Op donderdag 27 mei 2021 ondertekenden Rita Rahman, voorzitter van de Werkgroep Caraïbische Letteren, en... Lees verder →
Posts tagged with: Zemon Davis Natalie
Judges, Masters, Diviners: Slaves’ Experience of Criminal Justice in Colonial Suriname
by Natalie Zemon Davis
“Two negroes hanged,” John Gabriel Stedman wrote in his Suriname journal for March 9, 1776, and then two days later, among his purchases of“soap, wine, tobacco, [and] rum” and his dinners with an elderly widow, he records, “A negro’s foot cut off.”
read on…Three generations of slave mothers in Suriname: The making of Stedman’s Joanna
Lecture by Natalie Zemon Davis
Professor Natalie Zemon Davis will present findings from her ongoing researching into the family history of Joanna, a mixed race slave woman who married and had a son with John Gabriel
Stedman, the author of The Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796). Stedman’s account, with its firsthand depictions of slavery and other aspects of colonization, became an important tool in the early abolitionist cause and has remained enormously influential. Davis’ research investigates the grandmother and the mother of Stedman’s Joanna, and focuses on Joanna herself so as to identify a family tradition or ethos informing their behavior and choices. The talk will also illustrate the challenges in finding evidence for the reconstruction of the lives and attitudes of individual slaves in the 18th century.
Natalie Zemon Davis is a leading historian of early modern Europe, a pioneer in feminist studies, and one of the first women to assume a senior position in North American academic life. Her research activity and publications have been in the social and cultural history of sixteenth-century France and in early modern Europe, where she has been especially concerned to get at the lives and values of peasants, artisans, and women, and to analyze their relation to other social groups and to power, property, and authority. Her current work is taking her outside Europe’s bounds to colonial Quebec and Suriname. She has written six books, co-authored one and co-edited two. She has also published over seventy articles.
Natalie Zemon Davis was educated at Smith College, Radcliffe College, and the University of Michigan (Ph.D. 1959). She has taught at Brown University, at the University of Toronto, at the University of California at Berkeley, at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris, and at Princeton University. Now Professor Emeritus from Princeton, she is affiliated with the University of Toronto.
Date: Tuesday 15 April 2014
Time: 15.30-17.00
Room 005, Lipsius building (across KITLV building),
Leiden University, Cleveringaplaats 1 , 2311 BD Leiden
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
RSS
Facebook
Twitter
