Buch, Englisch, 320 Seiten, Hardback, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm
Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana
Buch, Englisch, 320 Seiten, Hardback, Format (B × H): 155 mm x 235 mm
ISBN: 978-1-4696-5404-1
Verlag: The University of North Carolina Press
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.