The Power Of Neo Slave Fiction And Public History

"Professional historians, schools, colleges, and universities are not alone in shaping higher-order understanding of history. The central thesis of this book is the belief historical fiction in text and film shape attitudes towards an understanding of history as it moves the focus from slavery to the enslaved-from the institution to the personal, families and feminist accounts. In a broader sense, this contributes to a public history. In part, using the quickly growing corpus of neo-slave counterfactual narratives, this book examines the notion of the emerging slavery public history, and the extent to which this is defined by literature, film, and other forms of artistic expression, rather than non-fiction-popular or scholarly-and education in history in the school systems. Inter alia, this book looks to the validity of historical fiction in print or in film as a way of understanding history. A focal point of this book is the hypothesis that neo-slave narratives-supported by selective triangulated readings and viewings of scholarly works and nonfiction-have assisted greatly in reshaping the historiography of antebellum slavery, and scholarly historians followed in the wake of these developments. Essentially, this has meant a re-shaping of the historiography with a focus from slavery to that of the enslaved. Moreover, it has opened new vistas for a public history, devoid of top-down authoritative scholarship. An important and provocative read for students and scholars interested in understanding the history of slavery, its harrowing effects, and how it was culturally defined"--

"Professional historians, schools, colleges, and universities are not alone in shaping higher-order understanding of history. The central thesis of this book is the belief historical fiction in text and film shape attitudes towards an understanding of history as it moves the focus from slavery to the enslaved-from the institution to the personal, families and feminist accounts. In a broader sense, this contributes to a public history. In part, using the quickly growing corpus of neo-slave counterfactual narratives, this book examines the notion of the emerging slavery public history, and the extent to which this is defined by literature, film, and other forms of artistic expression, rather than non-fiction-popular or scholarly-and education in history in the school systems. Inter alia, this book looks to the validity of historical fiction in print or in film as a way of understanding history. A focal point of this book is the hypothesis that neo-slave narratives-supported by selective triangulated readings and viewings of scholarly works and nonfiction-have assisted greatly in reshaping the historiography of antebellum slavery, and scholarly historians followed in the wake of these developments. Essentially, this has meant a re-shaping of the historiography with a focus from slavery to that of the enslaved. Moreover, it has opened new vistas for a public history, devoid of top-down authoritative scholarship. An important and provocative read for students and scholars interested in understanding the history of slavery, its harrowing effects, and how it was culturally defined"--

Professional historians, schools, colleges and universities are not alone in shaping higher-order understanding of history. The central thesis of this book is the belief historical fiction in text and film shape attitudes towards an understanding of history as it moves the focus from slavery to the enslaved—from the institution to the personal, families and feminist accounts. In a broader sense, this contributes to a public history. In part, using the quickly growing corpus of neo-slave counterfactual narratives, this book examines the notion of the emerging slavery public history, and the extent to which this is defined by literature, film and other forms of artistic expression, rather than non-fiction—popular or scholarly—and education in history in the school systems. Inter alia, this book looks to the validity of historical fiction in print or in film as a way of understanding history. A focal point of this book is the hypothesis that neo-slave narratives—supported by selective triangulated readings and viewings of scholarly works and non-fiction—have assisted greatly in re-shaping the historiography of antebellum slavery, and scholarly historians followed in the wake of these developments. Essentially, this has meant a re-shaping of the historiography with a focus from slavery to that of the enslaved. Moreover, it has opened new vistas for a public history, devoid of top-down authoritative scholarship. An important and provocative read for students and scholars interested in understanding the history of slavery, its harrowing effects and how it was culturally defined.

This book examines two venerable cultures, art and technology, and uses the young "interdiscipline" of cognitive history combined with case studies of both ancient and modern artifacts to explore, and unveil, some of the bridges by which this reconciliation of two seemingly distant and oppositional cultures can be effected. Art and technology are commonly regarded as oppositional. While both are concerned with made things – artifacts – and both have their origins in pre-literate antiquity, the primary purposes they are intended for are quite distinct: the artifacts of technology serve utilitarian purposes while those of art serve affective needs. This opposition between art and technology, notably argued by such scholars as Lewis Mumford and George Kubler is challenged in this book. For, when we consider art and technology as creative phenomena, then many significant, interesting, and often subtle commonalities emerge whereby a reconciliation – a unity – of these two great cultures seems possible. This book utilizes case studies of both ancient and modern artifacts – ranging from the Nataraja sculpture of ancient India, a great astronomical clock of ancient China, and Japanese Samurai swordmaking, through Gothic cathedrals and Renaissance paintings of Europe to English Elizabethan machinery to the French Impressionists to modernist concrete structures and paintings in both East and West. This book will be of interest to students and professional scholars interested in the histories of art and technology, cultural history, and creativity studies.

This detailed study of eighty European journeys examines the everyday spatial concerns of nineteenth-century travelers, with a focus on travelers from the Netherlands and North Sea region. From common soldiers in revolutionary Belgium to guests of the tsars in Russia, many of their travel accounts are here examined for the first time. Chapters analyze the different meanings of the home and homeliness; travelers’ desires for socializing but equally their intricate privacy norms; their intense attachment to cleanliness, order, space, and light; and the discomforts of cold, hot, wet, hard, and cramped spaces. Author Anna P.H. Geurts details what spatial characteristics travelers valued, what measures they took to ensure them, and what sensations, emotions, and thoughts this resulted in. Geurts’s careful attention to gender, class, and individual experience turns existing conceptions of industrial modernity on their head. From Napoleonic stagecoaches and sailing-boats to the steam-powered journeys of the belle époque, the continuities in travel experiences are surprising, as are the commonalities between travelers of different social classes and genders. Significant shifts in their spatial micropolitics should be sought less in the world of administration and industrial machinery, and more in travelers’ increasingly flexible and egalitarian mindset and changing economic relations. This book will be of value to students and researchers of cultural history as well as contemporary planning and design.

This books examines the history of Belgian physical anthropology in the long nineteenth century and discusses how the notion of ‘race’ structured Belgian pasts and presents as well as relations between metropole and empire. In a context of competing European nationalisms, Belgian anthropologists mainly used physical characters, like skull form and the color of hair and eyes, to delimitate ‘races’, which were believed to be permanent and existent. Their belief in a supposed racial superiority was however above all telling about their own origins and physical characters. Although it is often assumed that these ideas were subsequently transferred to the colony, the case of Belgian colonization in Congo shows that colonial administrators, at least in theory, were reluctant to use the idea of permanent ‘races’ because they needed the possibility of ‘evolution’ to legitimize their actions as part of a ‘civilizing mission’. In reality, however, colonization was based on military occupation and economic exploitation, with devastating effects. This book analyzes how, in this violent context, widespread racial prejudices in fact dehumanized Congolese. This not only allowed colonizers to act inhuman but also reduced Congolese, or their body parts, to objects that could be measured, photographed, casted, and ‘collected’. This volume will be of use to students and scholars alike interested in social and cultural history as well as imperial and colonial history.

NeoSlave Narratives is a study in the political, social, and cultural content of a given literary form--the novel of slavery cast as a first-person slave narrative. After discerning the social and historical factors surrounding the first appearance of that literary form in the 1960s, NeoSlave Narratives explores the complex relationship between nostalgia and critique, while asking how African American intellectuals at different points between 1976 and 1990 remember and use the site of slavery to represent the crucial cultural debates that arose during the sixties.

Staging the Amistad collects in print for the first time plays about the Amistad slave revolt by three of Sierra Leone’s most influential playwrights of the latter decades of the twentieth century: Charlie Haffner, Yulisa Amadu “Pat” Maddy, and Raymond E. D. de’Souza George. Until the late 1980s, when the first of these plays was performed, the 1839 shipboard slave rebellion and the return of its victors to their homes in what is modern-day Sierra Leone had been an unrecognized chapter in the country’s history. The plays recast the tale of heroism, survival, and resistance to tyranny as a distinctly Sierra Leonean story, emphasizing the agency of its African protagonists. For this reason, Haffner, Maddy, and de’Souza George counterbalance the better-known American representations of the rebellion, which center on American characters and American political and cultural concerns. The first public performances of these plays constituted a watershed moment. Written and staged immediately before and after the start of Sierra Leone’s decade-long conflict, they brought the Amistad rebellion to public consciousness. Furthermore, their turn to a uniquely Sierra Leonean history of heroic resistance to tyranny highlights the persistent faith in nation-state nationalism and the dreams of decolonization.