Rosa Mahier’s Freedom: Identity and the Maintenance of Liberty in Antebellum Louisiana

Posted in Forthcoming Media, History, Louisiana, Papers/Presentations, Slavery, United States, Women on 2012-11-25 21:54Z by Steven

Rosa Mahier’s Freedom: Identity and the Maintenance of Liberty in Antebellum Louisiana

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

Saturday, 2013-01-05: 14:50 CST (Local Time)
Chamber Ballroom I (Roosevelt New Orleans)
Paper in AHA Session 220: Manipulating Freedom: Liberty, Enslavement, and the Quest for Power in the Southwestern Borderlands (2013-01-05: 14:30-16:30 CST)

Johanna Lee Davis Smith
Tulane University

Rosa Mahier had lived her whole life in Mulatto Bend, a little community located a short distance from Baton Rouge.  Born a slave in 1813 and legally freed in 1827, Rosa was a familiar member of a network of free people of color which had lived and worked within and throughout the larger white population of the area since the 1780s.  Most of the inhabitants – black as well as white, Rosa included – were descended from local families of longue durée, and the free people of color in the community carefully cultivated their identity in order to perpetuate the security of their free status.  Rosa Mahier had been legally free for twenty years when Fergus Mahier, the white nephew of the man who once owned her, took legal action in an attempt to re-enslave her and her freeborn children.

Fergus Mahier did not ultimately prevail in his lawsuit, but his petition is as compelling for what he did not demand as for what he did.  Mahier did not attempt to re-enslave Rosa’s two brothers or her grandmother, all of whom had been manumitted at the same time and in the same way as Rosa, nor did he include Rosa’s mother Agnes, who also had been owned and freed by the Mahier family.  Therefore, the brief record of the case offers the opportunity to weigh the roles of identity, status, gender, wealth, and power as factors in the successful maintenance of liberty among free people of color in antebellum Louisiana.  Mahier’s motivation for the suit and the individual characteristics of the people involved present a trenchant illustration of the hair’s breadth that separated slavery and freedom, as well as the continuous efforts of aspiring slaveowners to breach that line.

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Donas, Signares, and Free Women of Color: African and Eurafrican Women of the Atlantic World in an Age of Racial Slavery

Posted in Africa, History, Live Events, Papers/Presentations, Slavery, Women on 2012-11-25 05:39Z by Steven

Donas, Signares, and Free Women of Color: African and Eurafrican Women of the Atlantic World in an Age of Racial Slavery

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 153
Saturday, 2013-01-05: 09:00-11:00 CST (Local Time)
Chamber Ballroom II (Roosevelt New Orleans)

Chair: Hilary Jones, University of Maryland, College Park

Papers:

Comment: Lorelle D. Semley, College of the Holy Cross

In the age of the Atlantic Slave Trade, African and Eurafrican women emerged as intermediaries between foreign traders and local populations. Europeans’ lack of knowledge in African languages, trade networks, local culture, social structures and political institutions provided African and Eurafrican women a unique opportunity to become cultural and economic brokers.  Portuguese adventurers on the coast of West Africa first named these women “senhoras” in the 16th century. Although Portuguese men coined the term, they were not the only Europeans to name and have socio-economic relationships with African and Eurafrican women. Over time each European group made the original Portuguese term their own: in Crioulo it became “nhara”, in French “signare”, in English “senora”, and “dona” among the Portuguese of Central Africa.  These ‘middle-women” surfaced all along the coast of Africa from the Senegambia to Mozambique between the 15th and the 20th centuries, although the most famous of these women were found in the port cities of Bathurst, Benguela, Bissao, Cacheu, Goree, Joal, Luanda, Osu, Portudal, Rufisque and Saint Louis. These women formed a distinct group within African and Afro-Atlantic society during an age of racial slavery, but the duration and trajectory of their lives varied across time and place.

“Donas, Signares & Free Women of Color” gathers scholars working on female African and Eurafrican entrepreneurs, brokers, and partners who allied with Portuguese, Spanish, French and Danish men in one specific enclave of Africa or the Americas. Together these four papers will question what made these women unique, how different European powers perceived them, if and how partnering with one particular European power over another influenced these women, and how their actions were shaped by their local environments. Panelists’ papers will also explore the trans-regional and trans-Atlantic connections between women in each society, drawing on comparative frameworks to interrogate the similarities and differences between each group. By exploring the individual stories of African and Eurafrican “middle-women” across the Atlantic world, this panel will move the scholarship beyond exoticism and generalizations. The panel’s ultimate goal is to determine if these women can and should be discussed as a coherent collective group throughout the Atlantic World or if scholars should continue to examine each group separately.

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Black Faces, White Deeds: The Miracles of Ancient Ethiopian Saints in the Early Modern Catholic Atlantic

Posted in History, Live Events, Media Archive, Papers/Presentations, Religion on 2012-11-25 00:19Z by Steven

Black Faces, White Deeds: The Miracles of Ancient Ethiopian Saints in the Early Modern Catholic Atlantic

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

Thursday, 2013-01-03: 16:10 CST (Local Time)
Preservation Hall, Studio 3 (New Orleans Marriott)

From Session AHA Session 31: Saintly Translations: Stories about Saints across Time and Space, 2013-01-03: 15:30-17:30 CST (Local Time)

Erin Kathleen Rowe, Assistant Professor of History
Johns Hopkins University

In the mid-seventeenth century, a woman stood before the Inquisitiorial tribunal in Mexico City, accused of Judaizing practices and speaking disrespectfully of the saints.  One witness claimed that the defendant had harsh words for one saint in particular, Benedict of Palermo: “How can a black man be a saint?” This striking question reveals the spiritual, cultural, and racial anxieties that could be provoked by black sanctity in the early modern Catholic world.  While the Catholic Church actively promoted the cults of several saints purportedly of sub-Saharan African origin or descent in the sixteenth through the eighteenth centuries, their reception and veneration created a kind of spiritual ambiguity during a period of history when rapid globalization of Catholicism paralleled rapid intensification of racialization.  My paper looks at the circulation of black saints throughout the early modern Catholic Atlantic; focusing on two case studies, the Ethiopian saints Ifigenia and Elesban, I examine the movement of devotion, miracles, and images throughout the larger Catholic world.  Miracles attributed to these saints were very likely to be associated with a holy image, since there were no extant relics.  Thus, the visible representation of their blackness stood as an ever-present aspect of their cults.  Ifigenia and Elesban stood as patron saints of confraternities for black and mulatto populations throughout Latin America, while back in Europe their images appeared in Carmelite churches throughout Spain and Portugal for predominantly white audiences.  Through close study of miracle stories, we can arrive at a fuller understanding of devotion to the saints throughout the Catholic world and the significance of their ethnicity and sanctity as they shifted locations and audiences, context and meaning.

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Life Stories, Local Places, and the Networks of Free Women of Color in Early North America

Posted in History, Live Events, Louisiana, Papers/Presentations, Slavery, United States, Virginia, Women on 2012-11-24 01:01Z by Steven

Life Stories, Local Places, and the Networks of Free Women of Color in Early North America

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 72
Friday, 2013-01-04: 08:30-10:00 CST (Local Time)
Preservation Hall, Studio 7 (New Orleans Marriott)

Chair: Daina Ramey Berry, University of Texas, Austin

Papers:

Comment: Anthony S. Parent, Wake Forest University

The three papers included in this panel share several themes significant to new directions in the history of women of color in North America and the Caribbean.

First, all three papers are concerned with the importance of networks, and the relationship between networks and localities.  In these papers, networks sustain women’s claims to freedom, and networks are closely associated with places.  Terri Snyder finds, for example, that Jane Webb and her daughter Elisha strengthened their positions in 18th century courtrooms–rarely hospitable to women of color–by drawing on local knowledge to support their claims to justice.  For Elisha, her mother’s networks in Virginia eventually intervened to secure her freedom in New Hampshire.  Elizabeth Neidenbach’s research in the wills of refugees from St. Domingue uncovers women’s networks expressed in the streets and neighborhoods of New Orleans–networks that reach back to the island home left behind.  Not only did these networks help refugee women survive, they played a significant role in shaping the culture of the city.  Finally, Sharon Wood’s research underscores the importance of African American-controlled space to the emergence of a black public sphere.  Property in Illinois owned by Priscilla, a former slave, became the meeting place when leading white men of St. Louis sought to suppress African American organizing by shutting off their access to space.  

Finally, all three papers are concerned with methodologies of doing history and biography at the intersections of race and gender in early North America. Focusing on relatively ordinary women of color, each paper aims to recover the lives of particular women and integrate them into history. Until very recently, it has been a truism that the life stories of unlettered, enslaved, and free women of color of the 17th, 18th, and early 19th centuries must remain unwritten because the sources to uncover their lives did not exist. Yet each of these papers, by imaginative use of primary sources and diligent linking of records across national, colonial, and state borders, challenges that claim, giving voice and flesh to women whose lives would otherwise remain fragmented among scattered documents.

This session addresses audiences interested in the histories of women, slavery and freedom, and geographical and biographical approaches to history.

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Family Stories, Local Practices, and the Struggle for Social Improvement in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Latin America

Posted in Brazil, Caribbean/Latin America, Forthcoming Media, History, Live Events, Mexico, Papers/Presentations on 2012-11-23 05:39Z by Steven

Family Stories, Local Practices, and the Struggle for Social Improvement in Eighteenth- and Nineteenth-Century Latin America

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 25: Conference on Latin American History 3
Thursday, 2012-01-03: 13:00-15:00 CST (Local Time)
Conti Room (Roosevelt New Orleans)

Chair: Matt D. O’Hara, University of California, Santa Cruz

Papers:

Comment: Elizabeth A. Kuznesof, University of Kansas

Over the last three decades, scholars of colonial and early national Latin America have worked to organize archives and compile quantitative data relative to the demographic composition and patterns of social interaction that marked those societies. Thanks to their efforts, we now have a better understanding of the impact Iberian, African and Indigenous peoples had on the formation of a colonial population; what the dominant patterns of family formation and population growth were; how the social and economic behavior of colonial elites supported the social reproduction of white privilege; how the social and economic behavior of Blacks and Indios challenged or at least complicated the existing social and racial hierarchies. These efforts, moreover, have now resulted in rich datasets that allow historians to follow individuals and their families over time to understand better the impact family formation and their various social and economic behaviors have had on the experiences of different ethnic and racial groups, as well as the history of particular localities, in this formative period of Latin American societies. The papers in this panel employ the study of families in a generational perspective as a new methodological approach to explore further issues of social mobility among persons of non-Iberian of mixed descent and their relevance to the development of a colonial or early national social order in Latin America. Through their focus on specific families and their local connections, moreover, the papers help to elucidate questions about the long term impact of individual social improvement on, and the importance of local practices and circumstances to, the social standing of families whose members transcended the social boundaries between free and slave, black/indio and white. Together these papers advance the current scholarship on race relations and social mobility in colonial and early national Latin America in two fundamental ways. First, they integrate historical narratives of black, white, and indigenous social experiences—which still tend to be developed separately—and demonstrate that certain social practices and behaviors that shaped social orders in the past resulted sometimes from the coordinated (and not oppositional) actions and efforts of members of mixed-race family and social units. Second, they highlight how socio-economic practices and behaviors that influenced local realities first, and broader regional, national, or imperial realities second, were born out of strategies individual families pursued generation after generation to ensure the well-being of their members.

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Boundaries, Subjectivity, and Knowledge Production in Colonial Río de la Plata

Posted in Caribbean/Latin America, History, Live Events, Media Archive, Papers/Presentations on 2012-11-23 05:17Z by Steven

Boundaries, Subjectivity, and Knowledge Production in Colonial Río de la Plata

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

Conference on Latin American History 65
Saturday, 2013-01-05: 14:30-16:30 CST (Local Time)
Ursuline Salon (Hotel Monteleone)

Chair: Shawn Michael Austin, University of New Mexico

Papers:

Comment: Heidi Scott, University of Massachusetts, Amherst

In comparison to other regions of Latin America, colonization efforts in the Río de la Plata had a slow and difficult start. Indeed, it was not until the mid-sixteenth century that colonials began to establish themselves in permanent ways, seeking an exportable commodity—found in yerba mate—and by exploiting native labor. By around the turn of the seventeenth century, Franciscan and Jesuit priests stepped up their missionizing efforts, bringing to the region a greater interest in harvesting native souls. These missionaries competed with Portuguese bandeirantes, who entered into the area in search of indigenous labor. Nonetheless, the absence of mineral wealth and sedentary native populations made the region a colonial backwater for the next hundred years. But by the mid-eighteenth century, with the proliferation of cattle and other exportable goods, the region became a centerpiece for competing Spanish and Portuguese imperial projects and a hotbed for interethnic conflict.

The papers in this panel will examine topics embedded in this unusual historical trajectory. They will explain how native peoples dealt with and defined colonial institutions in the face of  Iberian ways of knowing and governing and will examine how knowledge production was at the crux of interethnic relations. The panelists will combine revisionism, novel methodologies, and unused sources to provide insight into the political, cultural, economic, and social lives in the region. Shawn Austin will propose that to understand the shape and functionality of the Spanish encomienda we must understand that native sexuality and notions of affinity are at the heart of that institution. Austin’s paper will reveal the stories and lives of Guaraní, African, and mixed-race individuals in a narrative style culled from litigation records. While Austin will focus on civil society, Kristin Huffine will explore the construction of Guaraní-Christian subject formation in the Jesuit missions through her analysis of visual cultures. Both Huffine and Austin will argue that cultural and social life in the region can only be elucidated through an understanding of native social and cultural contributions. Huffine will build upon existing scholarship on mission art by moving beyond simply recognizing Guaraní artisan labor to understanding how the Guaraní’s hands also shaped their identities, literally through their own artistic expressions. Jeffrey Erbig’s presentation will explore the production of imperial geographic knowledge by examining two eighteenth century Luso-Hispanic mapping expeditions. Erbig will show that as Iberian officials demarcated a linear divide between their South American kingdoms, they depended upon native peoples for both labor and knowledge. Nonetheless, these attempts to produce static territorial states ignored and conflicted with native land claims and territorialities. This panel brings together a variety of new approaches to the study of the Río de la Plata that promise to promote lively discussion and exchange.

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Germans Loving Others: Narrating Interracial Romance in Kenya, North America, and Guatemala

Posted in Africa, Caribbean/Latin America, Europe, Forthcoming Media, History, Live Events, Native Americans/First Nation, Papers/Presentations on 2012-11-23 02:02Z by Steven

Germans Loving Others: Narrating Interracial Romance in Kenya, North America, and Guatemala

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 70: Central European History Society 3
Friday, 2013-01-04: 08:30-10:00 CST (Local Time)
Chamber Ballroom II (Roosevelt New Orleans)

Chair: Andrew Zimmerman, George Washington University

Papers:

Comment: Lora Wildenthal, Rice University

The German fascination with the non-European world and its native populations, as documented and imagined in various forms of the German cultural archive, presents intriguing questions for scholars of race, sex, and empire. The German love affair with natives, including North American Indians, Bedouin nomads, and Masai warriors, dates back to the early days of colonial expansion, and gave rise to romanticized representations and staged performances of native nobility and ethnic pride. These cultural representations produced sentiments and desires that shaped contact and conduct as Germans sought out and stumbled upon native peoples abroad. While scholarship of the past two decades has explored a wide range of political, economic, and cultural aspects of the colonial and postcolonial encounter, interracial contact has received less attention. Scholars have given short shrift to the stunning array of unofficial, personal, and often quite intimate interconnections between Germans and non-Europeans during the modern era.

The proposed panel addresses this lacuna in scholarship, and focuses on the question of whether interracial love subverts or replicates the colonial and postcolonial histories that produced socio-economic inequalities, gendered norms, and racial hierarchies. The papers in this panel explore these questions through the lives, narratives, and memories of Germans, native peoples, and mixed-race children in three vastly different places: postcolonial Kenya, North America, and Guatemala. They collectively challenge and problematize assumptions of colonial and postcolonial scholars about the regulatory norms of interracial sex that shielded white female sexuality from dark, colonized men and often made interracial children the subject of state scrutiny and care. The papers demonstrate how German romance with natives could, in practice, vary widely across historical and geographical contexts, particularly with regard to cultural, economic, and political dimensions of these relationships. Finally, the papers consider the agency of the non-German partners in these interracial and binational relationships. The panels intends to shed new light on interracial and binational romance by probing questions of power and inequality in a comparative and transnational framework.

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Negotiating Racial and Ethnic Lines in the Borderlands: Mixed Peoples in Transitional North America

Posted in Caribbean/Latin America, Family/Parenting, History, Media Archive, Mexico, Native Americans/First Nation, Papers/Presentations, United States on 2012-11-22 18:22Z by Steven

Negotiating Racial and Ethnic Lines in the Borderlands: Mixed Peoples in Transitional North America

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 108
Friday, 2013-01-04, 10:30-12:00 CST (Local Time)
Cornet Room (Sheraton New Orleans)

Chair: Stephen Aron, University of California, Los Angeles

Papers:

Comments: Margaret Jacobs, University of Nebraska–Lincoln

The 2000 U.S. census revealed that an increasing number of Americans identified themselves as multi-racial and the recent 2010 census indicates the same trend. President Barak Obama’s 2008 election also called into question debates about multi-racial identities and the validity of racial categories given the long history of intimate mixing in the United States. This panel attempts to historically situate processes of identity-formation by people of mixed racial and ethnic backgrounds in North America, focusing particularly on the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. We argue that some mixed-race and multi-ethnic individuals and families struggled against mainstream racial discourses that discouraged any acceptance of complex identities. Some mixed individuals faced pressures to select and perform one racial identity in public and even within their communities and families. However, the research of this panel demonstrates that individual identities remained contested, negotiated, and in some cases fluid, especially in the American west where racial paradigms extended beyond black and white to include Native Americans and Mexicans in the evolution of racial categories and ideologies.

The first paper by Erika Perez evaluates how the offspring of Spanish-Mexican and European ancestry struggled to find their niche in the aftermath of the U.S. conquest of California in the wake of the Gold Rush. Mixed offspring soon discovered that their options for social mobility were shaped largely by gender, class, education and racial identity, and despite the presence of a European or Anglo-American father, this did not necessarily guarantee mixed offspring success in a changing social climate in American California. While mixed girls experienced increasing social and marriage options in California society, their brothers expressed fear and frustration that they would never attain the success of the previous generation. Anne Hyde’s paper demonstrates how U.S. bureaucrats and policy-makers of Indian affairs attempted to impose their own concepts of gender and the nuclear family upon Native American communities towards the latter part of the nineteenth century. However, Hyde shows that these bureaucratic efforts were contested by indigenous-influenced meanings of family and kinship, thereby contributing to confusion about racial categories, legal identities, and legitimacy in Indian country. Finally, Andrew Graybill’s paper tells the story of one man, John L. Clarke, a Montana artist, who held fast and firm to an Indian identity throughout his life and in his art despite the potential for him to lay claim to some white privilege because of his marriage and mixed heritage. Although other members of Clarke’s family claimed an “in-between” identity, affirming both their Indian and European roots, he remained determined to express himself as an Indian. As this abstract makes clear, all of these papers touch upon identity-formation and developing ideas of race in the North American borderlands and how this process was not always geared towards assimilation but entailed great complexity and negotiation among mixed individuals and even members of the same family. Members interested in racial identities, borderland studies, and the American West will find this panel useful.

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Children of Empire: The Fate of Mixed-Race Individuals in British India, the Caribbean, and the Early American Republic

Posted in Asian Diaspora, Caribbean/Latin America, Forthcoming Media, History, Live Events, Native Americans/First Nation, Papers/Presentations, United States, Virginia on 2012-11-21 01:35Z by Steven

Children of Empire: The Fate of Mixed-Race Individuals in British India, the Caribbean, and the Early American Republic

127th Annual Meeting of the American Historical Association
New Orleans, Louisiana
2013-01-03 through 2013-01-06

AHA Session 105: North American Conference on British Studies
Friday, 2013-01-04, 10:30-12:00 CST (Local Time)
Chamber Ballroom III (Roosevelt New Orleans)

Chair: Kathleen Wilson, Stony Brook University

Papers

Comment: Kathleen Wilson, Stony Brook University

This session will examine the fate of mixed-race individuals in selected places in the English-speaking world from approximately 1775 through 1820. Royce Gildersleeve’s paper focuses on the Virginia government’s efforts to dispossess a group of Gingaskin Indians from their traditional lands on the Eastern Shore. Over time, intermarriage between free black people and the native population had altered the appearance of tribal members. By 1812, the Virginia government maintained that the community was no longer inhabited by Indians but by African Americans who did not deserve title to the land. Daniel Livesay investigates the stories of mixed-race individuals from Jamaica who moved first to Britain and then to British India in an effort to improve their social and economic status. Focusing on the story of three families of color, Livesay explores how British imperialism allowed mixed-race individuals to forge new identities in a new place, but also shows how the hardening of racial ideologies ultimately foreclosed some of the most promising avenues of advancement. Rosemarie Zagarri explores the effects of a migration that proceeded in the opposite direction. Thomas Law, a high-ranking British East India Company official, brought his three illegitimate children, born of an Indian concubine, first to England and then to the young United States. Law hoped that this move would allow his Eurasian children to escape India’s increasingly hostile environment for mixed-race children and secure his sons’ future in what he believed to be a land of unbounded opportunity. Kathleen Wilson, an eminent scholar of the “new” imperial history of Britain, is an ideal commentator for the session.

By focusing on a small group of individuals from a wide geographic expanse, scholars on this panel will directly address the 2013 convention theme, “Lives, Places, Stories.” By concentrating on mixed-race peoples, the panel will complicate our understanding of racial regimes that have been seen in terms of binary oppositions, such black and white, native American and white, Anglo and Indian. The panel will also provide an opportunity for the study of comparative imperialisms. Despite their common British origins, British India, the Caribbean, and the early American republic are seldom examined with reference to one another. Given the relatively flexible character of racial ideology in the mid-eighteenth century, mixed-race individuals from these places could often exploit the ambiguities of their descent to their own advantage. Yet in both British India and the early American republic, the rise of scientific forms of racial ideology in the early nineteenth century diminished their room to maneuver. White Europeans and Americans came to define “race” less in terms of a society’s degree of civilization and economic affluence and more in terms of its members’ skin color and physical characteristics. Nonetheless, the application of these ideas was highly contextual and differed from place to place. By juxtaposing the fate of individuals of mixed-race origins in a variety of English-speaking contexts, this panel will provide new insights into the development of racial identity and the ways in which different imperial regimes imposed shared racial ideologies.

For more information, click here.

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