Temple University Press Journals
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“Workers + Warriors”: Black Acts and Arts of Radicalism, Revolution, and Resistance, Past, Present, and Future
No full textFor this special issue, we bring together an array of interdisciplinary international scholars who are working across the fields of Black studies, African diasporic studies, slavery studies, American studies, and memory studies. They debate, destabilize, interrogate, and reshape widely known and accepted methodologies within literary studies, art history, visual culture, history, intellectual history, politics, sociology, and material and print cultures in order to do justice to the hidden histories, untold narratives, and buried memories of African diasporic freedom struggles over the centuries. This collection is the result of a symposium that we held in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 2018 as part of a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council project titled Our Bondage and Our Freedom: Struggles for Liberty in the Lives and Works of Frederick Douglass and His Family (1818–1920). The inspiration for this project, which we launched in 2018 on the two-hundredth anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s birth, emerged from a determination to revisit his legendary life and pioneering works. A world-renowned freedom fighter, inspirational social justice campaigner, mythologized liberator, exemplary philosopher, breathtaking orator, and beautiful writer, Douglass dedicated his life to the fight for Black liberation by any and every means necessary. As he repeatedly maintained in the motto he endorsed for his radical newspaper, the North Star, “Right is of no sex—Truth is of no color—God is the Father of us all, and we are brethren.”
Through engaging with the narratives, poetry, speeches, songs, oral testimonies, correspondence, essays, photography, drawings, paintings, and sculptures produced by and/or representing Douglass and his family members, it becomes newly possible to do justice to the psychological, imaginative, and emotional realities of iconic and unknown Black lives as lived during slavery and into the post-emancipation era. Two hundred years after Douglass’s birth, in the era of Black Lives Matter, there can be no doubt that the Douglass we need now is no representative self-made man but a fallible, mortal individual. The onus is on academics, archivists, artists, and activists to harness every intellectual tool available in order to tell the stories not only of Black women, children, and men living in slavery but of Black women, children, and men experiencing the illusory freedoms of the post-emancipation era. For Douglass’s rallying cry “My Bondage and My Freedom” it is possible to read “Our Bondage and Our Freedom
African Caribbean Residents of Edinburgh in the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries
No full textScotland is gradually coming to terms with its involvement in slavery and colonialism as part of the British Empire. This article places the spotlight on the lives of African Caribbean people who were residents of Edinburgh during the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. I discuss their varied experiences and contributions: from runaways and men fighting for their freedom in the Scottish courts to women working as servants in city households or marrying into Edinburgh high society. The nineteenth century saw activism among political radicals from abolitionists to anticolonialists; some of these figures studied and taught at Edinburgh University. Their stories reflect the Scottish capital’s many direct connections with the Caribbean region
Jade Montserrat’s Fugitive Traces and Earth-Splattered Bodies: Making African Atlantic Homespace in Alien Environments Then and Now (1758–2018)
No full textThis article discusses the Scarborough-born Black British artist Jade Montserrat, interrogating her multimedia work in the light of the history of slavery and Black British presence, postcolonialism, and ecocriticism. It looks specifically at the video works Clay and Peat Bog, discussing them in the context of their relation to Black presence in the North and the history of Black agency including new information about runaway slaves. The watercolour Toes and the installation piece No Need for Clothing are discussed in these terms as well, while the latter is used also to describe how charcoal traces from the work illuminate the physical cost of the work on Black bodies. The article uses theoretical work by Edouard Glissant, Paul Ricoeur, Michael Rothberg, Katherine McKitterick, Ian Baucom, and Hannah Arendt, as well as the context of Black British history, to help illuminate the multiple meanings the work engenders
