We should be focusing on this two page assignment as a proposal of sorts. Follow this guideline for your papers. From this investigation and short description of your project, you can make an outline for your larger paper. Use this space to let me know how you are going to address the issues below. You just need to tell me in a sentence or two. I will respond when I can. Use both today and Friday to come up with something good. Cheers!
Assignment #1: Proposal- use this as the model for your 500 word analysis of the AST data
I have noticed that you guys are attempting to move into good theoretical territory. This is a good way to structure your paper:
1. Figure out what argument you like from the specific historian you are focusing on. Then parse down their argument to one paragraph.
2. You are now engaging with their theoretical model, or methodology. This means that you are going to try to use their model to prove or disprove your own argument, based on very specific data from your AST project. Write a paragraph on what you are going to do and how.
3. Now is the time to provide an analysis. This is the point where you have left their argument and the way they constructed their theoretical model and now you are on your own. You have made your own argument, you are using your own evidence, and you are developing your own analysis. This is the bulk of your essay.
4. Conclude, but don't act like you have figured out some gospel truth. Make room for further analysis, or future research, stuff like that., so that you can use it as the base for your larger paper
I will be using Joseph Inikori's argument from the reading which states that the firearm imports into Africa stimulated warfare to obtain the slaves paid for the weapons. This will help me to introduce the historian and bring about his argument. I want to specifically look at the Gold Coast area of West Africa, this should allow me to see exactly what is traded within the coast and who the trade is between or at least I hope I can find that information. Will still need to do more research.
ReplyDeleteI will be using Eric Williams argument regarding the establishment of capitalism on top of a base of slavery. I will particularly focus on his claim that racism was a result of slavery, rather than the inverse. Additionally, I will employ evidence the database to further the argument, specifically taking aim at the large number of slaves transported to the Caribbean as a testament to the fact that mass quantities of labor at low prices amalgamated the economic motives.
ReplyDeleteCheck out White over Black by Winthrop Jordan to help you with this argument.
DeleteI'm focusing on Philip D. Morgan's argument that the African slave communities were often too diverse to recreate one single African culture. However, the diversity of the African slave communities led to borrowing and innovation of various cultures which led to the communities still being grounded in their African heritage. I have been looking on JSTOR and found an article written by Katherine Smith which is titled, "African Religions and Art in the Americas". It discusses the transmission on the Yoruba culture into the African slave communities in America. I also found a review of "Mapping Yoruba Networks" on JSTOR that I feel will be helpful with understanding how the Yoruba culture spread through the Americas. Therefore, I'm focusing my slave trade database research on slaves initially bought in West Africa and disembarking in North America.
ReplyDeleteMake sure that you are focusing on Africa and not too much on the Americas.
DeleteLook at Michael Gomez, Exchanging our Country Marks...he does a good job of focusing on West Africa and you can find a good methodology there.
DeleteI want to look deeper at Herbert S. Klein's argument about Profit and Losses, considering which factors made the massively complicated market viable for all parties involved. Specifically, I'm going to dissect which factors directly and specifically led to the massive expansion of the market in its later years. The economics mechanics to slavery as a realistic endeavor seem worth exploring, and I'll need to dig around to really get a feel for it.
ReplyDeleteGood.
DeleteI'm planning on using Eric Williams and his argument about capitalism and slavery. I want to use the slave trade database to research the number of slaves that came from Trinidad, where Williams is from, as well as other surrounding areas in Caribbean and where they went. I want to research the prices of the slaves to show that they were a cheap source of labor. I want to support Williams argument that slavery was primarily about economics rather than race, but race did become an issue due to slavery.
ReplyDeleteFind a good source with prices and this will be good. Try HB Higman.
DeleteI plan on supporting Claude Meillassoux’s argument regarding the importance of female slaves in African Slave societies. With a majority of male slaves being traded in the Atlantic Slave Trade, female slaves were tasked with not only domestic work, but also with punishing physical labor. Female slaves were higher priced than male slaves because of their versatility, and he argues against their reproductive ability as being a factor in the price. He argues that the population was maintained through the importation of slaves from different areas. I am going to prove this through data in the Atlantic Slave Trade database by tracking male and female slave numbers out of Africa. I will also find outside sources regarding the populations of different areas within Africa along with the sexual distribution of labor in those areas.
ReplyDeleteBe careful with Claude. He is a strict Marxist and although I love him, many other historians don't. Maybe you could try to figure out why.
DeleteI plan on using John Thornton's argument about power dynamics in African warfare, in "Warfare in Atlantic Africa," as a model to investigate Walter Rodney's argument that European influence and power in the slave trade, relative to that of African states, has been underestimated. I'm still trying to figure out how best to use the TSD, but right now I'm considering picking several exemplary conflicts from west Africa and investigating the number of slaves that left a region before, during, and after a conflict occurred as a rough, quantitative way of judging the impact of warfare on the slave trade.
ReplyDeleteHa.. This is an oldie but goodie. If you take Cleaveland's seminars you will have a jump on everyone. Maybe try a historiographical approach?
DeleteI have changed my whole proposal for my paper. While I love hair and know I can write a paper on it, it was hard finding argumentative sources to back up my thesis. I will be using Jennifer Morgan's "Some could suckle over their shoulders: Male Travelers, Female Bodies, and the Gendering of Racial Ideology." The argument in this book (which I will be supporting
ReplyDelete)seems to have ideas about "black sexuality and misconceptions about black female sexual behavior which formed the cornerstone of Europeans’ and Euro-Americans’ general attitudes toward slavery. they acquired a [moral and social distance]… in part through manipulating the women. It's like when the Europeans justified slavery by the Hamitic hypotheses. These travelers justified enslaved women because of their bodies and the men's own lustful and negative misconceptions. I think this will be a great topic and I will actually enjoy writing this paper!!! let me know what you think please!!
YES!!!!!
DeleteFind the discussion of African women by Ibn Battuta to help you with some primary sources for this argument.
DeleteOyèrónkẹ́ Oyěwùmí, "Conceptualizing Gender: Eurocentric Foundations of Feminist Concepts and the Challenge of African Epistemologies," in African Gender Scholarship: Concepts, Methodologies and Paradigms. , ed. Adebayo and Francis B. Nyamnjoh Olukoshi (Africa: CODESRIA Gender Series, 2004).
DeleteCrais, Clifton C., and Pamela Scully. Sara Baartman and the Hottentot Venus : A Ghost Story and a Biography. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009.
Magubane, Zine. "Which Bodies Matter? Feminism, Poststructuralism, Race, and the Curious Theoretical Odyssey of the "Hottentot Venus"." Gender and Society 15, no. 6 (2001)
I will be using Klein's Profit/Loss argument as the basis, but only in a narrow way. I plan to use the database to establish a link between the increase in profits and the decrease in mortality. This would show a very strong link between the profit being the major push for the slave traders themselves. There is the possibility that other arguments can be worked in, specifically Williams', to explain the overall forces involved in the slave trade. I will use the database for the mortality numbers, both as a whole and to create a general trend line, then research average slave prices and create a trend from that, then compare the two.
ReplyDeleteGood.
DeleteI am supporting Claude Meillassoux’s argument that in African societies there was a greater demand for female slave labor than male slave labor. The absence of many male slaves due to the Slave Trade lead to female slaves preforming domestic and physical tasks. I am also focusing on how the western ideas of gender influenced the amount of males versus female slaves sold on the Trans Atlantic Slave Trade. I am using evidence from the database to support that more males than females were being sold out of Africa. Also, that voyages landing in North America were almost always males dominated.
ReplyDeleteOkay, but be careful with him!!!
DeleteHerbert S. Klein and Stanley L. Engerman, “Fertility Differentials between Slaves in the United States and the
DeleteBritish West Indies: A Note on Lactation Practices and Their Possible Implications”, The William and Mary
Quarterly, 3rd Series, Vol. 35, No. 2 (April, 1978
Barbara Bush, Slave Women in Caribbean Society, 1650-1838. (Indiana University Press, 1990), 6; Barbara Bush
has also argued that the tensions inherent in slave women's “dual burden” of production and reproduction,
combined with attempts by slave masters to manipulate these women's cultural practices and fertility, strongly
influenced the response of slave women to childbirth and infant rearing at both conscious and unconscious
levels in her article, “Hard Labor: Women, Childbirth and Resistance in British Caribbean Slave Societies” in
More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas, edited by Darlene Clark Hine and Barry Gaspar
(Indiana University Press, 1996),
I really want to focus on Joseph Inokori slave gun theory. I am having trouble figuring out what exactly I want to solely focus on, but I am very interested in his theory and would like to start there.
ReplyDelete