Review
"This anthology links Africa, Latin America, the Caribbean, and the United States in its analysis of the role of gender in creating new social orders after the end of slavery. Taken together, the essays are clear, compelling, complex, and ultimately unsettling in their evocation of a past filled with hope for great change and largely effective struggles for its containment"--Eileen Findlay, author of Imposing Decency: The Politics of Sexuality and Race in Puerto Rico, 1870-1920 "This innovative volume highlights the quite different ways in which men and women achieved freedom and faced the possibility of citizenship in postemancipation societies. By examining ideologies of gender as well as differences in experiences, the contributing authors broaden our understanding of emancipation as a transformative process. By placing women of color at the center of the analysis, moreover, many of these authors develop a new picture of the dynamics of emancipation."--Rebecca Scott, author of Degrees of Freedom: Louisiana and Cuba after Slavery "[A] thought-provoking collection of essays ... valuable for its discussions of divergent gender ideals among men and women slaves, elites and non-elites, planters, abolitionists, and missionaries. It is most important for its descriptions of the efforts of former slaves to contest and define what it meant to be free and male, versus free and female, in the aftermath of emancipation."--Kathleen Higgins, American Historical Review
Product Description
This groundbreaking collection provides the first comparative history of gender and emancipation in the Atlantic world. Bringing together essays on the United States, Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, West Africa and South Africa, and the Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean, it demonstrates that emancipation was a profoundly gendered process, produced through connections between race, gender, sexuality, and class. Contributors from the United States, Canada, Europe, the Caribbean, and Brazil explore how the processes of emancipation involved the re-creation of gender identities - the production of freedmen and freedwomen with different rights, responsibilities, and access to citizenship.Offering detailed analyses of slave emancipation in specific societies, the contributors discuss all of the diverse actors in emancipation: slaves, abolitionists, free people of colour, state officials, and slave owners. Whether considering the construction of a post-slavery masculine subjectivity in Jamaica, the work of two white U.S. abolitionist women with the Freedman's Bureau after the Civil War, freedwomen's negotiations of labour rights in Puerto Rico, slave women's contributions to the slow unravelling of slavery in French West Africa, or the ways that Brazilian abolitionists deployed representations of femininity as virtuous and moral, these essays demonstrate the gains that a gendered approach offers to understanding the complex processes of emancipation. Some chapters also explore theoretical and methodological approaches that enable a gendered reading of post-slavery archives. The editors' substantial introduction traces the reasons for and patterns of women's and men's different experiences of emancipation throughout the Atlantic world.Contributors include: Martha Abreu, Sheena Boa, Bridget Brereton, Carol Faulkner, Roger Kittleson, Martin Klein, Melanie Newton, Diana Paton, Sue Peabody, Richard Roberts, Ileana M. Rodriguez-Silva, Hannah Rosen, Pamela Scully, Mimi Sheller, Marek Steedman, Michael Zeuske Pamela Scully teaches at Emory University. She is the author of "Liberating the Family? Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823-1853". Diana Paton is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Newcastle. She is the author of "No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780-1870" and the editor of "A Narrative of Events, since the First of August, 1834", by James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica, both also published by Duke University Press.
