Martha S. Jones

Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women

Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women. Edited by Mia Bay, Farah J. Griffin, Martha S. Jones, and Barbara D. Savage. John Hope Franklin Series in African American History and Culture. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2015. Pp. xii, 308. Paper,

Time, Space, and Jurisdiction in Atlantic World Slavery: The Volunbrun Household in Gradual Emancipation New York

27.95, ISBN 978-1-4696-2091-6.) Toward an Intellectual History of Black Women offers a compelling exploration of black womens diverse intellectual labors and contributions. The volume is organized into four chronological sections that span the period from Phillis Wheatleys writings to the present day; the collections focus lies within and beyond the United States, and it draws on numerous academic traditions. This border-crossing impetus shapes the collections content and foci as well as its methods. It is historical in scope and interdisciplinary in approach, stretching the terms of what counts as history, who counts as a knower, and what constitutes an adequate historiographical method or source. Because the volume approaches intellectual history from beyond the usual bounds, it was a bit surprising to find no reference to some foundational interdisciplinary volumes documenting black womens ideas, such as Beverly Guy-Sheftalls edited collection Words of Fire: An Anthology of African-American Feminist Thought (New York, 1995) and Ann Allen Shockleys Afro-American Women Writers, 1746-1933: An Anthology and Critical Guide (Boston, 1988). Nevertheless, the volumes interdisciplinary reach adds many new insights to the extant literatures focused on tracing and analyzing black womens distinctive intellectual traditions. The authors illustrate that bringing together seemingly disparate sources is necessary to illuminate this rich history, given the partial and often fragmented nature of the historical archive vis-a-vis black womens lives. The contributors explore diverse genres of knowing across time, place, and circumstance, including novels, poetry, prose, spiritual autobiographies, letters, journalism, church registers, cloth, colonial archives, mission reports, church newsletters, trial records, public depositions, diaries, social media, speeches, the blogosphere, and various forms of activism, organizing, and protest. Many contributors also examine sites of reluctance, backlash, withholding, silence, and self-censure, underscoring that the expressive nature of the unsaid, the erased, and the untellable is in and of itself a pivotal means for tracing genealogies of black womens intellectual history, in terms of both epistemic and historical politics. Given my own work on Anna Julia Cooper, an early black feminist scholar, educator, and activist, 1 was drawn to the essays that highlighted black womens strategies for pivoting dominant frames of knowing (though, for full disclosure, I had hoped to find some engagement with Coopers 1925 Sorbonne dissertation on the Haitian and French revolutions, which anticipated black Atlantic studies and predated W. …

Emancipation's Encounters: The Meaning of Freedom from the Pages of Civil War Sketchbooks

This essay takes up an 1801 freedom suit brought by those held as slaves in the Volunbrun household by those said to be slaves from the French colony of Saint-Domingue. It was the era of gradual emancipation in New York and law makers were engaged in a self-conscious series of reforms aimed at regulating and ultimately bringing an end to slavery in the state. Still, little was settled. Courts, confronted with the lived experiences and doctrinal questions posed by the presence of black refugees from the Haitian revolution, contemplated whether France had abolished slavery in 1794, and, if so, how U.S. courts should regard black refugees said to have been made freed people. Atlantic world dynamics forced legal culture to grapple with authorities beyond its territorial jurisdiction--fleets of French naval vessels, refugees from Caribbean revolutions, decrees of slave generals, and the force of some 200 “French negroes” gathered on a local street. Courts gave way to zealous attorneys, aggressive reformers, impassioned pundits, illicit traders, household intimacies, and disorderly crowds for supremacy over slavery’s juridical dimensions. Slavery helped make the reputations of New York’s elite attorneys and define the parameters of its distinct legal culture. Ultimately, legal culture evidenced neither the acumen nor the ambition to settle who was a slave and who was not.

All Bound Up Together: The Woman Question in African American Public Culture, 1830-1900

The sketchbooks of Civil War-era soldiers and sailors offer a rich and largely untapped opportunity to explore one point of view in the complex drama that was emancipation. As complex as letters and diaries, the drawings of self-taught artists capture the questions that surrounded many sorts of encounters between Union men and enslaved and formerly enslaved people throughout the South. These images are striking for what they generally omit. Absent are representations based upon popular caricature techniques. Instead, sketch artists most often used their talents to carefully render black Americans as individuals rather than parodies. They also omitted antislavery’s visual tropes of punishment and the auction. These autonomous figures suggested a future for black Americans free from the express direction of whites. Most significantly, sketchbook images vividly expose the questions Union men held about who African Americans were and who they might be after slavery and with freedom. Their questions were about freedom, citizenship, and how the body politic of a post-slavery society might be organized. Their answers are more difficult to categorize. At their most insightful, sketchbook images reflect the multi-layered ambivalences that cast a shadow over the freedom claimed by African Americans. Depictions of African American dignity and competence are interwoven with images of ridicule and racism. Their visually rendered vignettes were part of personal reflections, camaraderie and curiosity in the field, and the raw materials of memory in the postwar decades. Emancipation’s encounters were one subject that few sketch artists would miss.