Gender and Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World

This groundbreaking collection provides the first comparative history of gender and emancipation in the Atlantic world. Bringing together essays on the United States, Brazil, Cuba, Puerto Rico, West Africa and South Africa, and the Francophone and Anglophone Caribbean, it demonstrates that emancipation was a profoundly gendered process, produced through connections between race, gender, sexuality, and class. Contributors from the United States, Canada, Europe, the Caribbean, and Brazil explore how the processes of emancipation involved the re-creation of gender identities--the production of freedmen and freedwomen with different rights, responsibilities, and access to citizenship. Offering detailed analyses of slave emancipation in specific societies, the contributors discuss all of the diverse actors in emancipation: slaves, abolitionists, free people of colour, state officials, and slave owners. Whether considering the construction of a post-slavery masculine subjectivity in Jamaica, the work of two white U.S. abolitionist women with the Freedman's Bureau after the Civil War, freedwomen's negotiations of labour rights in Puerto Rico, slave women's contributions to the slow unravelling of slavery in French West Africa, or the ways that Brazilian abolitionists deployed representations of femininity as virtuous and moral, these essays demonstrate the gains that a gendered approach offers to understanding the complex processes of emancipation. Some chapters also explore theoretical and methodological approaches that enable a gendered reading of post-slavery archives. The editors' substantial introduction traces the reasons for and patterns of women's and men's different experiences of emancipation throughout the Atlantic world. Contributors: Martha Abreu, Sheena Boa, Bridget Brereton, Carol Faulkner, Roger Kittleson, Martin Klein, Melanie Newton, Diana Paton, Sue Peabody, Richard Roberts, Ileana M. Rodriguez-Silva, Hannah Rosen, Pamela Scully, Mimi Sheller, Marek Steedman, Michael Zeuske Pamela Scully teaches at Emory University. She is the author of Liberating the Family? Gender and British Slave Emancipation in the Rural Western Cape, South Africa, 1823-1853. Diana Paton is a Senior Lecturer in History at the University of Newcastle. She is the author of No Bond but the Law: Punishment, Race, and Gender in Jamaican State Formation, 1780-1870 and the editor of A Narrative of Events, since the First of August, 1834, by James Williams, an Apprenticed Labourer in Jamaica, both also published by Duke University Press.