Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Gender and American Culture)

Amazon.com Price: $29.95 (as of 19/04/2019 12:11 PST- Details)

Categories: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,

Description

Contemporary scholarship on slavery has explored the lives of enslaved people beyond the watchful eye of their masters. Building on this work and the study of space, social relations, gender, and power in the Old South, Stephanie Camp examines the on a regular basis containment and movement of enslaved men and, especially, enslaved women. In her investigation of the movement of bodies, objects, and information, Camp extends our recognition of slave resistance into new arenas and reveals the most important and hidden culture of opposition.

Camp discusses the more than one dimensions to acts of resistance that might another way seem to be little more than fits of temper. She brings new depth to our understanding of the lives of enslaved women, whose bodies and homes were inevitably political arenas. Through Camp’s insight, truancy becomes an act of pursuing personal privacy. Illegal parties (“frolics”) grow to be an expression of bodily freedom. And bondwomen who acquired printed abolitionist materials and posted them at the walls of their slave cabins (even supposing they could not read them) grow to be the subtle agitators who inspire more overt acts.

The culture of opposition created by enslaved women’s acts of on a regular basis resistance helped foment and sustain the more visible resistance of men in their individual acts of running away and in the collective action of slave revolts. In the long run, Camp argues, the Civil War years saw revolutionary change that had been in the making for decades.

Related products

Home » Shop » Books » Subjects » Arts and Photography » History and Criticism » History » Americas » United States » Civil War » Abolition » Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Gender and American Culture)

Recent Products