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Authors are cordially invited to submit proposals and/or full manuscripts by email to the publisher Dr Kate Hammond. Please direct all other correspondence to Associate Editor Alessandra Giliberto.
Abstract
This article analyzes the repetitive stories that Cuban journalists, community members, and others have told about Emilio Duanes Duvarcer, the Haitian who migrated to Cuba in his youth and allegedly lived to be 120 years old. Although underemphasized by international journalists, Duanes’s Haitian birth and history of migration were crucial to his claim of longevity, since they were responsible for the archival and cultural conditions that made his claim plausible and impossible to (dis)prove. However, the appeal of his story required transforming him into a Cuban through journalistic repetitions and statements, symbolically linking him to canonical moments in Cuban history. By analyzing repeated stories, their variations, and their slippages, this article provides insights into the racism that continues to affect Blacks and immigrant descendants in Cuba—not to mention efforts to challenge these stereotypes. It ends with reflections about which stories and identities are highlighted in Cuba’s burgeoning digital media landscape and which are overcrowded by traditional repetitions of Cuban revolutionary nationalism.
Abstract
Drawing on official imperial discourses in the Russian Empire and archival documents of the Orenburg Border Commission (1799–1856), the Russian imperial administrative institution subordinated to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, this paper analyzes the ransoming, release, and reintegration of freed Russian subjects and shows how these processes and practices were inextricably linked to the Russian imperial concept of political belonging. In such a context, the concepts of freedom and liberation must be questioned; that is, we must determine the extent to which “freedom” can represent a universal value and is legally defined and thus dependent on sociopolitical situations and frameworks. To contribute to a more precise and multifaceted understanding of “freedom” and “dependency” as well as “freeing” and “enslavement,” this article examines the liberation and repatriation of enslaved Russian subjects in the Central Asian khanates of Khiva and Bukhara in the first half of the nineteenth century.
Abstract
This introductory essay to the special issue Beyond Slavery and Freedom? makes concrete suggestions how we might move beyond this binary and why we should do so. The introduction argues that the conceptual pair slavery/freedom is deeply entwined with narratives of modernity and progress and has shaped scholarship in very diverse fields. On the basis of empirical research from the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS), we identify six possible pathways of thematically and methodologically moving beyond slavery/freedom that the contributions to the special issue address: 1) investigating forms of dependency that are not usually defined as slavery, 2) paying attention to semantic fields that are closely connected to this binary but not usually understood in relation to it, 3) highlighting the connection between (political, institutional) power and dependency, 4) engaging with post-slavery periods and experiences, 5) problematizing the challenges of identifying slavery in non-written records, and 6) underscoring the voice of actors.
Abstract
Louis de Grandpré’s book Voyage à la Côte Occidentale d’Afrique, published in 1801, is well-known to historians of Africa working on the eighteenth-century Loango Coast, located in the Cabinda province of Angola and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. In describing the laws and customs of the African societies in this region, de Grandpré invites the reader to imagine these societies as “feudal” in character and draws on the semantics of “slavery” in doing so. This article proposes that we need to place this text in the context in which it was written, namely the French Revolution and the rise of Napoleon Bonaparte. We also need to consider why the author published this book in the first place, in order to understand how the terms “slave” and “slavery” function in this text. The article argues that Louis de Grandpré used the feudal/slavery nexus consciously in order to provide a legitimizing framework for a possible French conquest, hoping to prove his own loyalty and usefulness to Napoleon.
Abstract
This article explores the relationship that the United Irishmen, Irish revolutionaries of the 1790s, had with slavery during the Revolutionary Period. The United Irishmen were exiled by the British Government as a result of a failed rebellion in 1798 and were exile throughout the Atlantic World. For the exiled United Irishmen, the United States became a primary destination for their exile, and here, slavery became an important source of disunity. In Ireland, resistance to slavery was assumed across the entire membership of the United Irishmen, but in exile, this unity diminished. In conversation with past histories, this scholarship focuses on the limitations of Jacobinism as a political ideology and the prominence of rhetoric in revolutionary ideologies of the period.