Slave cultures and the cultures of slavery
By: edited by Stephan Palmié.
Contributors: Palmié, Stephan.
Edition: 1st ed.
Publisher: University of Tennessee Press; Univ of Tennessee Pr
Published: 1995
Place of publication: Knoxville
Language: eng
Number of pages: 283
Subjects: Slavery -- History.
Description: Featuring essays by historians and anthropologists, this volume focuses on the cultural dimensions of slavery in a wide variety of geographical and historical settings. The contributors examine the historical manifestations of slavery not only as legal, political, and economic institutions but as systems of human interaction and experience that are prone to conflicts and riddled with contradictions.

Among the geographic areas covered in this collection are colonial Louisiana, the American South of the antebellum and Reconstruction periods, Jamaica, the Danish West Indies, Suriname, and Africa's Gold Coast. Some of the essays deal with conceptual and theoretical problems of current slavery studies, while others present new research on neglected issues such as Native American slave-holding and the integration of former slaves into West African societies.

Still other essays probe the continuities of cultural processes across the historical threshold between slavery and freedom. Taken together, the comparative perspectives and interdisciplinary approaches offered by this volume make it an important addition to the increasingly sophisticated ways in which the social and ideological arrangements produced by slavery are understood.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (p. [239]-273) and index.
Table of contents: title: Analyze the sounds : Frederick Douglass's invitation to modern historians of slavery / David W. Blight; title: Slave life on Caribbean sugar plantations : some unanswered questions / Sidney W. Mintz; title: African cultural principles in Caribbean slave societies : a view from the Danish West Indies / Karen Fog Olwig; title: Taste for human commodities : experiencing the Atlantic system / Stephan Palmie; title: The gold coast, the closing of the Atlantic slave trade, and Africans of the diaspora / Richard Rathbone; title: Preliminary remarks on the Oldendorp manuscripts and their history / Gudrun Meier; title: Slavery and slave cultures in a hydraulic society : Suriname / Gert Oostindie and Alex Van Stipriaan; title: Female slave-owners on the Gold Coast : just a matter of money / Adam Jones; title: Dangerous ancestors : ambivalent visions of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century leaders of the eastern maroons of Suriname / H.U.E. Thoden Van Velzen; title: Indian-Black relations in colonial and antebellum Louisiana / Daniel Usner, Jr.; title: Native American tribes and their African slaves / Renate Bartl; title: Theft, moral economy, and the transition from slavery to freedom in the American South / Alex Lichtenstein; title: The creolization of African-American slave kinship in Jamaican free village and maroon communities / Jean Besson; title: The transformation of slave experience : self and danger in the rituals of creole migrant women in the Netherlands / Ineke Van Wetering.