Download Free Colonialism And Slavery In Performance Book in PDF and EPUB Free Download. You can read online Colonialism And Slavery In Performance and write the review.

A provocative, breath-taking, and concise relational history of colonialism over the past 500 years, from the dawn of the New World to the twenty-first century.
In Staging Creolization, Emily Sahakian examines seven plays by Ina Césaire, Maryse Condé, Gerty Dambury, and Simone Schwarz-Bart that premiered in the French Caribbean or in France in the 1980s and 1990s and soon thereafter traveled to the United States. Sahakian argues that these late-twentieth-century plays by French Caribbean women writers dramatize and enact creolization—the process of cultural transformation through mixing and conflict that occurred in the context of the legacies of slavery and colonialism. Sahakian here theorizes creolization as a performance-based process, dramatized by French Caribbean women’s plays and enacted through their international production and reception histories. The author contends that the syncretism of the plays is not a static, fixed creole aesthetics but rather a dynamic process of creolization in motion, informed by history and based in the African-derived principle that performance is a space of creativity and transformation that connects past, present, and future.
Colonialism and Slavery in Performance brings together original archival research with recent critical perspectives to argue for the importance of theatrical culture to the understanding of the French Caribbean sugar colonies in the eighteenth century. Fifteen English-language essays from both established and emerging scholars apply insights and methodologies from performance studies and theatre history in order to propose a new understanding of Old Regime culture and identity as a trans-Atlantic continuum that includes the Antillean possessions whose slave labour provided enormous wealth to the metropole. Carefully documented studies of performances in Saint-Domingue, the most prosperous French colony, illustrate how the crucible of a brutally racialized colonial space gave rise to a new French identity by adapting many of the cherished theatrical traditions that colonists imported directly from the mainland, resulting in a Creole performance culture that reflected the strong influence of African practices brought to the islands by plantation slaves. Other essays focus on how European theatregoers reconciled the contradiction inherent in the eighteenth century's progressive embrace of human rights, with an increasing dependence on the economic spoils of slavery, thus illustrating how the stage served as a means to negotiate new tensions within "French" identity, in the metropole as well as in the colonies. In the final section of the volume, essays explore the enduring legacy of the Old Regime in contemporary Antillean stage culture, illustrating how performance traditions continue to structure the understanding of what it means to be French in France's former Atlantic slave colonies.
Exploring the fraught processes of Spaniards' efforts to formulate a national identity - from the Enlightenment to the present - this book focuses on the nation's Islamic-African legacy, disputing the received wisdom that Spain has consistently rejected its historical relationship to Muslims and Africans.
Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in History A New York Times Notable Book A New York Times Book Review Editors’ Choice Selection A Providence Journal Best Book of the Year Winner of the Organization of American Historians Merle Curti Award for Social History Finalist for the Harriet Tubman Prize Finalist for the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize "This book is an original achievement, the kind of history that chastens our historical memory as it makes us wiser." —David W. Blight, author of Frederick Douglass: Prophet of Freedom Finalist for the Pulitzer Prize Widely hailed as a “powerfully written” history about America’s beginnings (Annette Gordon-Reed), New England Bound fundamentally changes the story of America’s seventeenth-century origins. Building on the works of giants like Bernard Bailyn and Edmund S. Morgan, Wendy Warren has not only “mastered that scholarship” but has now rendered it in “an original way, and deepened the story” (New York Times Book Review). While earlier histories of slavery largely confine themselves to the South, Warren’s “panoptical exploration” (Christian Science Monitor) links the growth of the northern colonies to the slave trade and examines the complicity of New England’s leading families, demonstrating how the region’s economy derived its vitality from the slave trading ships coursing through its ports. And even while New England Bound explains the way in which the Atlantic slave trade drove the colonization of New England, it also brings to light, in many cases for the first time ever, the lives of the thousands of reluctant Indian and African slaves who found themselves forced into the project of building that city on a hill. We encounter enslaved Africans working side jobs as con artists, enslaved Indians who protested their banishment to sugar islands, enslaved Africans who set fire to their owners’ homes and goods, and enslaved Africans who saved their owners’ lives. In Warren’s meticulous, compelling, and hard-won recovery of such forgotten lives, the true variety of chattel slavery in the Americas comes to light, and New England Bound becomes the new standard for understanding colonial America.
This wide-ranging book presents the first comprehensive and comparative account of the slave trade within the nations and colonial systems of the Americas. While most scholarly attention to slavery in the Americas has concentrated on international transatlantic trade, the essays in this volume focus on the slave trades within Brazil, the West Indies, and the Southern states of the United States after the closing of the Atlantic slave trade. The contributors cast new light upon questions that have framed the study of slavery in the Americas for decades. The book investigates such topics as the illegal slave trade in Cuba, the Creole slave revolt in the U.S., and the debate between pro- and antislavery factions over the interstate slave trade in the South. Together, the authors offer fresh and provocative insights into the interrelations of capitalism, sovereignty, and slavery.
Why do the people of the French Caribbean still continue to be haunted by the memory of their slave past more than one hundred and fifty years after the abolition of slavery? What process led to the divorce of their collective memory of slavery and emancipation from France's portrayal of these historical phenomena? How are Martinicans and Guadeloupeans today transforming the silences of the past into historical and cultural manifestations rooted in the Caribbean? This book answers these questions by relating the 1998 controversy surrounding the 150th anniversary of France's abolition of slavery to the period of the slave regime spanning the late Enlightenment and the French Revolution. By comparing a diversity of documents—including letters by slaves, free people of color, and planters, as well as writings by the philosophes, royal decrees, and court cases—the author untangles the complex forces of the slave regime that have shaped collective memory. The current nationalization of the memory of slavery in France has turned these once peripheral claims into passionate political and cultural debates.
A literary venture into the economic shadow that slavery cast, Feeding the Ghosts, based on a true story, lays bare the raw business of the slave trade. The Zong, a slave ship packed with captive African “stock,” is headed to the New World. When illness threatens to disable all on board and cut potential profits, the ship’s captain orders his crew to throw the sick into the ocean. After being hurled overboard, Mintah, a young female slave taken from a Danish mission, is able to climb back onto the ship. From her hiding place, she rouses the remaining slaves to rebel and stirs unease among the crew with a voice and conscience they seem unable to silence. Mintah’s courage and others’ reactions to it unfold in a suspenseful story of the struggle to live even when threatened by oblivion.
The French colony of Saint-Domingue (now Haiti) was home to one of the richest public theatre traditions of the colonial-era Caribbean. This book examines the relationship between public theatre and the enslaved people of Saint-Domingue—something that is generally given short shrift owing to a perceived lack of documentation. Here, a range of materials and methodologies are used to explore pressing questions including the ‘mitigated spectatorship’ of the enslaved, portrayals of enslaved people in French and Creole repertoire, the contributions of enslaved people to theatre-making, and shifting attitudes during the revolutionary era. The book demonstrates that slavery was no mere backdrop to this portion of theatre history but an integral part of its story. It also helps recover the hidden experiences of some of the enslaved individuals who became entangled in that story.
A series of penetrating, original, and authoritative essays on the history and historiography of the institution of slavery in the New World, written by a team of leading international contributors.