Using the history of slavery as a grounding for their arguments, Abolition 4\/13\u2019s readings incorporated an excellent combination of discussion on the Thirteenth Amendment, methods and archives, and women\u2019s experiences and the role of reproduction in Atlantic slavery. Although the topic for Abolition 4\/13 is on the abolition of slavery, this extensive reading list hints of the promise to talk about women\u2019s experiences within the institution of slavery and the history of slavery in conversation with the effects of the Thirteenth Amendment and Reconstruction.<\/p>\n
Eric Foner\u2019s Second Founding <\/em>(2019) and Joseph Reidy\u2019s Illusions of Emancipation<\/em> (2020) focus on various understandings of emancipation and the abolition of slavery. Both scholars attempt to describe that those who were enslaved had more agency than previous scholars often acknowledge. Reidy highlights agency, claiming that many contemporaries also realized that Lincoln\u2019s Emancipation Proclamation received too much attention compared to the broader abolition movement, which consisted of enslaved people. He claims, therefore, that \u201cemancipation was a social movement involving unheralded thousands of enslaved people\u201d who were often not given credit for working to free themselves.[1]<\/a> Foner\u2019s book, on the other hand, is more focused on the role of the Reconstruction Era in reshaping the constitution. Looking at the three Reconstruction amendments\u2014the Thirteenth through Fifteenth Amendments\u2014Foner gives the amendments the benefit of the doubt, explaining the intense dissent and push-back that they endured.<\/p>\n Dennis Childs\u2019s Slaves of the State<\/em> (2013) also adds to this conversation on the abolition of slavery but uses that analysis to apply to the prison industrial complex. Relating prison labor to slavery, Childs claims that \u201carial photographs of the largest maximum-security prison in the country offer stark evidence of the dynamic and interdependent function of \u2018old\u2019 and \u2018new\u2019 at the prison plantation through views of LSP\u2019s assortment of postmodern \u2018telephone-pole\u2019-style cell-block camps as they have been grafted onto its thousands of acres of slave plantation fields.\u201d[2]<\/a> Understood through this depiction, then, prison labor looks quite similar to nineteenth-century slavery, even in its layout across the plantation-style \u201cfields.\u201d Specifically targeting the Thirteenth Amendment, he claims that the amendment gave the \u201cright to publicly reenslave the black population and to make the penal enslavement of all bodies stigmatized as \u2018criminal\u2019 a matter of public investment to the end of private profits (and sadistic pleasures) that both corporate interests and putatively disinterested purveyors of the law continue to enjoy.\u201d[3]<\/a> Although there have been plenty of other scholars who also looked at the failures of the Reconstruction Amendments and the similarities between nineteenth-century slavery and the twenty-first century prison industrial complex, Childs\u2019s depiction linked the two together so clearly and completely, it seems hard to contest the comparisons he draws.<\/p>\n In addition to discussing the Thirteenth Amendment, many of Abolition 4\/13\u2019s readings focused on women\u2019s experiences within the institution of slavery. Mary Prince\u2019s The History of Mary Prince<\/em>, Stephanie Jones-Rogers\u2019s They Were Her Property<\/em> (2019), and Saidiva Hartman\u2019s \u201cVenus in Two Acts\u201d (2008) all allow the reader to take a deep-dive into understanding women\u2019s experiences. However, whereas Hartman\u2019s article is fairly recent scholarship on the topic, Mary Prince\u2019s book is a primary source, written in 1831 about Prince\u2019s own experiences as a slave and as an abolitionist. The History of Mary Prince<\/em> describes Prince\u2019s life as she was enslaved and fought for freedom. This personal narrative was an incredibly important to Abolition 4\/13\u2019s reading list for the week because, as the only primary source on the reading list and as told by a woman, this narrative will prove incredibly fruitful in discussions about women\u2019s experiences in slavery.<\/p>\n Contrasted to Prince\u2019s narrative, Jones-Rogers\u2019s They Were Her Property<\/em> discussed slaveholding girls\u2019 and young women\u2019s understanding of slavery and treatment of slaves. Attempting to depict this complicated relationship with slavery, Jones-Rogers breaks down this relationship by explaining how it different from that of the other members of their families. Unlike the young women, the adult slaveowners were much more violent. According to Jones-Rogers, \u201cwhile many slaveholding parents tried to shield their children from the brutality they and members of their communities perpetrated against enslaved people, many others, \u2026saw no need to do so.\u201d[4]<\/a> Therefore, many of the children grew up either seeing the violence their elders inflicted upon the slaves, or at the very least, the results of that violence. Their unique relationship with slavery, then, occurred because they were not the perpetrators of the violence, and yet they were complicit by being bystanders who could have acted but did not. This relationship is further complicated when considering that the young girls often befriended enslaved children from a young age. Although they \u201cgenerally thought of and treated enslaved children as playmates and companions,\u201d somewhere along the road to becoming more mature, the slaveholding girls later began to believe that \u201censlaved children were their property, and they treated them as such.\u201d[5]<\/a> Attempting to focus on slaveholding young women\u2019s experiences with slavery, Jones-Rogers attempts to draw out an answer as to how this mindset evolved.<\/p>\n Saidiva Hartman\u2019s \u201cVenus in Two Acts\u201d continues this discussion of women\u2019s experiences in slavery. Discussing enslaved women\u2019s experiences, Hartman attempts to answer questions about their lives and the violence they faced. Recognizing that lacking sources means she will not be able to answer certain questions, Hartman pivots to discuss the \u201carchive of slavery.\u201d[6]<\/a> Returning to the question of enslaved people\u2019s agency, Hartman declares \u201cI want to tell a story about two girls<\/em> capable of retrieving what remains dormant\u2014the purchase or claim of their lives on the present\u2014without committing further violence in my own act of narration.\u201d[7]<\/a> In an attempt to describe agency without furthering this violence, Hartman uses an emotional approach to state that in \u201cthe archive of slavery, the unimaginable assumes the guise of everyday practice, which we can never fail to forget as we gape at the grim faces and stripped torsos of Delia, Drana, Renty, and Jack, or recoil from the mutilated body of Anarcha, or admire a naked Diana, so lovely.\u201d[8]<\/a> By discussing the sources in this manner, Hartman evokes strong feelings in the reader and describes the archive of slavery.<\/p>\n Jennifer Morgan\u2019s \u201cPartus sequiter ventrum<\/em>\u201d (2018) focuses on the importance of reproduction to slavery. According to Morgan, \u201cAtlantic slavery rested upon a notion of heritability. It thus relied on a reproductive logic that was inseparable from the explanatory power of race.\u201d[9]<\/a> This \u201creproductive logic,\u201d according to Morgan, is the idea that, in Atlantic slavery, the children of slaves would automatically become slaves themselves. As many scholars have previously pointed out, Atlantic slavery was unique in this \u201creproductive\u201d logic because slavery was previously not seen as \u201cinheritable.\u201d However, as Morgan claims, once this claim for heredity began, it soon became \u201cinseparable from the explanatory power of race.\u201d Therefore, once slavery came to be understood as inherited, it became easier to assume that one\u2019s position in that slave society was entirely dependent upon race and that their race inherently determined their position withing that society.<\/p>\n With this combination of readings, Abolition 4\/13\u2019s discussion seems like it will be fruitful and could go in numerous directions. We might perhaps spend some time looking at understandings of the Reconstruction Era and the Reconstruction Amendments as an inability to reach a form of abolition democracy in regards to slavery. To that end, we could potentially devote a significant amount of time to tracing the Thirteenth Amendment\u2019s impact since the 1860s to understand how it allowed for the creation of the prison industrial complex. We might instead look at the institution of slavery itself and attempt to best represent women\u2019s involvement in slavery, or we could take a deeper dive into the archives of slavery. Finally, we might also look at the impact of slavery\u2019s inheritability. Whatever direction(s) we go in, Abolition 4\/13\u2019s reading materials will be a rich source to draw upon.<\/p>\n [1]<\/a>Joseph P. Reidy,\u00a0Illusions of Emancipation: The Pursuit of Freedom and Equality in the Twilight of Slavery<\/em> (University of North Carolina Press, 2020).<\/p>\n [2]<\/a> Dennis Childs, Slaves of the State- Black Incarceration from the Chain Gang to the Penitentiary <\/em>(University of Minnesota Press, 2018), 101-102.<\/p>\n [3]<\/a> Childs, Slaves of the State<\/em>, 92.<\/p>\n [4]<\/a> Stephanie Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property<\/em> (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2019), 9.<\/p>\n [5]<\/a> Jones-Rogers, They Were Her Property<\/em>, 6.<\/p>\n [6]<\/a> Saidiya Hartman, \u201cVenus in Two Acts,\u201d\u00a0Small Axe<\/em>, No. 26, Vol. 12(2), June 2008, 1-14.<\/p>\n [7]<\/a> Hartman, \u201cVenus in Two Acts,\u201d 2.<\/p>\n [8]<\/a> Hartman, \u201cVenus in Two Acts,\u201d 6.<\/p>\n [9]<\/a> Jennifer Morgan, \u201cPartus sequiter ventrum<\/em>: Law, Race, and Repoduction in Colonial Slavery,\u201d\u00a0Small Axe<\/em>, Volume 22, Number 1, March 2018 (No. 55), 1.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" By Rebecca Stout Using the history of slavery as a grounding for their arguments, Abolition 4\/13\u2019s readings incorporated an excellent combination of discussion on the Thirteenth Amendment, methods and archives, and women\u2019s experiences and the role of reproduction in Atlantic… Continue Reading Notes<\/h1>\n