bahareads's Reviews (1.09k)

Sherwin Bryant says that "Slavery in Quito reveals the centrality of slavery to colonial development and the emergence of race as a modality of early modern colonial governance." He is seeing to address the political history of slavery in the Andes and the ways in which slavery, and race for that matter continues to evade the grasp of postcolonial theoretical innovations concerning and coming out of Latin America.

Byrant moves away from the dichotomies of slave and non slave society by moving away from the lens of labor and economic capital. He turns to slavery within the Mediterranean household and Roman law to see labourers as conscripted colonial subjects. He suggests seeing slaves, slaveholders, magistrates, and colonial actors ad conditioning the development of an absolutist state and personal patronage. The book sheds light on the way colonial participants engaged in dialogues about good governance.

Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage reveals slavery as a fundamental feature of colonial practice, political economy and social life within early modernity RATHER than a replacement of a labor system used for the declining indigenous population. He also insists that slavery and race governance were quintessential to Spanish rule in the Andes.

Bryant says "Whatever justice there was for a slave, slave subjection was understood through and marked severely upon the body of the enslaved. Brands, baptism, and bonds (fetters, lashings, castration, amputations etc.) were all modes of subjection meant to govern slaves' comportment within Christian discipline. This was colonial race governance." Slave bodies were cites to inscribe and endow meaning, making it both text and repository for master and slave. Which really sticks to me with my own work.

Bryant's book has narrated precisely this struggle and dialogues it produced. It is, therefore, a history of a slave society, an insistent one that hopes to force us to see the enslaved as they would have been seen in society, to look at the slave in our attempts to define and describe the life cycle of colonial Quito

Intercolonial trafficking is the book subject; the scale, reasons, trader strategies, importance to imperial rivalries, connections to broader commerce and final passages for African slaves. O'Malley says he's concerned with "the regular and visible exchange of enslaved people as property in the markets of early America offered one important site where colonists learned to see African men and women as economic units with their humanity obscured." I enjoyed this book a lot. It's a macro-view book, which normally is not my favorite but the topic was fascinating. There were footnotes throughout which is always a historians favorite thing!

O'Malley has a five prong argument: (1) the intercolonial slave trade was robust in scale, (2) the extensive scale of intercolonial slave trading powerfully shaped enslaved people's experiences, (3) the intercolonial trade was not incidental but vital to the growth British Atlantic slave trade and the growth of American slavery, (4) the economic significance of this commerce extended beyond the profits of selling persons for a higher price, and (5) intercolonial slave influenced imperial policy, pushing the big empires away from mercantilism and towards freer trade.

Even though O'Malley takes a macro-view of the British intercolonial slave trade, he manages to fit poignant stories into each of his chapters that bring his arguments to life. He concludes with what separates the slave trade from other trades.

I’m too old for this genre now. 

A Kind of Madness by Uche Okonkwo is a collection of short stories. Okonkwo is an Nigerian author. The length of the short stories varies; one of them was only 4-5 pages long. 

The 10 stories are asking what happens when the ones closest to us drive us mad; or at least that’s what it is supposed to be asking. 

A problem that this book (and what I find with a lot of short story collections) is that all the different POVs read the same. There’s not enough distinction between each character to make each story distinct. They all started to blend together. 

The storylines were good, and the writing was okay. It was a quick read.

Thanks to @tin_house books for the copy.

A quick story that is great on audiobook. Yang covers heavy topics, such as grooming and rape. Both of the characters have unique lives. They were great main characters. I think this is a great book for those who are the 'ya age.'

Campisi wrote a book on the oral history of the experiences of Cubans in the camp at Guantanamo Bay, that have not been documented. Campisi was an observer to the Raft Crisis. She weaves her interviews in with historical facts, and allows them to rest as fact. She focuses on the balseros who resettled in Miami. By using the balseros' stories in their own words, she seeks to sensitive people to the trauma in such operations (like the Cuban Rafter Crisis).

Campisi is concerned with the relationship of Cuban culture and trauma with the way the culture of campus unfolded. She explores trauma theory for why creative expression was plentiful at the camp. It makes me think about The Bahamas, we have a large volume of high quality artists, and I wonder how trauma (present-day or historical) have helped to create and develop that side of our society.

Campisi seeks to increase the public's understanding of the Cuban rafter crisis and reduce the possibility that decision makers will use extraterritorial detention for people escaping crazy conditions in their countries. She highlights the balseros resilience was to highlight the human costs of the tensions between the US and Cuba, and using the case as a immigration center.

This book recounts Miles journey to haunted sites and reports on her investigation of ghost tours, ghost stories, and historical events attached to the haunted places in the South. Miles believes ghosts stories function as projections of contemporary feelings about historical relationships at a safe distance. The book is focused on three key narratives that share characteristics (Sorrel-Weed House, Madame Lalaurie House, and Myrtles Plantation). They are linked by slavery and haunting.

Miles is 'ghost-writing' this book. She is telling the stories of the ghosts who cannot speak for themselves, and as reality is shifting she had to write and rewrite the narrative.

Miles explore how slave ghost tales function in Southern tourism and why portrayals of enslaved black ghosts are on the rise. She considers what the phantoms signal about memories of slavery in contemporary american culture and what the evocation of ghostly memory might tell us about the realities of historical slavery and gender relations.

Miles says "Ghost stories as a form of historical narrative therefore do double work: they call to mind disturbing historical knowledge that we feel compelled to face, but they also contain the threat of that knowledge by marking it as unbelievable."

Tales from the Haunted South is a very personable book. Its size is deceptive, as Miles covers a lot in such a compact book.

I'll end with this: Miles says "We can call forth the power of ghosts as scholars, writers, artists, teachers, and stewards of historic sites, as indeed we must if we are to place progressive social justice visions in contention with a culture possessed by ghost fancy."

Ishi Robinson covers some great topics with her book; colorism, favorism in families, neglect, socio-economic challenges, and other things. However Robinson never delves deep into the themes. The character development for Pumpkin came out of nowhere. We do not unpack glaringly bad things. The plot was paced bad, it dragged then it rushed. I thought the audiobook was great; I enjoyed listening to it.

Snyder explores how the region's Native Americans practiced and understood captivity. Through the lens of captivity, she shows a new look at early American history because it touched Europeans, Africans, and Indians both captured and captor alike.

By exploring the long history of captivity among Native people, she gives a new perspective on race, slavery, and freedom. American and Native history cannot be separated because they are intertwined. Snyder says the opposite of slavery was kinship, not freedom. Kinship ties conferred power. Native captivity practices and ideas of race remained fluid long after White ones had hardened. Only with the second seminole war would they start to change.

Kei Miller is fantastic. I listened to this on audiobook, but I have to go back and read a physical copy. Miller covers a range of topics; his essays are impactful and meaningful. They resonate.