bahareads's Reviews (1.09k)

I read Lore Olympus on webtoons wayy back before this publication was in the works. I enjoyed seeing it in the print. The story is addicting and I love a good spin on greek mythology. The art style seemed different from the one on webtoons (I might just be tripping).

Black Litigants is a historical study of free and enslaved Blacks and their use of local courts in the antebellum Natchez region. Through looking at Black litigants, Welsh seeks to have readers reevaluate their understanding of the relationship between Black people, claims-making, racial exclusion, and the legal system in the South. This is a study of claim-making and the language of property.

The book is a story of black advocacy and accountability, not resistance and autonomy. The text is comparative between counties in Louisiana and Mississippi to show Louisiana is not as unique as some scholars have claimed. The book is laid out thematically and split into two parts: Black people’s tactics in courts and why they went to court.

The book shows who had access to the power of the law and under what circumstances in the Antebellum South. The definition of personhood throughout the text is understood in the legal recognition and protection of self-ownership to one’s person, body, and labour. Legal personhood and actual personhood were different, but both were understood in terms of gender and race.

Through these stories, Black litigants were able to reimagine their place and relationships in the world around them. Storytelling forced white slaveholders to look at Black people as humans and not property.

Welsh says Courtroom language was performed but performed according to the “rules”. However, there was space within the rules for composing narratives that suited Black litigants. Stressing that authorship should not be confused with authentic truth, Welsh says the genre of composition leaves freedom while constraining the author to create a narrative that whites could understand.

Property was used to anchor a person to a power system, as Welsh says. It gave people of colour the capital and confidence to pursue legal actions and employ the court in their favour which unsettled some white people. Property rights were civil rights to Black people.

Welsh’s monograph provides excellent insight into how Black litigants used the courts for their advocacy and is a great resource for legal history.  

Patchwork Freedoms study the enslaved people’s path to freedom in Santiago de Cuba's region using the legal framework of the area. The Afro-descendant peasants reshaped their current colonial systems through local customs and manumission practices. It tells the peasants’ story as a century of localism and custom, not just liberalism and mobility.

While previous findings have shown popular racial ideologies were regionally specific, Chira shows the ideologies were distinct because they were rooted in the local legal customs of manumission.

Using Santiago as a case study has led Chira to conclude that local customs matter a great deal in cases where the larger legal law was unclear. Looking at Santiago illuminates black freedom and black experiences beyond Cuba’s plantations and port cities.

Focusing on the making of communities through kinship, godparents, labour, and economic exchanges, the text shows how deeply community mattered for customs and manumission. The custom-based freedom, as stated by Chira, is contextual, localized, variable, and subjective as it was built out of positive law and community. Through the examples of legal cases, it is clear there are legal meanings in the mundane.

Breaking her argument down into six chapters, Chira covers the historical origins of the free population of colour in Santiago; marronage and peasantry of colour’s anti-plantation politics; how people of colour inserted themselves into custom-based politics of social control; hard questions enslaved and enslavers brought to their local courts; hierarchies among people of colour that resulted from manumission; and politics of custom in the broader struggle for liberal emancipation in Cuba.

The correlations made in the text show the civil status and specific behaviour associated with freedom informed colour status. Customs influenced the free population's ability to gain power and certain social status.

I enjoyed Chira’s note at the beginning of the text on language and region. Her explanation and a reminder of using “enslavement” instead of “slavery” to show that slavery was an active process is essential for the reader. Chira’s note in the introduction also impressed me. By explaining that legal testimonies of enslaved people do not free us from the epistemological violence and erasure of voices of enslaved people that archives of slavery were designed to inflict. She is correct to say that we cannot know and will never know the enslaved people’s full subjectivities by reading these records. It is an important reminder.

What Storm, What Thunder is a masterful work. Chancy holds nothing back as she takes through the journey of these various characters. Weaving the narratives together in such a moving and expert way. The characters' choices and lack of choices throughout the book continued to strike the reader. The way Chancy presented death scenes was eloquent and moving, juxtaposed against the harsh reality of the death that was around them. Connection was a major theme throughout the book. Chancy connects the reader with the characters, and the characters with each other. The beauty of life and connection is contrasted with destruction and death. A must read, What Storm, What Thunder will keep you glued to the pages.

Many of the character's musings struck me but these two thoughts/quotes stood out to me the most - The American white saviours who came and helped "decentralize" the capital. The narrator says " The problem with promises is that they don't come with guarantees; they can be forgotten or broken. They aren't worth the paper they're written on. In the desert there is no paper. You go out there on a prayer and wait." The other thing quote was "I'm thirty-two. The same as the number of Cuz that Haiti has suffered in its two-hundred-year history. I don't know how many more strokes of the lash we can bear."

Alejandro de la Fuente and Ariela Gross tell the story of how the initiatives of enslaved and free people of colour in the Americas changed and shaped the laws of slavery and freedom. From a legal perspective Becoming Free, Becoming Black shows how people of colour used the flexibility of the law to create communities and freedom for themselves and their families that challenged slaveholders’ desire to make blackness synonymous with slavery.

Through this study of the Americas, de la Fuente and Gross challenge the traditional historiographical perception of Latin America being a racially fluid society and the British colonies having a harsher racial binary. Using a comparative framework, the research instead indicates the differences between the locations studied – Cuba, Virginia, and Louisiana – come from how white elites successfully connected blackness with enslavement and whiteness with citizenship. De la Fuente and Gross present a bottom-up perspective by using the actions of enslaved and free people as a guide for their primary and archival research. The source used includes local court records, original trial records of freedom suits, free black and enslaved records, and petitions. By using a broad definition of law, codes and royal edicts are contrasted with local trials, statutes, and adjudications creating a broad net for source material. Gross and de la Fuente sum up their approach by assuming the “mutual constitutivness” of law and culture. The law is shaped by culture as culture is in turn shaped by the law.

Gross and de la Fuente present their argument well throughout the text. Each chapter points back to their main idea of people of colour using the law to navigate and negotiate for their own freedom. From chapter one they show the repressive legal regimes of all three locations rested on blackness becoming synonymous with enslavement. Using the issue of legal and social precedents, manumission, revolts, and colonization with examples from legal cases the authors prove by the 1850s all three studied areas were mature slave societies with legal gaps that free and enslaved people of colour could navigate. The differences in all three locations were the “regime” of race, not slavery, and the development of the law of freedom

Blackness being linked to degraded activities or social norms show that blackness has always been relegated as less than white within mixed societies. The association of blackness with incivility can be seen in society today. Blackness – whether it is the natural appearance of Black people, their pattern of speech, or any other aspect of a Black person – has been designated as less than their white counterparts. This study of Gross and de la Fuente shows that anti-blackness is written into the very legal code of the societies that are still around today. In the conclusion of Becoming Free, Becoming Black, it is stated laws regulating free people of colour served as legal templates during the post-emancipation era of these societies. Anti-blackness is built into the legal foundations of many societies today.

I saw this text in the Logos bookstore in Harbor Bay and I snatched it up immediately. My paternal Grammy's people come from Driggs Hill, South Andros (the Flowers Clan), and my dad has fond memories of growing up there for a period of time. The subtitle also caught my eye- insight into life and inter-island migration in a small community in The Bahamas. One of my historical interests is migration! The chapters are split up: an overview of inter-island migration; geography and early settlement; the hurricane of 1929; Seaman, Mariners, Boatbuilders, and lighthouse keepers; inter-island migration; island life in perspective; and the dynamic of politics. The Tinkers cover up to the present day, especially in the political chapter.

I learned new things from South Andros such as Bermudian families who settled in Andros starting in 1787 bringing family names like - Adams, Burrows, Cox, Davis, Evans, Gibbs, Gilbert, Higgs, Ingraham, Jennings, Seymour, Smith, Taylor, Tucker, Wells, Wright, and Young; There was a Jewish Cemetery in the St. Matthews Anglican Church compound in New Providence; the brazen destruction of the 1929 hurricane; the different waves of migration in and out of South Andros; some information about the Flowers clan and how they started off in Exuma.

I had some issues with the text. Because this book is being presented as a historical and cultural monograph I wanted more citations throughout the text. Both Tinkers present themselves as historians, and Keith Tinker has written other historical monographs. There were places in the text where statistics and facts were being stated and there were no citations at all. I appreciated the Tinkers' using oral history, as well as historical archives through the book. It brought a more personable element to the text. Overall South Andros was quick but fascinating read.

Cuban Memory Wars seeks to show that the Cuban story is multi-faceted; there are more than two camps- those who stayed and those left. Bustamante reveals the Cuban retrospective conflict after 1959 was central to the course of Cuban history. Drawing upon oral sources and rare press, Bustamante seeks to go deeper than that previous historical monographs have done. Focusing on the two decades of revolution 1959-1979, Bustamante tracks the dualistic visions of Cuban history. The conclusion shows that Cubans have "never been divided into just two camps." The different chapters tackles the explanation the Revolution's historical roots and claims to power; Castro's opponents who failed to unite; Bay of Pigs as a revolutionary myth; Cuban exiles' politics in the second decade; revolutionary improvement creating a stable 1970s Cuba; and the encounters that came for exiles returning to Cuba starting in 1979.

Michael Bustamante sums it like so "ultimately, this book is not primarily a study of the commemoration of individual events, or the memory of particular subgroups of the Cuban population. Rather, it explores contests over the national epic in political and cultural motion during the Revolution's first two decades… They [actors and themes] prove that the Cuban memory wars have never been a strictly polarized affair. They have always involved a more nested, multi violent set of anxieties and debates."

Mariana Dantas’ Black Townsmen: Urban Slavery and Freedom in the Eighteenth-Century Americas uses a comparative framework to show how seemly diverse spaces had similar models of urban black behaviour. She shows how slavery and the transition to freedom impacted the formation of urban society in the Americas. The central thesis is enslaved and free blacks had vital roles in their struggle for freedom and autonomy by using their labour to navigate the urban settings in which they lived. Dantas uses various sources from Baltimore and Sabara. Higher numbers of probate records are utilised for Sabara, inventories and wills are used more with Baltimore. Trade licenses are used in Sabara to show the diversity of those who worked in local urban settings. Manumission papers and Church records were important in the Sabara case, showing involvement in local society. Private papers and account books from Baltimore were valuable sources on the practice of slavery within the city. Census records, town directories, and newspapers also helped with research in the Baltimore case while these types of documents are almost non-existent in Sabara due to printing presses being prohibited.

Comparing Baltimore and Sabara, Dantas answers the historiographical questions of how urban blacks helped to shape their environment. Standing in direct opposition to an earlier historiographical belief that denies or overlooks the importance of urban people of African descent, Dantas builds upon a more recent historiographical view that looks at regional and local studies of slavery. Her methodology to bridge the gaps that culture, society, economics, and politics create in the comparative method focuses on a historical theme. Elected labour is the focal point of her historical theme in the comparative analysis.

Limitations of Black Townsmen comes from source bases; throughout the comparative study, Dantas mentions the lack of detail to help provide an in-depth look into the comparative work. In Sabara, enslaved people were categorized by their ethnic origins such as African, Crioulo, or Pardo, while in Baltimore, most people of colour were labelled black. I found the stricter labels of black people in Sabara to be interesting.

I believe she broadens the field by looking at how those of African descent play a part in shaping their environment to benefit themselves and retain some control over their lives. Mariana Dantas writes to counter an earlier historiographical tradition that has denied urban blacks in shaping society in the Americas. Looking at two distinct locations and tying them together has proved her point. While Baltimore and Sabara were culturally, economically, politically, and socially different, persons of African descent could navigate using their labour. Formerly enslaved people and freeborn blacks were incorporated into all sectors of the two cities’ urban economies.

The narrative style reads like an academic dissertation, which it is; there are many examples throughout the text and repetition as the text builds upon itself. For the narrative itself, Dantas says ignoring black interactions in urban settings would be ignoring those whose processes defined urbanisation as their efforts to improve their condition defined the nature of urban environments. With all the repetition and examples, I believe there is enough evidence of black interactions to prove the urbanisation effect they had on their societies.

I LOVED LOVED this book this time around. It's crazy what a difference two years can make. Ferrer does amazing work tying so many threads together to create a big readable narrative. The comparative element brings everything together to show just how interconnected the region has always been.
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First Review (Feb 18-22, 2022)

Ada Ferrer’s Freedom’s Mirror examines the Haitian Revolution’s contribution to creating deep-seated slavery in Cuba. Ferrer says the Haitian Revolution sped up the rise of the Cuban sugar revolution, fixing the cruel practices of enslavement that came with the increase in sugar production. The text shows that the growing power of slavery in Cuba is mirrored by the radical antislavery emerging from Haiti; Ferrer says it’s a story of slavery being unmade and made. Splitting the book into two sections: the first focuses on the period of the Haitian Revolution and the second section on the aftermath of the Revolution.  Ferrer breaks down her argument into different threads. The first four chapters are focused on Cuba: before the Haitian Revolution, responses and broader understandings of the revolution, Cuban experience in Spanish Santo Domingo, and Cuba as a place of asylum and ally to Napoleon’s regime. The last three chapters study Haiti’s intellectual, diplomatic, and political effects in the Caribbean, broken down into the questions of if Haitian antislavery was promoted abroad, what instability was caused by Napoleon in 1808, and how affective was the antislavery and anti-colonial movement of Jose Antonio Aponte.  

 Building upon the historiographical idea of the second wave of slavery in the Americas, Ferrer intervenes to show that freedom was already present in the second wave. She challenges the assumption that abolition of slavery was already a foregone conclusion. While British abolition played a significant part in the anti-slavery movement during the second wave, Haiti was already present and advocating anti-slavery. Thus, this discussion wipes away an Anglophone narrative of slavery’s rise and fall. Examining Haiti and Cuba side by side shows the connections from first to second slavery by answering broad questions related to capitalism and the global history of slavery.  Primary sources come from various places: Cuba, Spain, Haiti, France, England, and the United States. Ferrer uses the online database of The Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database. A wide range of secondary sources is used. The sources directly from Haiti appear limited in the bibliography. 
 The proximity of Cuba to Haiti shows each place would contend with the other as they grew in opposition of relation with one another. Ferrer’s narrative style is thick, with many references and examples. The constant hammering of anti-colonialism accompanying the antislavery movement was powerful. It is a reminder that resistance to colonialism and decolonisation efforts is not a new phenomenon but has always been present in the Caribbean. It helps me rethink my views of Haiti, as it is usually portrayed negatively in The Bahamas. 

Black Girl Unlimited using magical realism to show the tumultuous life Echo Brown lives. Once I realized the text was autobiographical I came at it from a different angle because the set-up originally was confusing for me. I enjoyed the story, and it was stirring; painful to read while bringing tears to my eyes. It addresses a lot of issues within the black community. The wizard angle was a brilliant storytelling technique, but after a while I got tired of it... I don't think I was the target audience for this book. I can see this beautiful story touching many people though.