Topic: Slave trade and the Black Atlantic (Reflection Paper)
1. What are the principal arguments or points of view offered in the readings? What are they trying to explain? Are they successful?
2. What is the relationship between the readings? Do they agree? Contradict each other? Do you find one more compelling than the other? Why?
3. What questions remain unanswered once you’ve finished reading this week’s reading? What should have been addressed?
Reading quide/questions for the week on the slave trade and the Black Atlantic.
Johnson, Soul by Soul: Life Inside the Antebellum Slave Market , Excerpts
Note that although the file will seem like a lot of pages when you open it, much of that is the pictures at the end, which include bills of sale, photographs, and reproductions of the slave market and enslaved people. This is a work of history that gives some important context for the slave trade, not only how it functioned through law but also about the relationship of the slave trade to the global political economy and the economy of the US in particular.
What do you learn from the ways in which Johnson describes the slave trade and the slave market? What kind of history is he telling?
M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong! (Excerpts) 938.198kb
M. NourbeSe Philip is a lawyer and poet who read the Gregson v. Gilbert case and was struck by not only the horrors that the case revealed but also how much is erased when it comes to the histories of slavery and enslavement. She decided to construct a work of poetry that would use only the words from this fragment of the Gregson case.
Consider the project of using the limited words of this atrocious case to try to memorialize slavery and the enslaved. Do you read the court case differently once you see the words used in this form?
What does it make you think about as you read these poems?
M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong!, Essay
M. NourbeSe Philip, Zong!, Essay (1.103 MB)
Your response paper will be evaluated based on both form and substance: A stellar reflection will be well-written, concise, carefully proof-read, and demonstrate a thoughtful engagement with the materials.
