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This book provides a case study of slavery and its abolition in Ottoman Tunisia, one of the smallest countries in North Africa and the first to abolish the longstanding institution of slavery in the Muslim world during the modern period. The book combines a range of Tunisian and European archival data, travellers' accounts, and Arabic legal documents and source materials, directing much-needed attention not only to the Tunisian elements within slavery and abolition discourses, but also to those in west and central Sudan and Europe, especially in the Mediterranean basin. It argues that the major force driving abolition was Tunisian rulers' pragmatic response to increased European economic and political intervention in North Africa—first with the 1816 prohibition against enslaving Christians for ransom and especially after the French occupation of Algeria in the 1830s. The urgency of safeguarding the independence of Tunisia, more than efforts at selective “modernization” or “reform,” triggered the move toward abolition and the emancipation of the enslaved black population, which was achieved in 1846. By assessing how European capitalism along with political pressure and dynamics in the western Mediterranean shaped the abolition of the trans-Saharan slave trade and slavery in Tunisia, this book attempts to bridge the historiographical gap that treats the Atlantic and Saharan slave trades as separate entities. It offers wider regional perspectives and shows how the Tunisian model of abolition is useful for viewing slavery in the Islamic context during the modern period.

Affective Materialities reads modernist literature for the ways in which bodies come to matter physically, socially, and juridically using two recent turns in literary studies—one to affect studies and the other to ecocriticism. Each chapter in the collection delves into a multifold body, investigating how body-forms come to matter. Chapters reveal what the modernist body represents in a way that also addresses the most urgent contemporary concerns of modernity today. In other words, chapters address how a body signifies, becomes legible, writes, is written, touches, constitutes, merges, and encounters through various representations in a peculiarly modernist fashion. In turn, the collection sets the stakes for how bodies merge with their surroundings or are re-created by them, into an amalgam of self and place, as ethical concern for social justice. We aim to address the way the body and animate matter become a lens for grasping the fluidities of race, gender, sexuality, anthropocentrism, individualism, and ultimately, the promise and limits of creativity itself.

This study of atheist African American writers poses a substantive challenge to those who see atheism in despairing and nihilistic terms. The author argues that while most white atheists mourn the loss of faith, many black atheists — believing the “God-concept” spawns racism and oppression — consider the death of God a cause for personal and political hope. Focusing on a little-discussed aspect of African American literature, this analysis of African American atheists' treatment of God fills a huge gap in studies that consistently ignore their contributions. Examining how a belief in God and His “chosen people” necessitates a politics of superiority and inferiority, the author considers the degree to which religious faith is responsible for justifying oppression, even acts of physical and psychological violence. In their secular vision of social and political justice, black atheists argue that only when the culture adopts and internalizes a truly atheist politics — one based on pluralism, tolerance, and freedom — will radical democracy be achieved.

Motivated by a growing need to address questions of transnationalism, female mobility, and citizenship, this book offers an in-depth study of selective texts of Audre Lorde (Barbadian-American), Edwidge Danticat (Haitian-American), Maryse Condé (Guadeloupean-American) and Grace Nichols (Guyanese-British). The book examines transnational migration or movement not only in terms of physical journeys, but it also employs the trope of migration as resistance, as dissent. Examining the pervasive circulation of bodies, this book challenges the pathologization ascribed to black female sexuality/body, subverting its assumed definition as diseased, passive, and docile. Investigating how black female identities and sexualities circulate globally, it focuses on issues of embodiment, how women's bodies are read and seen; how bodies “perform” and are performed upon; how they challenge hierarchical constructs and disrupt normative standards. Furthermore, it depicts how female subjects not only discursively engender a parallel “migration” that disrupts and debunks hierarchical structures, but how they also engender a politics of resistance and subversion of mainstream/dominant discourse, a detour from normative categorizations and ideologies, a migration from and challenge of single, fixed, heteronormative, heterosexual definitions of self. In essence, it examines the politics and economics of migratory movements, re-examining and reconfiguring the definition of citizenship to reflect transnational movements and subjectivities, and the shifting definitions of home. The book's engagement with critical race theory, adds another layer to its uniqueness by engaging “disability” studies, albeit peripherally, as it challenges the construct of disease, wellness and able-bodiedness as configured by Western medical science.

Toni Morrison herself has long urged for organic critical readings of her works. This book delves into African spiritual traditions, explaining the meanings of African cosmology and epistemology as manifest in Morrison's novels. The result is a critical investigation of such works as The Bluest Eye, Sula, Song of Solomon, Tar Baby, Paradise, Love, Beloved, and Jazz. While others have studied the African spiritual ideas and values encoded in Morrison's work, the author of this study explores a wide range of complex concepts, including African deities, ancestral ideas, spiritual archetypes, mythic trope, and lyrical prose representing African spiritual continuities. She writes this book, not only as a literary critic but also as a practicing Obatala priest in the Yoruba spiritual tradition and a Mama Nganga in the Kongo spiritual system. She analyzes tensions between communal and individual values and moral codes as represented in Morrison's novels. She also uses interviews with and non-fiction written by Morrison to further build her critical paradigm.

A close study of six major public religious festivals, including carnival, African-Brazilian Culture and Regional Identity in Bahia, Brazil, explores the cultural politics of regional identity in the state of Bahia in northeast Brazil. The author shows how, after 1930, the festivals provided a platform for African-Bahians and their allies to re-formulate Bahian regional identity to allow for a greater degree of cultural inclusion for Bahians of African descent. The book emphasizes the agency of African-Bahians as samba, capoeira, and Candomblé ritual were performed during the festivals and describes how politicians, journalists, song writers, and public intellectuals came to celebrate African-Bahian culture as a defining feature of what it meant to be Bahian. The nature of this cultural inclusion, however, was such that, although it was an improvement on the prejudice and persecution of the 1920s, it led to very little, if any, improvement in the political and economic position of working-class people of African descent. As such, the book explores the possibilities and limitations of cross-class alliances based around cultural inclusion in a specific historical setting and the potential of cultural politics for the social inclusion of people of African descent in multi-racial, multi-cultural communities within Brazil and the African diaspora.

Cuban Costumbrista writers reported the strong presence of African traditions developed by slaves and by freed Blacks as agents of a vigorous popular culture that was highly visible throughout the nineteenth century. In their handling of Black themes, Costumbristas addressed four main subjects: (1) the particularities of the sugar-cane plantation, rich in slave cultures (as performed in different formats of acculturation by both African and Creole or Cuban-born slaves); (2) the development of religious systems within rural and urban settings; (3) documentation of Black musical expressions; and (4) the incorporation of certain Black social types as literary characters, as workers of specific trades assigned to slaves or to freed Blacks, or as marginal outcasts living in slum areas of major Cuban cities. Afro-Cuban Costumbrismo intends to examine the special qualities that the nineteenth-century Costumbristas observed as eyewitnesses of the making of a new racial hybridity, known today as “mulattoness.” Although mulattoness was a racial concept handled in various types of documents (for example, in ecclesiastical and civil regulations against mixed marriages), it was in Costumbrista literature that the concept took on literary presence. Although Blacks as depicted by Costumbristas had little literary significance, their presence in these politically infused texts covertly addresses the influence of Black Creole culture on developing Cubanía.

Afro-Cuban Religious Arts traces the religious art created by four generations of Afro-Caribbean women from Havana, Cuba, to Spanish Harlem, New York, from 1899 to 1969. Through an examination of archives featuring photographs, notes, and surviving altar fragments belonging to Tiburcia Sotolongo y Ugarte, Hortensia Ferrer, Iluminada Sierra Ortiz, and Carmen Oramas Caballery, a history of women’s leadership roles within Afro-Cuban religious arts practices emerges. To this end, their work reveals the critical interaction between the arts of different Afro-Caribbean belief systems, particularly Espiritismo and Santería. With careful documentation of this work, these leaders created an impressive account of hybrid cultural identities that references African, native Caribe, and European cultural inheritances. This exploration of Caribbean Creole identity prompted critical dialogue among their audiences during highly turbulent social and political changes of the twentieth century. Such popular discourse proves to be exemplary of the dynamic exchange of histories that led to the explosion of African diasporic religious arts throughout the Americas and beyond.

This book compares Cuban American and African American religiosity, arguing that Afro-Cuban religiosity and culture are central to understanding the Cuban and Cuban American condition. The book interprets this saturation of the Afro-Cuban as transcending race and affecting all Cubans and Cuban Americans in spite of their pigmentation or self-identification. Building on a historical overview of the intersection of race, religion, and nationhood, the book explores the manner in which devotion to La Caridad del Cobre, popular religion, and Cuban letters inform an Afro-Cuban theology. This interdisciplinary study draws from various theological schools as well as the disciplines of history, literary studies, and ethnic studies. The primary discipline is systematic theology, with special attention to black and Latino/a theologies. Far from being disconnected subfields, they are interrelated areas within theological studies. The book provides a broad overview of the Cuban and Cuban American communities, emphasizing the manner in which the intersection of race and religion has functioned within the construction of Cuban and Cuban American identities. The Roman Catholic Church's role in this history, as well as the preservation of African religious practices and consequent formation of Afro-Cuban religions, are paramount. Also new is the collaborative spirit between black and Latino/a that underlines this work. The book proposes an expansion of racial identity recognizing the different cultures that exist within U.S. racial contexts—specifically a model of collaboration versus dialogue between black and Latino/a theologies.

This volume presents examples of how digital technologies are being used by people of African descent in South America and the Caribbean, a topic that has been overlooked within the field of digital humanities. These case studies show that in the last few decades, Black Latinx communities have been making themselves visible and asserting long-standing claims and rights through digital tools and platforms, which have been essential for enacting discussions and creating new connections between diverse groups. Afro-Latinx Digital Connections includes both research articles and interviews with practitioners who are working to create opportunities for marginalized communities. Projects discussed in this volume range from an Afrodescendant digital archive in Argentina, blog networks in Cuba, an NGO dedicated to democratizing technology in Brazilian favelas, and the recruitment of digital media to fight racism in Peru. Contributors demonstrate that these tools need not be state of the art to be effective and that they are often most useful when employed to sustain a resilience that is deep and historically grounded. Digital connections are shown here as a means to achieve social justice and to create complex self-representations that challenge racist images of Afrodescendant peoples and monolithic conceptions of humanity. This volume expands the scope of digital humanities and challenges views of the field as a predominantly white discipline.

The struggle for racial justice by Afro–civil society in Brazil and Salvador da Bahia is the main concern of this book. Theoretically this research aims to contribute to Latin American critical racial theory and Afro-Brazilian social movements by providing deep insights regarding cultural politics in Salvador da Bahia by exploring the following: various and different of forms of Black consciousness and cultural expressions; different levels of political action and social mobilization by Afro-Brazilian groups; the role of Afro–civil society in relation to the state; and to critically analyze current debates on racial and gender discrimination as well as social inequality. Conceptually, this research seeks to break new ground by examining how Black politics both cultural and formal are articulated and the ways in which the state is responding to various Black demands in Brazil, particularly in Salvador da Bahia.

This book discusses the central role that race played in Mississippi's gradual transition from a Democratic stronghold to a solidly Republican state. Prior to 1965, the state had almost no black political participation, but, in just over twenty years, it had hundreds of black elected officials. The growth of black political power was contested by white politicians in both parties, who alternated between resistance to and solicitation of black voters. These mechanisms of resistance included numerous vote-dilution schemes to weaken black voting strength and defeat black candidates. Eventually, the Democratic Party achieved integration, but white Democrats still held the real power in the party. The price of this integration was the increasing defection of white voters to the Republicans, who abandoned interracial efforts in favor of racial conservatism and indifference to black concerns. Unlike recent studies arguing that class, economics, or other nonracial issues played a role in southern political realignment, this study reinforces the fact that race was at the heart of the “Great White Switch” of Mississippi to the GOP in the 1980s.

This is a collection of recent scholarship on the aftermath of US slave emancipation, with a range of contributions from leading scholars in the field (Foner, Holt, Fitzgerald), up-and-coming historians with a reputation in the study of Reconstruction (O'Donovan, Baker, Kelly, Downs), and other promising junior and mid-level scholars (Illingworth, Mathisen, Bryant, Rhyne) whose essays here speak to some of the key issues in Reconstruction historiography. Aside from Holt's opening piece and the afterword by Foner, the essays were selected from more than 75 papers presented at two conferences organized by the After Slavery Project (www.afterslavery.com), a transatlantic research collaboration directed by Brian Kelly from Queen's University Belfast in Northern Ireland. The selection was based on three main criteria: the essays had to concern the former Confederate states during the period following slave emancipation; they had to be based on original research; and in the judgment of the editors, the essays had to make a substantial contribution to Reconstruction historiography. We sought essays that concerned the role of labor in Reconstruction but did not confine ourselves to these. The result is a collection that covers a geographically diverse area of the former slave states, grappling with problems central to Reconstruction scholarship in the aftermath of Foner's important synthesis.

Too often, approaches to dealing with the problems posed by the spread of HIV have been one dimensional, with the assumption that what works in one place will work in another. This book includes chapters representing a range of original ideas, methodologies, and suggestions that contribute to the field of AIDS research, both in Africa and beyond. The chapters examine such issues as HIV transmission, condom use, sexual patterns, male circumcision, political factors, gender, poverty, and behavioral change. The book features the research of those working in different countries in Africa, with different communities within those countries, and with different age, class, religious, and ethnic groups within those communities. These previously unpublished chapters also address the need for a greater anthropological perspective in the increasingly medicalized and politicized study of HIV and AIDS. As a whole, they pave the way for a deeper cultural understanding necessary to effectively reverse the catastrophic growth of HIV/AIDS on the continent.

There are approximately seven million adult gay and bisexual men in the United States and 120 million adult gay and bisexual men globally. This book explores the cultural dimensions of AIDS among men who have sex with men (MSM). The traditional emphasis in HIV/AIDS research within gay communities has focused on sexual behavior and psychological issues. Yet to better understand the social and cultural dimensions of the disease, and to halt the spread of HIV infection, it is essential to recognize and understand the culture of MSM. Cultural anthropologists, unquestionably, are in a unique position to achieve this understanding. The editor has gathered a diverse group of experts to contribute to this collection, and the volume features a wealth of scholarly data unavailable elsewhere.

During the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, thousands of people were incarcerated in southern jails as a result of their involvement with the civil rights movement. This book follows those activists inside the jail cell to explore the trials and tribulations of life as a civil rights prisoner. It highlights the conditions inside southern jails, activists’ interactions with “ordinary” prisoners, and the importance of race and gender in shaping the prisoners’ treatment. It also reveals how, beyond the jail cell, the movement sought to counter such repression via an ideology that embraced imprisonment as a mark of honor and a statement of resistance, while also seeking to fill the jails and thereby place financial pressure upon local government; this was encapsulated in the term “jail-no-bail.” Organizations and individuals regularly testified to the importance of incarceration as a form of induction into the movement. However, after 1963, as activists faced increasingly serious charges and served longer sentences, many struggled to maintain their commitment to the philosophy behind jail-no-bail. Beneath movement rhetoric, activists found that the earlier exuberance for jail sentences did not fit with the conditions under which they worked. Ain’t Scared of Your Jail concludes by examining the shift toward black power in the post-1965 era and demonstrates how activists, now freed from an earlier focus upon integration and respectability, began to challenge mainstream definitions of criminality to claim that black prisoners were not so much criminals as victims of a racist social structure.

This book presents a new framework for understanding the history of Algeria and its global connections from the late eighteenth century to the present day. It focuses on the movement of people within, but especially from and back to Algeria. These include immigrants crossing borders for purposes of work, education, or diplomatic or military service, and refugees fleeing political or religious oppression. This framework helps to bring out long term continuities in Algerian history and create an understanding of these continuities in a geopolitical context. The book examines both the political and economic factors that have affected Algerian border crossing, and the legal and institutional elements that have shaped it including international refugee law, trans-national Islamic movements, and great power conflicts. Algerians are understood as forming a global frontier society coming from an area where the Western and Islamic worlds have long experienced intensive interaction, sometimes resulting in a “clash of civilizations,” but at other times fostering interfaith dialogue and cultural syncretism. The book examines ways in which Algerians have interacted with “others”, notably through intermarriage, political alliance, and shared participation in music or theatre. The Algerian experience is viewed in a long term historical context in which there are cycles of opening when civil society is insulated from government authority, and of closing, with efforts to impose government control through means including arbitrary detention and torture.

Conventional history narratives tell us that in the early years of the Republic, the United States fought three wars against the Seminole Indians and two against the Creeks. However, this book argues that we would do better to view these events as moments of heightened military aggression punctuating a much longer period of conflict in the Gulf Coast region. Featuring chapters on topics ranging from international diplomacy to Seminole military strategy, the volume urges us to reconsider the reasons for and impact of early U.S. territorial expansion. It highlights the actions and motivations of Indians and African Americans during the period and establishes the groundwork for research that is more balanced and looks beyond the hopes and dreams of whites.

This book provides detailed history and technical design information on every type of small rescue craft ever used by the United States Life-Saving Service and United States Coast Guard, from the early 1800s to the current day. By looking at these vessels, many of which featured innovative designs, the chapters shed light on the brave men and women who served in USLSS and USCG stations, saving innumerable lives. In the book rare photographs and drawings of each type of boat are enhanced by detailed design histories, specifications, and station assignments for each craft. The book includes motorized, wind-powered, and human-powered vessels.