| Unit name | Violence and Slavery in the American South |
|---|---|
| Unit code | HIST20108 |
| Credit points | 20 |
| Level of study | I/5 |
| Teaching block(s) |
Teaching Block 2 (weeks 13 - 24) |
| Unit director | Dr. Livesey |
| Open unit status | Not open |
| Pre-requisites |
None |
| Co-requisites |
HIST23008 Special Field Project |
| School/department | Department of History (Historical Studies) |
| Faculty | Faculty of Arts |
Slavery in the United States was a system of racial oppression, underscored by a number of technologies developed over centuries that served to subjugate, humiliate and force a whole ‘race’ of people into submission. This unit will explore the concept of ‘violence’ in relation to the system of slavery to think about the multitude of ways that this can be applied and used as theoretical framework to interpret the enslaved experience. The unit will begin by thinking about violence as a concept: how can we define it, and how broad should our definition be? We will then move on to think about the different ways that enslaved people experienced violence in public and in private through bodily punishment, medical experimentation, and exploitation of female bodies through sexual violence, forced reproduction and wet-nursing. Throughout, students will be encouraged to engage with the testimony of enslaved and formerly enslaved people through interviews and autobiographies, in addition to thinking about how violence and slavery have been represented in popular culture, and their memory invoked in modern movements for racial justice and equality.
Successful students will be able to:
1.Critically explore the relationship between violence and racial slavery
2.interpret violence as a broad theoretical concept and its role in shaping lives
3.discuss and evaluate the key historiographical debates surrounding the subject
4.interpret primary sources and select pertinent evidence in order to illustrate specific and more general historical points
5.present their research in written forms and styles appropriate to the discipline and to level I/5
1 x two-hour seminar per week
One two-hour exam (100%). [ILOs 1-5]
S. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery and Self-Making in Nineteenth Century America (1997)
M. Bay, The White Image in the Black Mind: African-American Ideas About White People 1830-1925. (2000)
W. Johnson, River of Darn Dreams: Slavery and Empire in the Cotton Kingdom (2013)
R. Nisbett & D. Cohen, Culture of Honor: The Psychology of Violence in the Old South (1996)
G. Smithers, Slave Breeding: Sex, Violence, and Memory in American History (2014)
M. Wood, Blind Memory: Visual Representations of Slavery in England and America (2000)
