Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana (Published by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture and the University of North Carolina Press)

White, Sophie

ISBN 10: 1469654040 / ISBN 13: 9781469654041

Published by Omohundro Institute and UNC Press, 2019

Hardcover Book. Includes dustjacket. Seller Inventory # LACV.1469654040.G

Synopsis:

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 demonstrate how enslaved people 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 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.

About the Author: Sophie White is associate professor of American studies at the University of Notre Dame and author of Wild Frenchmen and Frenchified Indians: Material Culture and Race in Colonial Louisiana.

Bibliographic Details

Title: Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and ...
Publisher: Omohundro Institute and UNC Press
Publication Date: 2019
Binding: Hardcover
Condition: good