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Week9CapeVerdeUStransatlantic.docx
1Week 9) ‘Race,’ transatlantic slavery, and the revolutionary potential of the maternal
Last week, we explored how race is derivative of maternal exploitation; it is what allows for a particularly intense form of maternal exploitation, of committing certain maternal bodies to the barest of lives to secure the highest rates of profit. If so, the black maternal is also the greatest freedom engineer in that it has had to develop extraordinary relational means of survival operating beyond the ken of possession. This engineering is a paradox in that it is heightened by propertied attempts to contain it. This week, we examine some instances of how this engineering-for-freedom proceeded in transatlantic slavery. Assignment A explores how slave girls and women in Cape Verde celebrated the power of the maternal in secret for hundreds of years through the communalistic batuko, a dance in which the bodies and clothing of women are mobilized into drums. Assignment B addresses the decisions made by three female slaves in the US to take the lives of those who ruined them or that slavery had ruined.
Assignment A:
Mini-lecture
Cape Verde is an archipelago of ten volcanic islands off the coast of West Africa. There is no evidence that humans ever settled there, the assumption being that the environment was so dry and inhospitable that no sane group of humans would do so. That is, until the Portuguese arrived in 1462 to claim the islands as their own. Read the following article and study the maps so that you get a good sense of the geography of slavery that the author describes. http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/british/empire_seapower/white_slaves_01.shtml
Next, find/make/save a contemporary map that shows where the Barbary Coast was located in relation to the British Isles. This will require that you select an appropriate regional (versus global) map. The article will help you to get a sense of these two regions, but you may need additionally to Google them to get a more precise sense. Label these areas. Next, label the 10 or 11 individual nations and cities mentioned in the first paragraph, only. After you have read the article, draw arrows on the map to show from which areas humans were stolen and made into slaves. Position the arrow-head so that it points from these areas towards where the slaves were brought. Give the map an appropriate title following by a comma and the time period involved (e.g., The migration route of Monarch butterflys from Chicago to Houston, 2000-2010). Underneath the map, add any details about the numbers of slaves involved and during which time periods. You will upload this map as part of your Assignment A exercise, below, under the name: Slav Map.
Prior to the 1400s, Portuguese merchants could not easily access two of the most lucrative global commodities of the time: gold and spices. By contrast, North African Islamic merchants traveled hundreds of miles across the transSaharan desert by camel to reach the source regions of West African gold. These same merchants were also closer than the Portuguese to source regions for Southeast Asian spices, like black pepper, nutmeg and cinnamon.
This advantage that the North African merchants held began to change in the 1430s when the Portuguese invented a new kind of sailing ship that allowed them to travel longer distances. Portuguese mariners first sailed beyond Morocco in the 1430s, and in 1445 they established a trading post further south on an island off the coast of Mauritania. In the process of exploring the African coastline and rivers over the following decades, they established feitorias or coastal trading posts where they could tap into pre-existing local commercial networks. Thus, Portuguese traders procured not only captives for export, but also various West African commodities such as ivory, peppers, textiles, wax, grain, and copper. In 1482, the Portuguese built the feitoria São Jorge da Mina, near the town of Elmina in present-day Ghana to trade in gold. Later, other navigators would find their way further south along the Atlantic coast, eventually circumnavigating the southernmost tip of Africa to then sail northeastward to the spice islands.
It was out of all of these commercial endeavors that Cape Verde became an important Portuguese trading post. It allowed mariners (sailors) to stop, rest, pick up supplies, socialize, and move on. It was only after the Genoese merchant, Christopher Columbus, ‘discovered’ the ‘new’ world in 1492, and the Portuguese followed suit in 1493, that the urgency, intensity, and complexion of European slavery changed.
These changes had to do with the colossal conceit of European ambitions, in which the European ‘father’ imagined that he had the right to conquer an unimaginably large amount of land and break its life down into isolated fragments for commoditization and sale. Early on, the Portuguese and Spanish had hoped to use indigenous persons for labor. Yet, without the antibodies needed to withstand European illnesses, tens of millions of indigenous persons died, leaving some places with no indigenous people at all. Between 1500 and 1650, European diseases killed between 80 to 95% of all native persons, a population that had been largely disease-free. Many other indigenous persons were worked to death.
Britain and France, which entered the Caribbean and North America about a century later, would be similarly guided by the anti-maternalist forces of the father. Whereas all white settlers systematically displaced the indigenous inhabitants of colonized lands, those settlers committed to establishing the plantations in Brazil, the Caribbean and the southern US, did so knowing that they would need an unprecedently large slave labor force. They also knew that with navigational innovations, slaves could now be taken directly from West Africa to the ‘new’ world. Thus, the ‘father’ of numbers, accountancy, economic profit, and wealth for its own sake geographically extended and qualitatively deepened its capacity for death.
It is only when these superordinate ‘fathers’ made massive demands for slave labor in the seventeenth century that Cape Verde’s significance as an outpost assumed great importance. Amongst the ten islands, Santiago becomes the most important for slave trading. It also becomes the island where Portuguese elites set up their own plantations to be worked by African slaves. According to one source, the Portuguese regularly raped Cape Verdean women for instrumental reasons, namely, that each infant born made it less compelling for them to have to take care of those slaves who were sick or ailing. The difficulties of cultivation and the cruelties of the ‘planters’ towards their slaves resulted in many slave revolts and for some slaves to find freedom and safety in the more remote, rural reaches of the island.
Assignment A explores how slave women resisted their status as property by finding life and community in an ‘African’ dance known as batuko. Cape Verdean women used it not only to celebrate the inability of any ‘father’ to subjugate them, but to enjoy the relational power that comes from the maternal nature of their bodies. In the dance, women pound a ‘pano’ or piece of cloth that they roll up tightly and place between their legs. This practice may have to do with the Portuguese having outlawed African drumming and, hence, the drum. Unfortunately, the only copy of one of the earliest recorded performances of batuko is in VHS format in a library in South Africa! I’ve spent hours searching for a digitized copy to no avail.
Reading A:
Read pp 109-121 of this doctoral dissertation: https://scholarworks.utrgv.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1001&context=mus_etd Next, watch two youtube videos that are the least “touristic” representations I could find. The first one is less than 5 minutes long https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wU9HC2qAJJw while the second one is about 15 minutes https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uZhxfJJrao8 The second one shows the torno, which is when the drumming quickens, and a woman feels moved to rise up and dance. She begins by wrapping her pano below her hips (or wrapping it around another woman’s hips) and then moves her hips in a way that speaks to the possibilities for life that those maternal hips can beckon. Note that after Cape Verde’s independence in the 1970s batuko became a site of entertainment for tourists, much like “going to see” the Mosuo women is today considered a tourism-worthy endeavor. Most recently, Madonna visited Cape Verde to record a song about batuko, in which she ‘does’ batuko.
Assignment A:
Find or make a map of the archipelago that shows where Cape Verde is located in relation to Western Europe and North and West Africa. Download and save this map as Cape Verde Map. Underneath it, write a 250-word essay describing how the batuko is a specifically African maternal refusal to be owned, to be unfree. That is, how does batuko reassert the relational nature of (maternal) life that, by definition, cannot be owned. How does batuko celebrate the inability of the ‘father’ to own life (clue: think about the dyadic nature of the pregnant body). This will take at least two hours to think about and write, so take your time.
Assignment B:
Celia (1855), Annice(1828), and Mary (1838)
You will find Celia at: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/State_of_Missouri_v._Celia,_a_Slave
Links to Annice and Mary are provided at the end of the Celia article.
This exercise explores three slave women’s reactions to their condition of unfreedom. Their reactions also point to how transatlantic slavery hyperexploited the maternal body. That is, they show how the plantation ‘father’ was made the proprietor (owner) of the body of the slave ‘mother,’ which allowed him to subject both slave ‘mother’ and ‘child’ to the cruelties of accountancy and numbers. The ‘crimes’ for which these three women were punished paradoxically show how the wealth of the ‘white father’ and, accordingly, his prestige and status, depended on the African maternal. He concealed her importance through demeaning her value through race.
Write one paragraph (150-200 words) explaining why you think that the same white supremacist system that treated slave women as the most inferior of human beings spent an inordinate amount of time and energy investigating the details of these women’s purported crimes and carrying out their executions.
Write an additional paragraph (150-200 words) analyzing Annice’s case. How might Annice be seen as a profoundly maternal (dyadically relational) figure whose seemingly radical actions were, in some sense, an expression of love. How did whites criminalize this love by pointing to their own related economic loss. Lastly, how might you consider Annice’s actions as an attempt to re-assert the relational value system of life against the non-relational system of slave owning and death.
How does resistance to the ‘father’ embodied by batuko differ from that of Celia, Annice, and Mary? While the importance of the maternal is highlighted and defended in all cases, what is it that differs? (150-200 words). Upload the Slav Map and Assignments A and B to D2L.
A picture containing diagram Description automatically generated
Figure 1. The principal forts, trading posts and colonies of the Portuguese Empire (1415-
1999). Contemporary Portugal and its colonial holdings are underlined in green.
RUBRIC
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