This dissertation traces the intellectual and social history of slavery in the Lower Congo over the Longue Durée. It examines how Bantu-speaking groups of the Lower Congo inherited, constructed, reconstructed, and passed on to younger generations a vocabulary that framed their shifting slaving practices from their arrival in the region...
How do you map a rebellion, especially when its participants do not want to be seen? Between British colonization in the 18th century and emancipation in 1834, Dominica presented a number of slave and Maroon rebellions. This mapping project considered the First Maroon War (1785-86), the New Year’s Day Revolt...
This dissertation provides a socio-spatial account of black anarchism that emerges from a central concern with the practice of slaves’ jumps from the slave ship. It demonstrates how a substantive theoretical attention to these jumps generates possibilities for thinking about black radical politics differently. Through death, mobility, destruction, and escape,...
This dissertation examines the gradual construction and contested meanings of U.S. slavery’s first western border. According to most historiography, Congress’s Northwest Ordinance of 1787 fixed the meaning of this border at the nation’s inception, constituting the Northwest Territory as the free opposite of slave territories south and west of the...