It is understood that the first recorded history of slavery had its beginning in the United States in 1619, when approximately twenty Africans were brought by a Dutch soldier and sold to the English colony of Jamestown, Virginia as indentured servants. The transformation from indentured servitude to racial slavery happened gradually. It wasnt until 1661 that a reference to slavery entered in Virginia law, directed at Caucasian servants who ran away with a black servant. It wouldnt be until the Slave Codes of 1705 that the status of African-Americans as slaves would be sealed. This would last for another 160 years, until after the end of the American Civil War with the ratification of the 13th Amendment in December 1865. However, it must be noted that the first imported Africans were brought as indentured servants not slaves. They were required, as white indentured servants to serve nine years. Many were brought to the British North American colonies, specifically Jamestown, Virginia in 1620. It is most interesting to make note of the fact that slavery was subsequently legalized in the following states: 1641 Massachusetts becomes the first colony to legalize slavery. 1650 Connecticut legalizes slavery. 1661 Virginia officially recognizes slavery by statute. 1662 A Virginia statute declares that children born would have the same status as their mother. 1663 Maryland legalizes slavery. 1664 Slavery is legalized in New York and New Jersey. The shift from indentured servants to African slaves was prompted by a dwindling class of former servants who had worked through the terms of their indentures and thus became competitors to their former masters. These newly freed servants were rarely able to support themselves comfortably, and the tobacco industry was increasingly dominated by large planters. This caused domestic unrest culminating in Bacons Rebellion. Eventually, chattel slavery became the norm in regions dominated by plantations that were owned by Englishmen who lived in Great Britain, where the British courts had made a series of contradictory rulings on the legality of slavery, which encouraged several thousand slaves to flee the newly-independent United States as refugees along with the retreating British in 1783.

Inquiries into the meaning and force of race in American culture have largely focused on questions of identity and difference—What does it mean to have a racial identity? What constitutes racial difference? Such questions assume the basic principle of racial division, which todays seems to be becoming an increasingly bitter and seemingly irreparable chasm between black and white. This book confronts this contemporary problem by shifting the focus of analysis from understanding differences to analyzing division. It provides a historical context for the recent resurgence of racial division by tracing the path of the color line as it appears in the narrative writings of African-Americans in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In readings of slave narratives, "passing novels," and the writings of Charles Chesnutt and Zora Neale Hurston, the author asks: What is the work of division? How does division work? The history of the color line in the United States is coeval with that of the nation. The author suggests that throughout this history, the color line has not functioned simply to name biological or cultural difference, but more important, it has served as a principle of division, classification, and order. In this way, the color line marks the inseparability of knowledge and power in a racially demarcated society. The author shows how, from the time of slavery to today, the color line has figured as the locus of such central tenets of American political life as citizenship, subjectivity, community, law, freedom, and justice. This book seeks not only to understand, but also to bring critical pressure on the interpretations, practices, and assumptions that correspond to and buttress representations of racial difference. The work of dislocating the color line lies in uncovering the uncertainty, the incoherency, and the discontinuity that the common sense of the color line masks, while at the same time elucidating the pressures that transform the contingent relations of the color line into common sense.

The first of its kind, this volume sets in dialogue African Americanist and textual scholarship, exploring a wide range of African American textual history and work

This revealing interpretation of the black experience in the South emphasizes the evolution of slavery over time and the emergence of a rich, hybrid African American culture. From the incisive discussion on the origins of slavery in the Chesapeake colonie

An account of the location of black intellectuals in the modern world following the end of racial slavery. The lives and writings of key African Americans such as Martin Delany, W.E.B. Dubois, Frederick Douglas and Richard Wright are examined in the light of their experiences in Europe and Africa.

This collection presents a comparative study of the impact of slavery on the literary and cultural imagination of the Americas, and also on the impact of writing on slavery on the social legacies of slavery's history. The chapters examine the relationship of slavery and master/slave relations to nationalist projects throughout the Americas - the ways in which a history of slavery and its abolition has shaped a nation's identity and race relations within that nation. The scope of the study is unprecedented - the book ties together the entire 'Black Atlantic', including the French and Spanish Caribbean, the US, and Brazil. Through reading texts on slavery and its legacy from these countries, the volume addresses the eroticization of the plantation economy, various formations of the master/slave dialectic as it has emerged in different national contexts, the plantation as metaphor, and the relationship between texts that use cultural vs biological narratives of mestizaje (being interracial). These texts are examined with the goal of locating the origins of the different notions of race and racial orders that have arisen throughout the Americas. Isfahani-Hammond argues that without a critical revisiting of slavery and its various incarnations throughout the Americas, it is impossible to understand and rethink race relations in today's world.

For the past two decades Mauritians have focused on their remarkably successful economy and tended to ignore the poverty and marginalisation of a significant minority in their country. This book examines this situation among the Creoles, descendents of African and Malagasy slaves who live in Mauritius, an Indian Ocean island that has experienced three centuries of subsequent colonization by the Dutch, the French and the English. The author investigates le Malaise Crole, a socio-cultural phenomenon said to affect the progress and well being of Creoles in the society. The discussion of le Malaise Crole unravels a tragedy and cultural paradox for Mauritians have all essentially become social and biological hybrids but continue to perceive and treat their 'roots'as a source of power, purity and identity. In the quest for power and social order, dominant groups in the society promote a 'roots'discourse that has contributed to a rigid ethnic hierarchy. As slave descendants, Creoles experience problems identifying and confirming their 'roots.'Dominant and negative perceptions of slavery, blackness and hybridity also result in their of experience racial discrimination and economic marginalisation. To culturally survive in the new millennium Creoles are compelled to foster a roots discourse of their own for without 'roots'they are treated as a people who lack identity and power. Today Creoles are commonly stereotyped as lazy, spendthrift and hedonistic. The author's empirical research in five locations challenges these stereotypes and indicates how socio-economic and spatial factors diversify Creole identity. She advances several interpretations of le malaise Crole and investigates whatkind of phenomenon this is, arguing that although whiteness is highly valued in Mauritius, global values focusing on hybridity and power in blackness are beginning to influence Creole identity and to empower this ethnic group.

Introduces key terms, interdisciplinary research, debates, and histories for African American Studies As the longest-standing interdisciplinary field, African American Studies has laid the foundation for critically analyzing issues of race, ethnicity, and culture within the academy and beyond. This volume assembles the keywords of this field for the first time, exploring not only the history of those categories but their continued relevance in the contemporary moment. Taking up a vast array of issues such as slavery, colonialism, prison expansion, sexuality, gender, feminism, war, and popular culture, Keywords for African American Studies showcases the startling breadth that characterizes the field. Featuring an august group of contributors across the social sciences and the humanities, the keywords assembled within the pages of this volume exemplify the depth and range of scholarly inquiry into Black life in the United States. Connecting lineages of Black knowledge production to contemporary considerations of race, gender, class, and sexuality, Keywords for African American Studies provides a model for how the scholarship of the field can meet the challenges of our social world.

In The Black Shoals Tiffany Lethabo King uses the shoal—an offshore geologic formation that is neither land nor sea—as metaphor, mode of critique, and methodology to theorize the encounter between Black studies and Native studies. King conceptualizes the shoal as a space where Black and Native literary traditions, politics, theory, critique, and art meet in productive, shifting, and contentious ways. These interactions, which often foreground Black and Native discourses of conquest and critiques of humanism, offer alternative insights into understanding how slavery, anti-Blackness, and Indigenous genocide structure white supremacy. Among texts and topics, King examines eighteenth-century British mappings of humanness, Nativeness, and Blackness; Black feminist depictions of Black and Native erotics; Black fungibility as a critique of discourses of labor exploitation; and Black art that rewrites conceptions of the human. In outlining the convergences and disjunctions between Black and Native thought and aesthetics, King identifies the potential to create new epistemologies, lines of critical inquiry, and creative practices.