Enslaving History: Narratives on Local Whiteness in a Black Atlantic Port

Abstract

In this article, I analyze the jointly racial and spatial politics of representing slavery in contemporary Liverpool, England. I show how central space and place are to black Liverpudlians' theories of racial processes and therefore to their anti racist activism. While I highlight the agency of subalterns in constituting the white identity of the city and its population, I also point to some of the limitations of their antiracist practice and that of their white supporters. Toward that goal, I draw lessons from the antebellum slave narrative because its authors also understood and reappropriated slavery's geopolitics, navigating similarly racialized terrain, [whiteness, space, place, locality, transnational ism, slavery, Britain] I want to draw a map, so to speak, of a critical geography and use that map to open as much space for discovery, intellectual adventure, and close exploration as did the original charting of the New World-without the mandate for conquest.Toni Morrison, 1992 Denouncing his bondage and narrating his runaway plot to freedom, Frederick Douglass wrote that "every slaveholder seeks to impress his slave with a belief in the boundlessness of slave territory, and of his own almost illimitable power. We all had vague and indistinct notions of the geography of the country (1994(1855]:310). Because Douglass's enslavement was effected, in part, through the control of his conception of space, his runaway plot depended on his ability to imagine a point geographically and politically beyond his master's reach-but within his own. Years after his escape, as an abolitionist on the lecture circuit in Britain, Douglass would speak further to the importance of space-this time, transnational. Here he explains why he was bringing his cause to the British public:The distance between London and Boston is now reduced to some twelve or fourteen days, so that the denunciations against slavery, uttered in London this week, may be heard in a fortnight in the streets of Boston There is nothing said here against slavery that will not be recorded in the United States. I am here also because the slaveholders do not want me to be here The slaveholders would much rather have me, if I will denounce slavery, denounce it in the northern states, where their friends and supports are, who will stand by and mob me for denouncing it.... My influence now is just in proportion to the distance that I am from the United States. (1994(1855): 407-408)The 19th-century politics of slavery, in which narratives like Douglass's played such a pivotal role, show how crucially space figured in the exercise and experience, the formation and transformation of racial power. American Ethnologist 27(2):34O-37O. Copyright C 2000, American Anthropological Association. enslaving history 341This is an ethnographic study of contemporary spatial and racial politics in Liverpool, England, 1 once a port of major significance in the Atlantic slave trade. I study the way that black Liverpudlians and their white supporters narrate and denounce that city's ro...

Shattering Slave Life Portrayals: Uncovering Subjugated Knowledge in U.S. Plantation Sites in South Carolina and Florida

“…Nonetheless, the recovery of Anna's story through interpretations shared by descendents demonstrates the potency of an analysis that acknowledges the fluidity of roles and relationships in the lives of African people and in diasporic communities. Such perspectives are essential in disrupting fixed notions of social place (see Brown 1998, 2000; Gilroy 1991, 1993a).…”

“…Later, in the 1990s, scholars such as Edward Soja (1998), Homi Bhabha (1990, 2002), and bell hooks (1990) reaffirmed the significance of space as a strategic domain of social analysis. The import of a diaspora space perspective to my analysis is best explained by scholars who focus on geographies of blackness—spaces and places socially produced by the everyday lived experiences of people racially identified as black (Brown 2000; Carney 2001; Glissant and Dash 1989; McKittrick and Woods 2007).…”

“… 9. As a proponent of African diasporic criticism, Scott (1999), along with others (Apter 1991; Brown 1998, 2000; Clarke and Thomas 2006; Gilroy 1993a; Hall 1996), has advocated analyses that critique the intellectual processes that subjugate knowledge about African people. These scholars’ approaches in recognizing the dynamism of African diasporic cultural forms can be contrasted against limiting constructions.…”

Introduction: White Noise: Bringing Language into Whiteness Studies

“…Building on such work, the contributors to this collection use the tools of linguistic anthropology to explore four central issues in whiteness studies and to locate these issues squarely within discourse. The first of these is the construction and circulation of ideologies and critiques of whiteness among those who do not identify as white, a perspective mat remains surprisingly underdiscussed in much of the literature on whiteness (see Brown 2000 for a recent exception). Some of these are members of subaltern groups in contexts of postcolonialism, including Lakhota Sioux commenting on white intrusions into their world (Trechter) and Nigerian Hausa men discussing white gay men's sexual practices (Gaudio).…”

“…Such theoretical and practical separation of the global from the local misses the crucial point of how each is (reproduced at the nexus of ideology and practice. Inevitably, the details of focused ethnography at the local level are taken up as more "real" and global considerations are viewed as more "abstract" (Brown 2000). Local contexts and analysis of detailed interaction, however, can be a reconstruction site for global hegemonies of whiteness, just as viewing a local context through the lens of detailed interaction may disrupt given understandings of racial categorization.…”