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about this course
Focused principally on the 20th and 21st centuries, this course will study the legacies and implications of the massive migration, forced and otherwise, from the African continent to the Caribbean, Latin America, and North America. Topics will range from the creation of racial categories in the contexts of slavery and colonialism to the making of transnational and transracial families to the recent cultural politics of “blackness” with emphasis on the ways that different kinds of archives produce multiple and often conflicting narratives. Students will produce as well as consume history. In addition to scholarly monographs and articles, course material will include film, sound, and fiction.
I’m very excited to be teaching this course, and looking forward to working with you all semester. Please take a moment to familiarize yourself with the website and read the syllabus. We will use this site extensively for announcements, postings, and virtual conversations. You should feel free to treat it as your own, and post links, images, videos, or anything else of interest to the class.
This week?s readings, I contend, draws on the themes of hybridity, duality and in-betweeness that we have discussed through different mediums in class and in our previous reading of Gilroy?s “Black Atlantic, Modernity and Double Consciousness.” Gilroy employs the symbolism of a ship in motion to demonstrate the movement of ideas and people that are in-between, which sometimes history could minimize by creating a single homogenous picture. By studying the overlapping movement of key cultural and political artifacts, opens up the opportunity for different stories and experiences. Weaver in ?The Red Atlantic? simultaneously enforces and critiques Gilroy?s idea of Black Atlantic; Weaver contends that the Red Atlantic enables the story of the transoceanic story to move beyond the homogenous story of Black slaves and victims and instead shines light on the individuals? self-determination, power and agency.
I found the theme of fluidity and fixity very intriguing in all our readings this week. Particularly, what drew my attention was Earle?s usage of food. Food as a symbolism, I argue is very interesting depending on the usage of it. Cuisine and food has the power to create differences or mix all the ingredients to be one very complicated dish (mixed grill, fusion food, ?ethnic? Lebanese food etc). For example, the breaking of the bread and wine is integral to the Catholic and Christian communion, which could separate one religion from another or deem a group of individuals as being worthy or unworthy bodies. The bread and wine is also a symbolism of the dichotomy of the Old World versus the New World. However, in reality there are plenty of overlapping as Earle suggests, between the New and Old World, such as cotton, yam, chocolate, chili peppers, and avocados, thus this fixity of two separate spheres can be viewed as a mere construct, which was categorized from the start of 1494 when Spain and Portugal divided/claimed the world. However, I argue this in-betweeness and hybridity is threatening to the colonial space because it eliminates the structure of clear hierarchy. Colonization relies on the idea of perceived unity with distinct colonial distance/ space between the colonizers and colonized, thus this hybridity poses a threat to the power of subordination, power and hierarchy.
In Dawson?s ?The Cultural Geography of Enslaved Ship Pilots,? the enslaved pilots employs the hybridity and the positionality of being afloat between the hydrospace of Old/ New World and “the last link most saltwater salves had with Africa and the first they had with the Americas” (Dawson, 2013, pg. 163). What stood out to me in Dawson?s article was the creation of a new identity through the mixture of attire- to not fully embrace Western fashion nor fully embrace the Slave attire.
My question for this week for the class is the idea of hydrospace- when I think of hydrospace, I think of ?water space? that is in a constant fluidity and not fixated to land, geography and idea. What do you guys think? How does hydrospace contrast hydrography? How do us, students, often try to create our own identity through food, clothing, and the way we communicate in our daily lives? Do we sometimes “police” our identity by constructing certain characteristics that we deem as our self identity?
After completing this week?s readings the lingering idea that stuck with me was how looking at colonial history as a fluid space demands that history, in this instance the experience of colonialism and slavery, be seen as a bidirectional process. This is key in exploring colonization where histories are typically dictated by the colonizers and not the colonized.
When describing one reason why colonialists sought to bring European agriculture to the Americas in ?If You Eat Their Food? Rebecca Earle states (among many reasons) that it was to acculturate indigenous people to ?civilized,? European culture. This is the popular narrative of colonialism. By seeing the experience of colonialism as fluid it was also bidirectional is affecting both European settlers and indigenous people. Earle continues to show how settler?s needed to adapt to their new environment when she states that Europeans ?fluctuated in their views about how much of the new American environment they could incorporate into their own bodies, and by extension into their culture.? This experience of colonization was not a direct translation of European values and culture to the New World but rather a give-and-take to mediate a dialogue between the colonial vision and environmental and social factors.
?The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade? by Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra, Matt Childs, James Sidbury and ?The Red Atlantic: Transoceanic Cultural Exchanges? by Jace Weaver both work to contest popular, one-directional narratives of colonialism by showing how colonized groups challenged existing colonial hierarchies and played key roles in colonial spaces. These two articles show how all sides of colonialism affected and were affected by slavery and colonialism.
Histories of colonialism and nationalism are typically dictated by the borders that are drawn in their wake. The fluidity of human bodies and the ocean are typically forgotten but show the importance of challenging fixed ideas of slavery and colonialism by seeing history as bidirectional.
Going Against the Grain: A Challenge to the Traditional Narrative of Colonialism
Geography scholar John Agnew coined the term ‘territorial trap’. This is the notion that people take current territorial borders for granted, falling into the mental trap of viewing these arbitrary demarcations as fixed and unchanging. This worldview sanitizes the history of these contours and lines, obscuring from view the bloody conflicts that are evidence of their actually ever changing and contested nature. This geographic tunnelvision is similar to the concept of ‘single stories’ that we discussed in our study of race in the Americas. Much like in Agnew’s geographical research, there are dominant singular narratives and mental traps in race literature as well. For example, Africans are predominantly portrayed as objects onto which ‘superior’ Christian colonizers exerted tremendous pressure and extortion. Indeed, the story of slavery often places emphasis on the strife of the Africans and Indigenous peoples while simultaneously underscoring the dominance of the Europeans. I argue that this week’s readings by Rebecca Earle, James Sidbury and Jace Weaver are incredibly profound because they challenge this singular narrative and mental trap. The authors offer a more nuanced view of slavery in the Atlantic and Spanish America, exploring instances where Africans and Indigenous peoples actually exerted pressure and dominance on Europeans colonizers. In this way, the three articles are joined by a common thread, the theme of Afro-Indigenous agency, in an era or European imperialism.
Earle, Sidbury and Weaver challenge the traditional narrative of African slaves and Indigenous peoples as helpless, in different ways. In The Black Urban Atlantic in the Age of the Slave Trade, Sidbury explains how Indigenous peoples worldwide leveraged their knowledge of local terrain in order to “invert racial/social hierarchies” (164). In this way, even though European empires sought to colonize and extract resources from distant lands, Africans, Asians, Amerindians and Polynesians were nonetheless relied upon as ‘pilots’ in these ‘exotic’ territories. This was to the degree that enslaved peoples were empowered with “unparalleled privileges”, allowing them to talk back to European naval captains and commandeer entire fleets. These instances of Indigenous-African power over Europeans are not common in the narrative of slavery. Similarly, in The Red Atlantic, Weaver echoes that “Atlantic history seemed to be the story of the White Atlantic”(420), emphasizing for example the connections between “North America and Europe rather than of those between both Americas and Africa”. Weaver however, provides examples of respected and influential Africans, such as Ayuba Suleiman Diallo, who in the 18th century, through heartfelt appeals, influenced the Governor of the Georgia to take on an antislavery platform. Weaver adds that Diallo went on to emigrate to Britain as a freedman, where he took on a prominent role in the museum society, acquiring membership in the “Gentleman’s Society of Spalding, a club whose members included some of the country’s most distinguished scholars” (419). Likewise, Earle in If You Eat Their Food, similarly emphasizes an instance of strength that Indigenous peoples displayed in the face of colonization. Unlike the European settlers on the Caribbean island of Hispaniola who “had fallen sick and died”, Indigenous peoples were able to withstand the climate of the Americas. Again, this challenges the once “unquestionable assumption of European superiority”, hinting instead that colonialism was instead an “anxious pursuit” in which Indigenous peoples actually displayed greater strength than generally known.
Taken together, these accounts of Indigenous agency and capabilities of survival, are examples of their agency during the era of colonialism. Through their texts, Earle, Sidbury and Weaver confront the mental trappings of the dominant/singular narrative of Anglo-Indigenous peoples as ‘the oppressed’. Their writing is profound as it displays that the story of colonization is not as one dimensional as it is widely held to be.
What I found interesting in how these readings brought new perspectives to the narrative of slavery and racialization of the indigenous populations of the Americas, and how they relate to Gilroy. Earle’s “if you eat their food” felt especially relevant because it examined how European notions about health and the importance of one’s diet contributed to the creation of the Spanish and the Native Americans as separate races, which is one of the things that Gilroy believes should be given much more scrutiny in cultural studies. He states that we “must construct an account of how… European traditions of thinking about culture” and how these “cultural perspectives provide the images of their racialized others as objects of knowledge, power, and cultural criticism.” Earle provides a specific example in my eyes as she explores how anxious the Spanish were at the prospect of becoming like the natives that they brought their own food over as quick as they could.
Another thing that I found interesting was how Dawson and Gilroy intersect when they talk about duality. Gilroy points out that one of his key points was to understand the double consciousness black people in England (and by extension in the rest of the West) struggle with, that is between their national identity and their racial identity. Dawson explores a similar kind of duality with the enslaved ship pilots and the way they did not belong either at sea or on shore, but became “a marginalized amphibious group” because of how unique their position was. Unlike other enslaved people, the knowledge they possessed of the ocean made them extremely valuable and well compensated, and for a time they held a position of authority over other slaves and white sailors alike.
In addition, these two readings bring a new level of nuance to colonial and racial narratives as it presents, in Earle’s paper, how Europeans believed that climate affected physical traits, in addition to believing that the Native Americans and the Spanish both descended from a common ancestor. While this resembles current ideas of evolution through natural selection, it was still an intellectual production of the time because the Spanish believed those ancestors were still Spaniards, and that those physical traits would disappear once if they kept eating the local cuisine. Dawson contributes to this by pointing out how the middle passage should be looked at more closely, for it was a space where groups of people, such as the ship pilots, could subvert racial narratives.