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Brenda E. Stevenson - What Sorrows Labour in My Parent's Breast?, Inbunden

Inbunden, Engelska, 2023

What Sorrows Labour in My Parent's Breast?

A History of the Enslaved Black Family

Av Brenda E. Stevenson

512 kr

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Beskrivning
The legacy of the slave family haunts the status of black Americans in modern U.S. society. Stereotypes that first entered the popular imagination in the form of plantation lore have continued to distort the African American social identity. In What Sorrows Labour in My Parents' Breast?, Brenda Stevenson provides a long overdue concise history to help the reader understand this vitally important African American institution as it evolved and survived under the extreme opposition that the institution of slavery imposed. The themes of this work center on the multifaceted reality of loss, recovery, resilience and resistance embedded in the desire of African/African descended people to experience family life despite their enslavement. These themes look back to the critical loss that Africans, both those taken and those who remained, endured, as the enslaved poet Phillis Wheatley honors in the line—“What sorrows labour in my parents’ breast?,” and look forward to the generations of slaves born through the Civil War era who struggled to realize their humanity in the recreation of family ties that tied them, through blood and emotion, to a reality beyond their legal bondage to masters and mistresses. Stevenson pays particular attention to the ways in which gender, generation, location, slave labor, the economic status of slaveholders and slave societies’ laws affected the black family in slavery.
Produktinformation
  • Utgivningsdatum: 2023-04-21
  • Mått: 158 x 230 x 32 mm
  • Vikt: 662 g
  • Format: Inbunden
  • Språk: Engelska
  • Antal sidor: 440
  • Förlag: Bloomsbury Publishing Plc
  • ISBN: 9781442252165
  • Utmärkelser: Winner of Outstanding Academic Title 2024
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Brenda E. Stevenson is the Hillary Rodham Clinton Chair of Women’s History at Oxford and the Nickoll Family Endowed Chair of History at UCLA. Her previous works include What is Slavery? and the prize-winning monographs Life in Black and White: Family and Community in the Slave South and The Contested Murder of Latasha Harlins: Justice, Gender and the Origins of the L.A. Riots.

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This remarkably concise history of family among the enslaved explores diverse family practices from the 17th century through Reconstruction. Its title comes from a Phillis Wheatley poem expressing the trauma of family formations among enslaved persons. Captors set arduous conditions of compulsory labor, torture, sexual violence, and forcible relocation as ongoing structural challenges to family formation and maintenance. This tension between the desires of enslaved persons to create family and the power of captors to exploit and destroy it shapes the book's six splendidly written chapters. Stevenson exquisitely deploys the biographies of specific enslaved persons to illustrate her deeply researched thesis about family diversity and resilience, reflecting differing cultural legacies imported from the African continent to the differing colonial and antebellum societies in the US. These range from the well-known sagas of Wheatley and Elizabeth Keckley to less familiar stories such as that of Chloe Spear. Splendidly contextualizing her argument within the evolving historiography and the persistent stereotype of the Black family as defective and dysfunctional, Stevenson demonstrates not only the centrality of family in the African American experience but also the resilience and resistance of African American actors across time. Highly recommended. General readers through faculty.

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