| Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana Contributor(s): White, Sophie (Author) |
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ISBN: 146966626X ISBN-13: 9781469666266 Publisher: Omohundro Institute and Unc Press OUR PRICE: $28.45 Product Type: Paperback - Other Formats Published: August 2021 |
| Additional Information |
| BISAC Categories: - History | United States - Colonial Period (1600-1775) - History | African American - History | Native American |
| Dewey: 306.362 |
| LCCN: 2019032062 |
| Physical Information: 0.8" H x 7.8" W x 9.2" (1.10 lbs) 352 pages |
| Descriptions, Reviews, Etc. |
| Publisher Description: In eighteenth-century New Orleans, the legal testimony of some 150 enslaved women and men--like the testimony of free colonists--was meticulously recorded and preserved. Questioned in criminal trials as defendants, victims, and witnesses about attacks, murders, robberies, and escapes, they answered with stories about themselves, stories that rebutted the premise on which slavery was founded. Focusing on four especially dramatic court cases, Voices of the Enslaved draws us into Louisiana's courtrooms, prisons, courtyards, plantations, bayous, and convents to understand how the enslaved viewed and experienced their worlds. As they testified, these individuals charted their movement between West African, indigenous, and colonial cultures; they pronounced their moral and religious values; and they registered their responses to labor, to violence, and, above all, to the intimate romantic and familial bonds they sought to create and protect. Their words--punctuated by the cadences of Creole and rich with metaphor--produced riveting autobiographical narratives as they veered from the questions posed by interrogators. Carefully assessing what we can discover, what we might guess, and what has been lost forever, Sophie White offers both a richly textured account of slavery in French Louisiana and a powerful meditation on the limits and possibilities of the archive. |