New Scholarly Approaches to Teaching Slavery
Stephanie M. H. Camp
Assistant Professor of History
University of Washington
Part of a series of Diversity Teaching Workshops
sponsored by the Curriculum Transformation Project *
November 14, 2001
As I understand my assignment, it is to give a talk for a workshop on the promises and problems of teaching diverse content to a student population that is both diversifying, and not very diverse. This will not be a talk on my own research; rather, I will talk today about my experience as a teacher of black history and the history of U.S. slavery, and to raise questions about teaching in these fields.
Because everyone in this room thinks hard about teaching, and many have more experience in the matter than I do, I thought that what I would do today would be to raise a few questions that come up for me when I draft and revise my own courses, and then to share some of my thoughts as I grapple with those questions. I hope that the questions I raise regarding the teaching of black history and the history of slavery, will be interesting and meaningful to you, who are, I think, teachers in other fields and other disciplines. I hope that these questions will translate into other contexts and other subjects. My presentation begins with the smallest, or most detailed, questions first, and asks the largest questions last.
QUESTION: One basic question that emerges for me is: what do my students want and need from my classes in particular? This quickly leads me to ask what is the study of minority cultures in the US for?
There are, of course, many answers to these questions, and one motivation — one that is especially powerful when we are teaching about people as identities (women, racial and ethnic groups) — is the motivation of identification. Our students are often searching for someone or something to identify with. Our students are often in their teens and twenties, after all, and they are trying to figure out who they are and what they stand for. It is important for young people to be able to learn about people with whom, because they are women, black, Chicano, or gay, they can identify. Identification is a powerful motivation to study, and is often what students seek from the study of minority cultures. So, in my own teaching, when we read Frederick Douglass, or Malcolm X, or read about women in the Civil Rights movement, more students are included, many students are empowered and feel ennobled; all feel inspired. And this is just the way many of us would want it.
But that’s the easy part. Identification also raises a number of problems. For one, in the study of the past, identification can obscure important differences between ourselves and the subjects of our study. The past is in many ways a different place, and the people who lived there were different from all us—not absolutely, but largely. To some of us they may be perfect strangers, and to others who have encountered them through study they may be acquaintances. But I am starting to think that only biographers attain the level of expertise to call their subjects "friends."
In graduate school, I talked with a professor of women’s history and she taught me a wonderful technique for maximizing the energy of identification that students came to her class with while tempering it with acknowledgment of the fact that the women they would study were not, in fact, them.
On the first day of class, I tell the students that as students of the past we all tend to identify with the people we study, and that these identifications can help us to understand ourselves, and to a degree the people we study. I then ask the students to think for a moment about who they identify with in this class. I then say that one of the things that I would really like for them to keep in mind as we proceed through the course is in what ways are they like the subjects of our study, and in what ways are they not like them?
Putting identification and its limits openly on the table helps all of us to appreciate the difference between ourselves and, say, enslaved people, whose sufferings and struggles were monumental. Making identification an explicit part of the first day’s agenda, later, when problems around issues of identification come up, it is easy to turn them into a teaching opportunity. So that the crises that black and white students sometimes have when they feel intimately implicated in our studies become intellectually productive.
An example of this is the disquiet that black students may feel when faced with the violence enslaved people suffered, or the confusion they sometimes feel learning about betrayals of plots and rebellions, or the shame that white students sometimes feel in talking about planter exploitation and abuse of enslaved blacks. My own inclination is to engage with students’ psychologies as little as possible, since I am not trained for that kind of work. But it is right and natural that they have feelings — strong feelings — when studying the realities of American slavery, and I have found that this technique of making identification an intellectual and methodological problem, to be very productive. This technique also helps to diffuse and to make constructive use of the tensions that can arise among students of different racial and ethnic backgrounds, because it can facilitate a way to frankly talk about those tensions.
Another problem with identification is that it makes the implicit demand that we only teach that which affirms, that which uplifts. But what about texts and histories that are ugly, painful, atrocious even? In the case of my own work, should I sacrifice teaching about the brutalities of slavery, and the power of slaveholders in order to emphasize struggle and survival? Do I avoid frank discussions of planter brutality so that the white students do not feel implicated? Do I only talk about slave rebels so that the black students do not feel humiliated? There is a broader pedagogical question implicit here, which is:
QUESTION. How do we balance the political and historical realities of exploitation, abuse and degradation with the equal realities of agency, struggle, culture and creation? This question is a part of the political reality underlying many efforts to increasingly diversify our content.
One solution to this problem is revealed in the most recent developments in the study of slavery. Historians of U.S. slavery now pay a good deal of attention to conflict, tension, and difference within enslaved communities — especially conflicts, tensions and differences that existed between women and men, within the family, and across generations. By examining enslaved communities as places with rivalries, we move away from an idealized view of the slave community as heroic at the same time that we see them as frail and contradictory human beings. In other words, we see them as full human beings.
In my classroom, I have another solution, as well. I have made this balancing act an explicit problem in my courses, especially in my courses on slavery. Readings and discussions will offer multiple diverse perspectives, or one week challenges what we learned in a previous week. Or a single source will lend itself to multiple interpretations which students argue about, sometimes explicitly talking about this balance we are grappling with. Over the course of many weeks students build their own way of exploring oppression & agency, power & powerlessness, atrocities and joyful expression. As they read secondary sources and encounter new primary sources, they think out loud with one another to explore their evolving thoughts on all of these aspects of slave life.
This practice — of struggling alongside my students and leaving them to think it through themselves — has liberated me from having to settle on a single position, and relieves us all of the burden of coming up with have single answer that suits every one of us. It also empowers my students to interpret course materials for themselves, frees them to change their minds, and enhances my ability to learn from my students. Most of all, it shows that history is an active and contradictory process of interpretation — not a stable set of facts and events, nor even always a coherent narrative of meanings. For all of these reasons, I find this technique a rewarding tool for promoting intellectual exploration in the classroom.
QUESTION: But there are broader questions one thinks about as well. How does one incorporate issues of diversity into the classroom?
One thing that feminism and women’s history have taught us is that inclusion is not enough. "Adding in" women, non-whites, and working people into already existent frameworks will not really deepen our understanding of the past, or really diversify our ways of thinking. For example, if we continue to think of politics as electoral or movement-based, how do we account for the emergence of 1970s feminism from women who were, among other things, re-thinking their personal lives? Or, for another example, how can we appreciate the meaning of an enslaved person running away from her or his owner, if we assume that "politics" was out of that person’s reach? To really diversify our classrooms we have to diversify many of the terms of our disciplines, or at least that is the case in History. Writing the histories of working people had meant expanding the meaning of what is "historical" to include the mundane details of the work they performed. Telling women’s history has meant asking old sources some new questions, questions that consider the home, the family, and, of course, women themselves to be important parts of social and political life.
So it is with other forms of diversity, namely racial and ethnic diversity. Adding non-white histories into mainstream ways of thinking about history won’t work because diversity means more than just adding a dash of color. Really diversifying our courses means engagement with the transformative potential of new perspectives. As an example, slavery presents a chance to investigate a period of black American history, but it also illuminates southern history and, very profoundly, American history. The study of slavery grants the opportunity to think, yet again, about nation formation, nationalism, the origins of American rights talk, and the meaning of freedom.
One of the most dynamic developments in slavery studies is a deepening understanding of the relationship between American slavery and American freedom. For a long time, historians thought of the co-existence of slavery and freedom in our society as a contradiction, and therefore as a puzzle: how could it possibly be that slavery existed for so long in the homeland of liberty herself? There have been many objections to this narrative over the decades, but during the early 1970s they found their most influential articulation in the work of an historian who argued that far from being a contradiction, American slavery and American freedom are a paradox — they may seem contradictory, but in fact they are true elements of one another. Slavery and freedom are, we are increasingly understanding, "central paradox of American history." Slavery, not American freedom’s opposite, has instead helped to shape the very meaning and existence of freedom. Some historians point out that it was precisely the existence of slavery that emancipated poor whites from indentured servitude (and other forms of bound labor), and that freed them to move up the economic and social ladder in ways they otherwise would have been unable to do. Other historians reveal the extent to which the reality of slavery made revolutionary patriots especially sensitive to any incursions on their freedom. With slavery — the ultimate denial of rights — all around them, American revolutionaries knew what the denial of their rights and freedom could lead to: a condition akin to that of the enslaved blacks, and they made clear in their pamphlets that they would fight hard not to be debased to the position of the black slave. Yet others have argued that an important part of American freedom is the feeling of community and national belonging — community and belonging that depended on the exclusion of black and Indian people in order to facilitate cohesion among people who were, in fact, profoundly unequal because of their different class positions, but who could rally together, first as Englishmen and later as white creoles and later still, as white Americans.
The emergence, in the early 1970s, of this line of inquiry was one of the products of the Civil Rights Movement, and the changes it brought into being. No mere question of integration or addition, the inclusion demanded by the CRM transformed people’s lives, and it transformed historical scholarship. It forced and helped the discipline to rethink the puzzle — now a paradox — of slavery and freedom in the U.S.
To some, "diversity" or "inclusion" are mere bureaucratic words or numbers. But in the right hands — in the hands of teachers and scholars — they are the things of which new worlds and new minds are made.
Thank you.
Short bibliography of sources for teaching slavery
Compiled by Stephanie M. H. Camp
Fall 2001
Primary Sources; Slave Narratives
Olaudah Equiano. The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano. (Autobiography of a man who was captured, sold into the slave trade, went through the middle passage, bondage in the New World, and much more. Very compelling, very detailed. The recent Norton edition of the narrative, edited by Werner Sollors, has many interpretive essays to help one understand the context, the narrative, and gives ideas for discussion and lecture. Excellent!)
Frederick Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass. (Classic slave narrative; 19th century.)
Harriet Jacobs, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl. (One of the few slave narratives by a former bondwoman; 19th century.)
Henry Louis Gates, Jr., ed., Collected Black Women’s Narratives; Six Women’s Slave Narratives. (Each collection has about three slave narratives by women; 19th century.)
Primary Sources; Other types:
Frederick Douglass, "Fourth of July" speech in The Frederick Douglass Papers, volume of speeches. (Classic speech by the famous black abolitionist; good for discussing black anti-slavery activism; slave agency; black radicalism; history of black nationalism; and interracial nature of 19th century abolitionism.)
Octavia V. Rogers Albert, The House of Bondage, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr. (Interviews conducted with formerly enslaved people by Octavia Albert, a black woman, in the late 19th century. Extended interviews. Very nice.)
The Library of Congress web site has interviews of formerly enslaved people conducted in the 1930s of old people who had been enslaved. Sound recordings (!) of some of these interviews are available on the web site (I understand) and for purchase in the book/tape package edited by the eminent historian of slavery Ira Berlin and called...
*** Remembering Slavery. (*Excellent* teaching tool. I copy the transcription that comes with the tapes for my students because the quality of the tapes and the accents/dialects make it a little difficult to follow.)
Frances Anne Kemble, Journal of a Residence on a Georgia Plantation. (Written in the form of letters to a friend, this is the journal of a famous English actress who married a slaveholder, Pierce Butler, who resided in Philadelphia. The pair moved to his plantation in Georgia in 1838, and her experiences there turned Kemble into an active abolitionist. Dynamic and complex [her racialism regarding black and Irish people mixes with her anti-slavery beliefs], this journal gives a vivid portrait of plantation life through the eyes of a novice and foreigner. Her eyes are not unlike our own in that respect.)
Secondary Sources:
***** Edward D.C. Campbell and Kym S. Rice, eds., Before Freedom Came: African-American Life in the Antebellum South. (The best starting point, and a great point to come back to over and over again. Pictures for slides, and essays of various topics giving the big picture by some of the major historians in the field. Wonderful!)
Peter Kolchin, American Slavery. (Good overview; broad sweep. Great for teachers.)
Phillip Morgan, Slave Counterpoint. (Colonial era black life, culture, slave trade: excellent resource for many, many aspects of black life in early South Carolina and Virginia.)
** Charles Joyner, Down by the Riverside: A South Carolina Slave Community. (A study of slave life and culture from close-up: clothes, food, folk ways, religion, resistance. A wonderful, engaging book. Great for teachers; I’m not sure if it would be good for high school students.)
Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South. (A classic study of women’s lives in plantation slavery.)
David Northrup, ed. The Atlantic Slave Trade. (A collection of heavily abridged arguments from different historians on such questions as: why were Africans enslaved? Which came first, racism or slavery? Brilliant historical arguments and research debate one another, and make a wonderful tool to facilitate debate among students.)
For more on slavery and freedom, see: Edmund Morgan, American Slavery, American Freedom, especially Book IV; Eric Foner, The Story of American Freedom; David Roediger, The Wages of Whiteness.
For more on Jefferson’s racialist thinking, see: Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (1787); Jordan, White Over Black. For more on Jefferson and Hemings, see: the classic and magnificent, Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings: An American Controvsery by Annette Gordon-Reed; Sally Hemings and Thomas Jefferson: History, Memory and Civic Culture, edited by Jan Ellen Lewis and Peter Onuf; and the special issue of the William and Mary Quarterly dedicated to the topic in January 2000. Gordon-Reed’s book is especially good to learn about how to read and interpret sources, and is a good resource for the many biographies on Jefferson.
Leslie Schwalm, A Hard Fight for We: Women’s Transition from Slavery to Freedom in South Carolina. (Brilliant book on women’s lives and work in South Carolina’s rice swamps. Details work, gender relations, family life, resistance.)
John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World, 1400-1800. (On the Atlantic slave trade.)
John Vlach, Back of the Big House. (On the architecture of southern plantations, including the quarters, slaveholders’ homes and outbuildings. A great source for getting a feel for the space.)
Brenda Stevenson, Life in Black and White. (The lives, in rich and complex detail, of Loudon County, Virginia’s black families, and white families in the colonial era and the early 19th century.)
Drew Gilpin Faust, James Henry Hammond and the Old South: A Design for Mastery. (On slaveholders’ ideals of mastery and the reach of master’s influence even into slaveholders’ own hearts and minds.)
Fiction:
Octavia Butler, Kindred.
Hannah Crafts, The Bondswoman’s Narrative (1857). (Recently authenticated manuscript of what is probably the earliest novel by a black American woman.)
Charles Johnson, The Middle Passage
Charles Johnson, Soulcatcher
Toni Morrison, Beloved
Harriet Wilson, Our Nig; or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black (1859)
Documentary film:
"Digging for Slaves." (Documentary covering the creation of South Carolina’s rice plantations, and the role of African skill and techniques in that creation; archeological research into enslaved people’s everyday lives, especially their material culture; discussion of Colonial Williamsburg and representations of slavery.)
"Africans in America" (PBS series, much of the early volumes focus on slavery, especially Part One).
For a more detailed bibliography, please contact me at: stcamp@u.washington.edu
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Stephanie M. H. Camp
Assistant Professor of History
315 Smith, Box 353620
University of Washington
Seattle, WA 98195-3620
(Work) 206-616-2418
(Fax) 206-543-9451
*
This talk was also delivered at University Prep as part of the Curriculum Transformation Project Outreach Project, funded by the Ford Foundation
