![]() They remembered how masters encouraged slave marriages and large families, not out of care for “their people” but for profit. Freed people did not recall the happy slavery and benign masters portrayed by Lost Cause-leaning professional historians. Smithers traces a familiar historiography, but his innovation lies in juxtaposing African American vernacular history alongside that historiography. This key component of the Lost Cause culminated in the Dunning school at Columbia and William Archibald Dunning’s student, U. By championing objective, “scientific” history based on written records and deeming undocumented African American memories unreliable, professional historians propagated a sanitized version of paternal, benign slavery. Professional (white, male) historians shaped, and were shaped by, the Lost Cause mythology. Slave breeding here refers to the coercive, often violent, reproductive and sexual practices that prevented slaves from controlling their sexuality and families.Īfter the Civil War, former slaves’ memoirs, oral histories, and stories were shunted aside and subsumed by the Lost Cause mythology. Smithers reframes slave breeding, applying a wider scope that better encompasses the historical experiences of African Americans. However, many former slaves recalled “coercive and violent forms of reproductive sex during slavery” (p. ![]() They claimed that no archival documents conclusively proved that slave owners ran stud farms or “interfered with slave reproduction to maximize profits. Smithers also contributes to discourses about memory-how it is created and maintained-and historians’ role in propagating public memory.Īs Smithers explains, professional historians long disavowed slave breeding, which they defined in narrow, economic terms. ![]() Smithers’s monograph complements revisionist works that expose the horrific realities of the domestic slave trade and the capitalistic, cruel ethos of slave owners and traders, such as Edward Baptist, James Oakes, Robert Gudmestad, and Walter Johnson. Doing so required “methodological agility” and the use of oral histories, literature, theater, and film (p. Smithers shows “how black Americans defined, constructed, and used memories of slave breeding to structure historical narratives about sexual violence” (p. He intends to “problematize white America’s hegemonic hold over the retelling of American history and of slavery’s place in that history” and, in doing so, provide a “richer, deeper, and more complex understanding” about the meaning of slave breeding in “African American history and memory” (p. Smithers exposes how these divergent views developed by tracing two historical threads: the vernacular history of a largely African American community and a professional history of primarily white, male historians. Most Americans would agree that slavery existed, but they might have wildly different ideas about what slavery was like and what legacy it left. Sears (University of Alabama in Huntsville) Gainesville: University Press of Florida, 2013. Slave Breeding: Sex, Violence, and Memory in African American History.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |