, 1780-1838

ISBN-13: 9780415350266 / Angielski / Twarda / 2007 / 263 str.

Henrice Altink

Opis

Taking Jamaica as its focus of study, this book analyzes three debates about slave women in the period 1780-1838 which were central to the competing discourses of slavery and abolition: motherhood, marriage and flogging.

Representations of Slave Women in Discourses on Slavery and Abolition, 1780-1838 examines how British abolitionists and pro-slavery activists represented the slave women to their audiences and explain the purposes that these representations served. Henrice Altink shows how the representations were linked to plantation practices, slave laws, and metropolitan discourses, and that they exerted both positive and negative effects on slave women's lives.

This volume makes a welcome contribution to the scholarship on discourses of slavery and abolition, embedding them within their metropolitan and colonial contexts, and showing how they were varied, changing and inconsistent.

Recenzje

'Altink has provided a useful study that delves into the interplay of race, gender, and rhetoric as well as how these factors combined to initially uphold, but ultimately subvert, the slave system in Jamaica. In the process, she has contributed to a growing body of literature on slave women.' –  Journal of American Ethnic History

Spis treści

Part 1: Incompetent Mothers  1. Belly-Women  2. Pickeniny Mummas  Part 2: Adulterous Wives  3. Deviant and Dangerous: Attitudes to Slave Women's Sexuality  4. Slave Marriage: Solution or Problem?  Part 3: Unruly Workers  5. The Indecency of the Lash  6. Slavery by Another Name  7. Conclusion 

O autorze

Henrice Altink is a lecturer in history at the University of York.