bahareads's Reviews (1.09k)

Viola Muller says her book is an exploration of what space of refuge arose in the southern cities and how fugitive slaves navigated those spaces. She says freedom, with all its definitions and meanings, cannot fully capture the struggles of antebellum southerners of African descent.

Müller makes a lot of parallels between the undocumented in the US, and runaway slaves in urban environments. She mentions it throughout and brings it up heavily in the epilogue. She says she brings a new way of thinking about the conditions of fugitive slave workers and residents and allows us to concentrate on fugitive slaves legal and economic precariousness.

I'm always a huge geek for books that focus on Urban slavery. I enjoyed the latter chapter of these books, but I found (with my limited knowledge) that Müller didn't really add much to what's been done already. Particularly her first few chapters seem to be rehashing well known facts. Perhaps this needed more work to go from dissertation to book(?).

I enjoyed some of the arguments and methods Müller raises in the novel. She investigates how fugitive slaves navigated cities to breach the geographies of domination to find spaces of refuge. It's the phrases 'geographies of domination' and 'spaces of refuge' that intrigue me the most.

Müller claims historians need to be mindful of using runaway advertisements as quantitative sources. She says slaves in the paper were less likely to be found which is why they were publicly advertised in the first place. I do not know how well this idea translates over to other regions.

Overall I liked elements of argument.

ARE WE EVEN TEAL is great work! Brice's pieces have a fantastical whimsiness that reminds me of Alice in Wonderland. The lyricism is giving Dr Seuss (in the best way). The inspirations for the work shine throughout the entire book. Some of the poems could be songs. The illustrations are also amazing. The art work combined with the written work make the poems jump out on the page. Brice lays out raw emotions while unabashedly uplifting his queerness. It was a great read. I enjoyed picking it up before I went to bed, and reading a few poems each time.

Jennifer Morgan writes a THICK book. She does a lot of name/historiography dropping in the actual text, not just the introduction. She is concerned with the processes that divided people and economies along the distinct aces of value and commodity.

In the narrative, Morgan articulates the relationships and ideologies of the 16 and 17century that congealed in the 18th and 19th century into common sense understands that are still with us. She is concerned with the triangle of economic logic, black radical tradition and kinship as the basis of both racial formation and Blackness as enslavebility.

Morgan argues that kinship could be claimed only in freedom and Blackness signified freedom's opposite. This argument brings kinship and commodification to 17th century ideologies; it asks how the logics of racial slavery made sense to Europeans and what Africans knew about the terms of their captivity. The inability to convey kinship is the main issue here.

Morgan states there is a need to write histories that acknowledge the silences in the records as evidence of an irrecoverable w/hole. She seeks to denaturalize the system of thought that enslaved women's works were only just emerging in the early modern Black Atlantic. Kinship, motherhood, population and commodification were conceptually intertwined for slave owners and for those who were enslaved.

I enjoyed the many many themes, theories, and methods in this book but it was a lot. The first half of the book could be its own piece compared to the second half of the book.

A collection of stories by various Bahamian authors. They ranged from very dark to hilarious. I would love to see some of these stories fleshed out into longer pieces.

A beautiful anthology of 33 Caribbean women poets. All the poems are in Spanish and English. A few Bahamian poets are featured which made me very happy! The pieces cover a range of topics from very heavy to light. I cried in certain places. You can tell this was a work of love and tender care by the poets and the editors.

(read on Audiobook)

I enjoyed the narration but the story itself was bored in spots. I didn't realize this was based on a 'reimagining' so I was confused on a few things. Carlota as a character lacked depth at times.

Andrew Denson explores the public memory of Cherokee removal as it developed from the early 20th century through to the beginning of the 21st century. He explores the power and meaning of the most famous southern Indiana episode in a variety of modern contexts.

The structure of the book documents how the tourist industry embrace of Cherokee history in the 1920s and 1930s, to the substantial ware of removal commemoration that developed after WWII to the national campaign to remember the trail of tears that comes to the present day.

Denson argues that memorialising the Cherokee removal is a southern tradition, not a recent innovation. By examining the commemoration of Indian removal, Denson opens new terrain for native American scholarship within southern history. I enjoyed how Denson lets readers know that he wrestled with his own research motivations, and how his research evolved during its process.

A collection of nine stories that are all interconnected. I enjoyed the book overall. I wish some of the short stories were longer than others; some were better than others. The structure of the book makes it an interesting read already but focusing on how the characters were connected was the most entertaining part.

J.M. Johnson examines how African women and women of African descent used intimacy and kinship to construct and enact freedom in the Atlantic world. She is very very deliberate with her word choices. She constantly hammers her points throughout the text (specifically - gender, intimacy, and kinship). She does a great job of building her narrative. I enjoyed how she pushed 'imagined geography' beyond the bounds of land or landscapes to the body. She says the body is a geography.

Johnson says her narrative is not not an biography or micro-history, but a history practicing the same muddy freedom the women studied. It is a history of black women who experienced the contours of bondage and freedom as slavery and the slave trade began to unfold.

Her applied theory of null values was fasinating! She says Null values offers opportunity before reading along the bias grain for marking this space of indeterminacy. By identifying archival silences as null values surfaces slave owners and officials as responsible for missing and unacknowledged black life in the archive but resists equating the mission or in-applicable information with black death.

By focusing on how using the rule of intimacy and kinship played out highlights black women's everyday understanding of freedom as centered around safety and security for themselves and their children. It was a great book. I highly highly recommend.

I enjoyed this book a lot! Way more than I assumed I would. The writing is entertaining and it keeps you reading. I read this on audiobook and the narration was amazing. The 'twist' was kind of guessable BUT it did not go how I expected it to.