Benjamin N. Lawrance

Amistad's orphans : an Atlantic story of children, slavery, and smuggling

The lives of six African children, ages nine to sixteen, were forever altered by the revolt aboard the Cuban schooner La Amistad in 1839. Like their adult companions, all were captured in Africa and illegally sold as slaves. In this fascinating revisionist history, Benjamin N. Lawrance reconstructs six entwined stories and brings them to the forefront of the Amistad conflict. Through eyewitness testimonies, court records, and the childrens own letters, Lawrance recounts how their lives were inextricably interwoven by the historic drama, and casts new light on illegal nineteenth-century transatlantic slave smuggling.

La révolte des femmes: Economic Upheaval and the Gender of Political Authority in Lomé, Togo, 1931-33

Abstract: In 1932 the governor of French Togoland announced an increase in taxes on Lomé market women because of the economic downturn caused by the Depression. Both the indigenous city council and a clandestine resistance movement opposed this fiscal plan, warning of social unrest. The strain triggered a protest by market women that spread beyond the colonial capital. This article offers a new explanation of the explosive tension by arguing that an organized male political campaign conjoined with a socioeconomic protest led by market women. It explores womens resistance as a performance of vodou ritual as a vehicle of shame and protest. Ultimately the violent, culturally marked protests marked the gendered perimeters of political authority for both Ewe women and men and further defined Ewe market womens conception of an Ewe self and the emergence of conflicting and contested notions of “Eweness” as a prelude to the independence struggle.

‘A Full Knowledge of the Subject of Slavery’: TheAmistad, Expert Testimony, and the Origins of Atlantic Studies

This article explores the role of testimony, expertise, and the academy in the production of knowledge about slavery in the context of the trials of the Africans aboard the slave ship La Amistad, 1839–1841. Testimony provided by enlisted self-professed experts formed the intellectual architecture to the legal argument as it advanced to the Supreme Court. When considered separately from the trials, and distinctly as a question of the production of knowledge, the role of expert testimony provides crucial insight into the function of the university in antebellum anti-slavery thought and action, the marginalization of the lived African slave experience, and the emergence of Atlantic studies in the contemporary present. Examining the relationship between the university and the marshalling of expertise – broadly understood as linguistic, political and cultural knowledge of slavery and the slave trade – suggests that the early use of expert testimony had an important albeit neglected role in the birth of Atlantic studies.

From Child Labor “Problem” to Human Trafficking “Crisis”: Child Advocacy and Anti-Trafficking Legislation in Ghana

This article examines the relationship between multidimensional child advocacy campaigns and the enactment of Ghanas Human Trafficking Act (2005). I argue that while child advocacy has a rich history, the diffuse labor-oriented advocacy characteristic of the 1990s failed to articulate an achievable goal. Child labor advocacy was impotent because the diverse agencies involved adopted different positions about the permissibility of child labor. By contrast, the anti-trafficking initiatives of the early 2000s focused narrowly on legislative remedy and formulated a discourse of “crisis.” An anti-trafficking coalition built on an international regulation model that emerged from the cocoa industry. As agents of social and political change, domestic, regional, and foreign nongovernmental organizations and intergovernmental organizations played important roles in shaping debates and framing new law. The Ghanaian law, however, is of limited effectiveness because it ignores autochthonous social practices with historically rich traditions, and it enjoins a narrow, economic model for the proliferation of trafficking.

Introduction: Traversing the Local/Global and Food/Culture Divides

This interdisciplinary collection contributes to debates about the role and movement of commodities in the historical and contemporary world. The seven articles and Afterword by noted theorist of cuisine Rachel Laudan collectively address a fundamental tension in the emerging scholarly terrain of food studies, namely theorizing the relationship between foodstuff production and cuisine patterns. Originally drafted as contributions to a conference entitled “Tasting Histories: Food and Drink Cultures Through the Ages,” convened to celebrate the 2009 opening of the Robert Mondavi Institute of Food and Wine Sciences at the University of California, Davis, the seven articles appearing here were selected from approximately fifty papers presented, from over one hundred and thirty submissions. 1 Our conference explored critical issues in food and drink production and consumption, and we encouraged participants to deploy a world-historical lens. We found particularly compelling papers that explored the ways in which food and people interact when one or the other is in motion. In some cases, it is the foods that move, traveling between points of origin and points of consumption on their way to becoming “global” cuisines. In others, it is people who move, creating new meanings for “local” products, sometimes but not always in anticipation of external markets. These papers, now expanded into essays, consider such movements in context, and, in so doing, complicate notions that food “shapes” culture as it crosses borders or that culture “adapts” foods to its neo-local or global contexts. By studying closely the dynamics of contact between mobile foods and/or people and the specific communities of consumption they create, these authors reveal the process whereby local foods become global or global foods become local to be a dynamic, co-creative one jointly facilitated by humans and nature.

Colonialism and African Childhood

African children shaped social, cultural, and productive dynamics during European colonial rule. Often marginal to those in power, children have been neglected by historians until recently, in part because few sources reveal experiences of childhood socialization, labor, education, and play. What constituted a child could be indicated by membership in an age set or by ritual initiation. In the nineteenth century, children become visible in court records of enslavement. By the twentieth century, colonial authorities had erased many of the complexities of African childhood. In white settler states, boys and girls were simply identified as workers crucial to capitalist accumulation. Learning to read in the classroom informed children’s expectations. School literature taught girls to perform domestic roles while adventure stories prepared boys for public life. Scholars still need to delve more deeply into the variations and continuities of African childhoods across a vast continent.

Ebola’s Would-be Refugees: Performing Fear and Navigating Asylum During a Public Health Emergency

ABSTRACT Chronic and acute illnesses sit uncomfortably with asylum claiming and refugee mobilities. The story of a Sierra Leonean, an athlete who feared Ebola and sought refuge in the UK, provides an opening to examine protection discourses that invoke fear, trauma, and crisis metaphors, to understand how asylum claims are performed, and how related petitions are adjudicated during public health emergencies of international concern. Ebola is revealed as a novel claim strategy, and thus a useful subject matter to investigate the shifting modalities of migrant agency, the unstable fabric of medical humanitarianism, and knowledge production in moments of exceptionality. Video abstract Read the transcript Watch the video on Vimeo

Historicizing as a Legal Trope of Jeopardy in Asylum Narratives and Expert Testimonies of Gender-Based Violence

Testimony submitted with asylum petitions is a vantage point for documenting and evaluating lived experiences in post-conflict societies. Asylum petitions are rich documentary archives tethered to discrete legal contexts, which shed light on analytical categories, constructed identities, and personal narratives of fear, trauma, and violence. Lawrance argues that expert testimony interpreting petitions pertaining to gender-based violence in the Upper Guinea region is structured by the trope of historicization, a rhetorical logic of categorization and persuasion emphasizing historicity. Emboldened by “historicizing” expert testimony, asylum-seekers move beyond the experiences causing flight and testify to future jeopardy. Lawrance shows how questions of future jeopardy shape narrative strategies, providing a window on the changing cultural and legal landscape of post-conflict societies in Upper Guinea.

‘To Know Where You Come from; That Is Divine’: Three New Documentary Films on the African Slave Experience

Ghosts of Amistad: In the Footsteps of the Rebels (Tony Buba 2014, 56 minutes, Filmmakers Library/Alexander Street Press), English, Mende, Krio. English subtitles. The Diambourou: Slavery and Emancipation in Kayes, Mali (Marie Rodet 2014, 23 minutes), French, Bambara, Malinke. English and French subtitles. They Are We (Emma Christopher, 2014, 77 minutes, Icarus Films), Spanish, English, Krio, Mende, Temne, Banta. English, French, Krio, and Spanish subtitles.

'Your Poor Boy No Father No Mother': 'Orphans,' Alienation, and the Perils of Atlantic Child Slave Biography

This article explores the social and political context embedded in Atlantic child slave biography, such as claims about family, parentage, and orphanhood in narratives of child enslavement. I examine the claims of orphanhood and the fictive kinship relations marshaled by James B. Covey, the interpreter during the trials of La Amistad, during his Atlantic passages as examples of the struggle against alienation to “remake” his political and social being. More than adult slaves, children deployed kinship language and idioms as part of a larger struggle to forge and preserve relationships with benefactors. Although kinship claims are an experience common across slave populations, a focus on the difficulties of writing a biography of child claims draws attention to the extreme vulnerability of child slaves and their pressing need for patron/client relationships.