Thesis (Ph.D.)--Georgetown University, 2009. / Includes bibliographical references (p. 395-418)

Thesis (M.A.)--Florida State University, 2002. / Advisor: Dr. Maxine L. Montgomery, Florida State University, College of Arts and Sciences, Dept. of English. Title and description from dissertation home page (viewed Oct. 2, 2003). Includes bibliographical references.

Thesis (M.S.)--Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University, 2003. / "July 1, 2003." Title taken from PDF title screen (viewed September 10, 2007). Includes bibliographical references.

Whether through legal assault, private manumissions or slave revolt, the institution of slavery weathered sustained and substantial blows throughout the era spanning the American Revolution and Constitutional Era. The tumult of the rebellion against the British, the inspiration of Enlightenment ideals and the evolution of the American economy combined to weaken slavery as the delegates converged on Philadelphia for the Constitutional Convention of 1787. Even in the South, it was not hard to find prominent individuals working, speaking or writing against slavery. During the Convention, however, Northern delegates capitulated to staunch Southern advocates of slavery not because of philosophical misgivings but because of economic considerations. Delegates from North and South looked with anticipation toward the nation’s expansion into the Southwest, confident it would occasion a slavery-based economic boom. Consequently, the institution of slavery was given room to thrive in ways that would take decades and a devastating war to overcome.

My dissertation examines the work of George C. Wolfe, August Wilson, Lorna Simpson and Glenn Ligon, theater and visual artists working in the 1980s and 1990s who feature representations of the Middle Passage in their work. Despite their different mediums--Wolfe and Wilson created plays for the proscenium stage and Simpson and Ligon crafted art installations--all four critiqued the racialized social retrenchment of their historical moment by linking it to the slave trade, and each did so through an engagement with black performance traditions. / African and African American Studies

That slavery was largely excised from the cultural memory of the Civil War in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, particularly by white Americans, is well documented; Slavery and the Civil War in Cultural Memory moves beyond that story of omission to ask how slavery has been represented in U.S. culture and, necessarily, how it figures into some of the twentieth century's most popular Civil War narratives. The study begins in the 1930s with the publication of Gone with the Wind--arguably the most popular Civil War novel of all time--and reads Margaret Mitchell's pervasive tale of ex-slaveholder adversity against contemporaneous narratives like Black Reconstruction in America , Absalom, Absalom!, and Black Boy/American Hunger , which contradict Mitchell's account of slavery, the war, and Reconstruction. Spanning nearly seven decades, this study tells the story of how cultural productions have continued to reinterpret slavery. Focusing primarily on novels and films but also drawing on interviews with ex-slaves, private journals, and court records, each chapter explores how slavery is represented in a particular historical epoch and highlights each narrative's contribution to the creation of cultural memory, particularly its conformity to earlier works or its revision of antecedents. In addition, Slavery and the Civil War in Cultural Memory traces representations of slavery through recurring themes such as hunger, disease, marriage, and madness and seeks to understand how the narratives in question comment directly on the concept of memory. Among the topics discussed are the Civil War centennial; how Margaret Walker's Jubilee relates slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction to the civil rights movement of the 1960s; the controversy over The Confessions of Nat Turner; the Roots phenomenon, and the copyright lawsuit filed against the publisher of Alice Randall's unauthorized parody, The Wind Done Gone. The study concludes in 2005, with March, Geraldine Brooks's reimagining of Little Women, and E.L. Doctorow's The March, about Sherman's campaign through Georgia and the Carolinas. A pattern emerges in the final chapters that shows recent authors conjuring, in order to revise, elements of Absalom, Absalom! and Gone With the Wind.

This dissertation examines the experience of the tens of thousands of Chinese indentured laborers (colonos asiáticos or “coolies”) who went to Cuba and Peru as replacements for African slaves during the middle of the nineteenth century. Despite major sociopolitical differences (i.e., colonial slave society vs. independent republic without slavery), this comparative project reveals the common nature in the transition from slavery to free labor. Specifically, the indenture system, how the Chinese reacted to their situation, and how they influenced labor relations mirrored each other in the two societies. I contend that colonos asiáticos, while neither slaves nor free laborers, created a foundation for a shift from slavery to free labor. Elites in both places tried to fit the Chinese into competing projects of liberal “progress” and conservative efforts to stem this change, causing them to imagine these immigrant laborers in contradictory ways (i.e., free vs. slave, white vs. non-white, hard-working vs. lazy, cultured vs. morally corrupt). This ambiguity excused treating Asian laborers as if they were slaves, but it also justified treating them as free people. Moreover, Chinese acts of resistance slowly helped undermine this labor regime. Eventually, international pressure, which never would have reached such heights if the Chinese had remained passive, forced an end to the “coolie” trade and left these two societies with little option but to move even closer to free labor. That said, this work also considers the ways in which the differing socio-political contexts altered the Chinese experience. In particular, in contrast to Peru, Cuba’s status as a colonial slave society made it easier for the island’s elites to justify exploiting these workers and to protect themselves from mass rebellion. My dissertation places the histories of Cuba and Peru into a global perspective. It focuses on the transnational migration of the Chinese, on their social integration into their new Latin American host societies, as well as on the international reaction to the situation of immigrant laborers in Latin America. / text

Between 1790 and 1821, New York City underwent a dramatic transformation as slavery slowly died. Throughout the 1790s, a massive influx of runaways from the hinterland and black refugees from the Caribbean led to the rapid expansion of the city’s free black population. At the same time, white agitation for abolition reached a fever pitch. The legislature’s decision in 1799 to enact a program of gradual emancipation set off a wave of arranged manumissions that filled city streets with black bodies at all stages of transition from slavery to freedom. As blacks began to organize politically and develop a distinct social, economic and cultural life, they both conformed to and defied white expectations of republican citizenship. Over time, the emerging climate of social indistinction proved too much for white elites, who turned to new ideologies of race to enact the massive disfranchisement of black voters. / text

Between 1500 and 1800, Spaniards and their Native allies captured hundreds of Apache Indians and members of neighboring groups from the Rio Grande River Basin and subjected them to a variety of fates. They bought and sold some captives as slaves, exiled others as prisoners of war to central Mexico and Cuba, and forcibly moved others to mines, towns, and haciendas as paid or unpaid laborers. Though warfare and captive exchange predated the arrival of Europeans to North America, the three centuries following contact witnessed the development of new practices of violence and captivity in the North American West fueled by Euroamericans’ interest in Native territory and labor, on the one hand, and the dispersal of new technologies like horses and guns to American Indian groups, on the other. While at times subject to an enslavement and property status resembling chattel slavery, Native peoples of the Greater Rio Grande often experienced captivities and forced migrations fueled more by the interests of empires and nation-states in their territory and sovereignty than by markets in human labor. / text

published_or_final_version / History / Master / Master of Philosophy