Prof. Natalie Davis: “Accepteer verbranding The Book of Negroes niet”
[Brief van prof. Natalie Davis, Princeton University & University of Toronto, verzonden op 22 juni 2011 aan wetenschappers in Nederland]
This morning I heard on CBC radio an interview with the distinguished Canadian novelist Lawrence Hill: a group of Surinamese-born residents of The Netherlands are planning to burn his recent book The Book of Negroes because of its use of the word “Negroes” in its title. I am emailing you in hopes that you will protest this outrageous action and even prevent its occurring.
Lawrence Hill is himself a man of color, and from a family that has done much to protest racism and defend human rights in Canada. His Book of Negroes is an excellent historical novel set in the late 18th and early 19th century, ranging in location from Africa, to the Americas (including Nova Scotia) and England. (I have been on a panel with Lawrence Hill and know about the research behind the book.) The title refers to an actual physical object, a record book called “The Book of Negroes,” into which the names of former slaves were inscribed after the American Revolution -former slaves who had won their freedom (a precarious freedom) because they had been loyal to the British. This record book plays an important role in the historical novel, and the title is also a literary play on the whole subject of the book.
As for the word “Negroes,” you as scholars are familiar with its use by slaves and ex-slaves in the Sranan form of “ningri” and its variants. AND the word has a history in the U.S., with which -as a long activist in anti-racist movements in North America – I am very familiar. “Negroes” was forgrounded as the preferred polite term to refer to people of color, to black people, -the “politically correct” term if you will – for many decades of the 20th century. It was introduced and used by anti-racists among black people and others, as preferable to “colored people” (the NAACP was initially founded as the National Association for the Advanced of Colored People).
Then during the late sixties and afterward, the word “blacks” and “Afro-Americans” came to be preferred, for various reasons connected with the precise political movements in the US at the time. But “Negroes” was not a derogatory term (in contrast with the word “nigger,” which is an insult when said by a white person). “Negro” is simply not a preferred term -but it has historically a significant role, both in contexts which are racist and in contexts which were resisting racism.
So the choice of this book to burn is absurd, both historically and politically. And the burning of a book as a form of protest is dangerous and unacceptable. I hope you will do what you can to oppose this action.
Natalie Zemon Davis, Professor of History emeritus, Princeton University; Adjunct Professor of History and Anthropology, University of Toronto
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question1: did you read the official definition of the word in the official dutch dictionary the “Van Dale”?
question2: what was the consideration to call the book “Someone knows my name in the USA?
question3: Do you know where negroeland is? I missed that piece in geographical lessons.