[HN Gopher] A slave narrative resurfaces after nearly 170 years
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A slave narrative resurfaces after nearly 170 years
Author : cocacola1
Score : 108 points
Date : 2024-11-26 15:09 UTC (7 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.nytimes.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.nytimes.com)
| pvg wrote:
| https://archive.is/LsJXJ
| iambateman wrote:
| Cool story, but I wish this were published into the public domain
| online.
|
| It's kind of weird that a 150-year-old slave narrative is being
| sold by a University press.
|
| At any rate, here's the original text from the Australian paper:
| https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/rendition/nla.news-articl...
| quuxplusone wrote:
| Excellent find! That text actually begins here, much more
| poorly OCRed:
|
| https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/rendition/nla.news-articl...
|
| https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/rendition/nla.news-articl...
|
| so that the GUI version is probably easier to read (
| https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/60178733 ,
| https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/60177234 ).
|
| Also, TFA itself links to a transcription of the (according to
| TFA, "chopped ... excising most of its political arguments")
| _Leisure Hour_ reprint:
|
| https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jjacobs/jjacobs.html
|
| It might be interesting to compare the two. In fact, I would
| _hope_ that such a comparison appears in Schroeder 's new
| edition. A university press is exactly where I'd expect to find
| a "critical edition" or recension of a 150-year-old narrative
| that exists in multiple versions. If university-press
| publication is appropriate for a critical edition of
| Shakespeare or Pulci, it seems equally appropriate for a
| critical edition of John S. Jacobs. You're not paying for the
| transcription, you're paying for the scholarship.
|
| The only weird things about this story, to me, are:
|
| (1) The book-jacket design screams modern pop, where I
| personally would have gone with a more "serious"-looking
| design, like you'd find on a Penguin Classic, or even on an
| Erik Larson novel.
|
| (2) It's not clear what they mean "rediscovered"; I scanned the
| article looking for the traditional discovery narrative, like
| "he inherited a manuscript" or "a yellowed newspaper clipping"
| or whatever. Here it looks like the "rediscovery" was basically
| that it came up in a Google search and he said "oh that's neat,
| someone should republish that in real print, on paper." Which
| is fine and great; we _should_ republish more out-of-print
| work. It 's just not the traditional media narrative of a
| "rediscovered" or "resurfaced" lost work; it's more like a
| tracing of the familiar narrative beats from which the actual
| plot (the physical discovery of a lost work) has been
| surgically removed.
| tolerance wrote:
| Heugh. You're right about the cover. It looks like it was
| made to stand out in a brick-and-mortar Black History Month
| display. It feels out of place among other Black Studies
| titles from U. of Chicago in "seriousness" relative to the
| significance of its subject. [1]
|
| > "...it's more like a tracing of the familiar narrative
| beats from which the actual plot (the physical discovery of a
| lost work) has been surgically removed."
|
| I think that stories like this represent what's going to be
| the new normal for discovery practices in the humanities.
|
| Although I understand your disappointment, all that's changed
| is that physical discovery has gone digital and had that not
| been the case in this instant the likelihood of Jacob's
| narrative being resurfaced is altered.
|
| This is an example of it working out well, as far as I can
| tell. It couldn't get any better than how it turned out.
|
| Who else but a middle-aged post-graduate, in the middle of
| the first Trump administration, trying to get his
| dissertation published, looking for work, applying exercising
| his academic know-how to scratch his own itch, taking
| advantage of open source intelligence, corresponding with
| colleagues, transforming "from an interpretive literary
| scholar into an old-fashioned archive hound", could have
| pulled this of?
|
| (Because we know there's no way he'd even think about
| financing a trip to Australia to kick the research off the
| old fashion way)
|
| What better way for this to return to the fore in 2024?
|
| You say the plot of the beat has been surgically removed,
| _nay_ , I say beat goes on!
|
| We used to bang on papyrus, and pass credentials for access
| to microfilm. White-gloved hands daintily turn delicate
| pages...tired eyes glean call numbers scrawled onto hastily
| sheared scrap paper.
|
| _The same beat carries on my friend_...
|
| [1]: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/subject/su10.html
| quuxplusone wrote:
| > It looks like it was made to stand out in a brick-and-
| mortar Black History Month display.
|
| Or not to stand out, but to blend in. :) ...Ah, but the
| cover design on the actual publisher's website is
| different! And indeed more "serious"-looking.
|
| https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo21379
| 5...
| tolerance wrote:
| How strange. I was referring to the cover as I had found
| it on the publisher's website and now it's that one.
| Attummm wrote:
| It's ironic even after 150 years, the person is still facing
| the same issue.
| lazyeye wrote:
| [flagged]
| neogodless wrote:
| https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-reso...
|
| If you want to share statistics, it's not hard at all to find
| them.
|
| Though I wonder what point, if any, you're trying to make?
|
| Either way, it was taking humans and using them as forced
| labor, treating them as if they didn't deserve human rights.
| lazyeye wrote:
| I made the point because it seems to be a relatively unknown
| fact.
| estebank wrote:
| > Well over 90 percent of enslaved Africans were sent to the
| Caribbean and South America. Only about 6 percent of African
| captives were sent directly to British North America. Yet by
| 1825, the US population included about one-quarter of the
| people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere.
|
| https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-reso...
| echoangle wrote:
| For people wondering how this is possible:
|
| > In the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana, and Brazil, the enslaved
| death rate was so high and the birth rate so low that they
| could not sustain their population without importations from
| Africa. Rates of natural decrease ran as high as 5 percent a
| year. While the death rate of the US enslaved population was
| about the same as that of Jamaican enslaved persons, the
| birth rate was more than 80 percent higher in the United
| States.
|
| > In the United States enslaved persons were more generations
| removed from Africa than those in the Caribbean. In the
| nineteenth century, the majority of enslaved in the British
| Caribbean and Brazil were born in Africa. In contrast, by
| 1850, most US enslaved persons were third-, fourth-, or
| fifth-generation Americans.
|
| > Slavery in the US was distinctive in the near balance of
| the sexes and the ability of the enslaved population to
| increase its numbers by natural reproduction. Unlike any
| other enslaved society, the US had a high and sustained
| natural increase in the enslaved population for a more than a
| century and a half.
| isleyaardvark wrote:
| The last point may be the most important. The US banned the
| importation of slaves in 1808. The enslaved were treated
| like livestock and that's why they still had slaves in the
| 1860s.
| bilbo0s wrote:
| Yep.
|
| The US and Brazil knew how to breed enslaved people.
|
| Therefore today, Brazil has the largest slave descended
| population, and the US has the second largest.
| FuriouslyAdrift wrote:
| The US prohibited importing slaves in 1807-08 so a forced
| breeding program evolved to continue slavery in the South.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_breeding_in_the_United_
| S...
| drak0n1c wrote:
| For context, that article is focused on the Americas since it
| is an American History institute. Those stats aren't even
| including the 1500 years of Arab and Ottoman trade of African
| slaves.
| w10-1 wrote:
| Casting this as a slave narrative may be under-selling it.
|
| The whole point was that he went far enough away (sailing,
| Australia) to not only speak with the anger of the injustice
| (what happened to him), but to target the structural aspects (how
| enslavers are made) and how the justification was built in to the
| Constitution. In so doing, he anticipated the evolution of
| structuralism, post-structuralism, and critical theory.
|
| It seems to have been just one historian who found and validated
| the story. The author sister was the subject of fawning but
| incomplete treatment (her story was sympathetic, not damning);
| the historian found the author's work and traced the author's
| sailor gigs to validate the connections.
|
| There can be an element of passivation to history: "don't worry,
| we're understanding more and getting better". Thanks to both the
| author and the historian, it appears much was understood even
| then, and we shouldn't rest on tides that might not be rising.
|
| Critical theory has fatal flaws and anger almost never leads to
| insight or the right incentives, but how else would normalized
| and profitable injustice be stripped of a legal veil?
| csours wrote:
| I feel like critique in an academic context is a tool for
| communication, one way among many of understanding a system (or
| systems).
|
| However, that same critique is easily moralized in a political
| context, and communication stops cold.
|
| In the political context it is just blame, in academia it is
| structural analysis.
| PrismCrystal wrote:
| You're not using the terms "structuralism" and "post-
| structuralism" correctly. The term "structuralism" has its
| roots in Saussure, in linguistics and the notion of _l
| 'arbitraire du signe_. Semiotics and the post-structuralists
| then took this further. While today people might talk of
| "structural racism", the similarity to the term "structuralism"
| is merely coincidental, through sure, one might try to apply
| the idea there, too.
| Wolfenstein98k wrote:
| I feel like I didn't know anything more by the end of the
| comment then at the start.
|
| Can you word it again but more clearly?
|
| It currently reads like a signal of what you have memorised,
| rather than an effort to increase the knowledge of the
| reader.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| Structuralism can mean different things based on the
| context, I think the post you're replying to is meaning
| Structuralism in the philosophical context, but I think the
| post they're replying to is meaning it in the literary
| context (which derives from the philosophical), while the
| author of the post you're replying to seems to think
| they(the original poster) are somehow referring to
| structural Racism, which that interpretation of the primary
| poster does not make sense to me (hence my saying I think
| they mean Literary structuralism)
|
| So structuralism in literary theory is that the structure
| of a text is the important thing which can end up being a
| lot like those articles you see every now and then "There
| are only 10 basic plots in the world, here they are" or
| some stuff like that (I obviously say this as someone who
| does not much care for structuralism so take my words with
| a giant grain of salt)
|
| on edit: clarification
| pessimizer wrote:
| > You're not using the terms "structuralism" and "post-
| structuralism" correctly.
|
| The first sentence is the important part. "Structuralism"
| is in no way related to "structural" or "institutional"
| racism. "Structuralism" is what the next sentences are
| describing, and it doesn't matter if you understand them;
| they were probably added as ample evidence that the first
| sentence was true, and possibly as stuff to google if
| you're interested in a subject completely unrelated to this
| discussion about the article.
|
| Structuralism is some French theories about how creative
| writing should be structured.
| medo-bear wrote:
| > In so doing, he anticipated the evolution of structuralism,
| post-structuralism, and critical theory.
|
| That is a bit of a word salad. How about just calling spade a
| spade. This is an account of hypocricy of america's freedom
| mythology
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > The whole point was that he went far enough away (sailing,
| Australia) to not only speak with the anger of the injustice
| (what happened to him), but to target the structural aspects
| (how enslavers are made)
|
| Going far away won't help with targeting enslavers. If you're
| enslaved in Africa, the enslavers are in Africa.
| KittenInABox wrote:
| This makes me wonder the modern day slave narratives that will
| not be understood as such for another 100+ yrs. There are more
| enslaved people now than ever.
| nemomarx wrote:
| I expect we'll see stories out of Saudi Arabia or trafficked
| labor in SEA more and more as it becomes historical
| ossobuco wrote:
| I believe that, in the future, prison labor in the USA will
| be recognized as one of the largest examples of modern
| slavery.
|
| On top of that, we could argue that the concept of people
| depending on the good will of a specific employer/master to
| be able to survive will also be considered as the capitalist
| successor to slavery.
| tourmalinetaco wrote:
| Personally I would relate the latter to feudalism,
| especially as monopolies grow ever imminent within the
| majority of fields.
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