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- Title
- ASSUMPTION.
- Creator
-
Hinton, William, Lamazares, Ivonne, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
-
Assumption is the story of a slave named Nathan living in a racially hostile environment in antebellum and post-Civil War Louisiana. Assumption Parish was the kind of place where slaves were whipped frequently, where disease and rustic living were the normal course of life, where the swamp, with all its savage foreboding, loomed nearby. It was a place, Nathan discovered ,that traded in men's spirits, breaking them little by little for purposes that were difficult for him to comprehend. Like...
Show moreAssumption is the story of a slave named Nathan living in a racially hostile environment in antebellum and post-Civil War Louisiana. Assumption Parish was the kind of place where slaves were whipped frequently, where disease and rustic living were the normal course of life, where the swamp, with all its savage foreboding, loomed nearby. It was a place, Nathan discovered ,that traded in men's spirits, breaking them little by little for purposes that were difficult for him to comprehend. Like many slaves of his time, Nathan is raised without biological parents. His surrogate mother, Abbie, longs for the day when slavery ended. But she is too conservative in nature, too aware of her powerlessness, to do anything to force change. Nathan's surrogate fathers, on the other hand, are only too willing to rebel against the plantation system. Nefs, in fact, covertly plots revolt. He hopes Nathan will join him in this crusade. But even after being brutally whipped for a petty, accidental infraction of the plantation's unspoken code of conduct, Nathan does not fight back but instead opts to run from the plantation. This illusion of leaving the harshest of the Old South's conditions was fomented by Nathan's other surrogate father, Pinder Beauregard, who dreamed Nathan would become a New Orleans musician as Pinder once had been. Eventually, the plantation's slaves revolted and Nathan escaped, though not before witnessing Pinder death in battle. Nathan wanders the swamp where he discovers freedom is not what he'd expected. Every institution, from the military to religion to marriage, is closed off to him. Nathan falls into a deep fever, like the kind that killed his parents. He is returned to the plantation where he grew up, recovering to find the plantation has changed little since he's been away. The biggest shock is the fate of Nefs, who has been rendered into a catatonic, bootlicking, house servant. Nathan sees in Nefs his future self, a strange alien puppet with barely a mind of his own. He decides his musical life can wait until he can begin a campaign to topple the post-Civil War society.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2004
- Identifier
- CFE0000201, ucf:46258
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0000201
- Title
- A FRACTURED FOUNDATION: DISCONTINUITIES IN ACADIAN RESETTLEMENT, 1755-1803.
- Creator
-
Thomas, Leanna, Sacher, John, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
-
This study examines the social, cultural, and political discontinuities found among Acadians who settled in Louisiana after their deportation from Atlantic Canada in 1755. Historians studying the Acadians' early years of arrival and resettlement in Louisiana have drawn readers' attention to the preservation of Acadian cultural and social attributes. These works tell how in spite of their need to adapt to life in a southern borderland region, the Acadians who arrived in Louisiana retained...
Show moreThis study examines the social, cultural, and political discontinuities found among Acadians who settled in Louisiana after their deportation from Atlantic Canada in 1755. Historians studying the Acadians' early years of arrival and resettlement in Louisiana have drawn readers' attention to the preservation of Acadian cultural and social attributes. These works tell how in spite of their need to adapt to life in a southern borderland region, the Acadians who arrived in Louisiana retained important qualities of their pre-dispersal identity. Such studies have served well in deconstructing the "Evangeline" myth created through Henry Longfellow's epic poem, yet at the same time they have inadvertently mythologized the preservation of the Acadians' pre-dispersal identity. In contrast, this text examines ways that the Acadian identity changed through their experiences in exile and resettlement in the South. The Acadians' interactions with the government, with Native and African Americans, and among themselves in Louisiana provide evidence that the very foundation of their former identity underwent severe fractures. In studying their new relationships with colonizers as well as other colonized, evidence of the Acadians' willing participation in the colonial military, their fears of Native American tribes, their involvement in slaveholding, and their increased dependence on the government indicate that they experienced critical social, cultural, and political changes as a result of the Grand Derangement. Through their dispersal and their resettlement in the South, the Acadians' quest for survival resulted in a new definition of what it meant to be "Acadian."
Show less - Date Issued
- 2011
- Identifier
- CFE0003965, ucf:48688
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFE0003965
- Title
- Ballou's pictorial Vol. IX., No. 25, December 22, 1855.
- Creator
-
Ballou, Maturin Murray, Austin C. Burdick
- Date Created
- 1855
- Identifier
- DP0012649, AP2.A389 No. 233
- Format
- Set of related objects
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/DP0012649
- Title
- "ANIMAL-LIKE AND DEPRAVED": RACIST STEREOTYPES, COMMERCIAL SEX, AND BLACK WOMEN'S IDENTITY IN NEW ORLEANS, 1825-1917.
- Creator
-
Dossie, Porsha, Lester, Connie, University of Central Florida
- Abstract / Description
-
My objective with this thesis is to understand how racist stereotypes and myths compounded the sale of fair-skinned black women during and after the slave trade in New Orleans, Louisiana. This commodification of black women's bodies continued well into the twentieth century, notably in New Orleans' vice district of Storyville. Called "quadroons" (a person with 1/4 African ancestry) and "octoroons" (1/8 African ancestry), these women were known for their "sexual prowess" and drew in a large...
Show moreMy objective with this thesis is to understand how racist stereotypes and myths compounded the sale of fair-skinned black women during and after the slave trade in New Orleans, Louisiana. This commodification of black women's bodies continued well into the twentieth century, notably in New Orleans' vice district of Storyville. Called "quadroons" (a person with 1/4 African ancestry) and "octoroons" (1/8 African ancestry), these women were known for their "sexual prowess" and drew in a large number of patrons. The existence of "white passing" black women complicated ideas about race and racial purity in the South. Race as a myth and social construct, or as Evelyn Brooks Higginbotham explains in her essay, African-American Women's History and the Metalanguage of Race, a "metalanguage" exposes race not as a genetic fact, but rather a physical appearance through which power relations and status were to be conferred. My methodology uses race and gender theory to analyze primary and secondary sources to understand and contextualize how population demographics, myths, and liberal 18th century colonial laws contributed to the sale of black women's bodies. The works of Emily Clark, Walter Johnson, Gwendolyn Midlo Hall and other historians who utilize Atlantic history have been paramount in my research. Emily Clark has transformed the "white-black" women from a tragic, sexualized trope into a fully actualized human being, while Hall has tackled the racist underpinnings inherent in the neglect of black women's history. The writings of bell hooks, particularly her essay Eating the Other, establishes the modern day commodification of black women vis-a-vis their representation in media, as well as through the fetishism of their bodies by a white patriarchal system. During slavery plantation owners could do virtually anything they wanted with their property, including engaging in sexual intercourse. By depicting black women as hypersexual jezebels, they could justify their rape, while establishing their dominance and place in the white male hegemony of that time period. For the right price a white male of a lesser class could achieve the same thing at a brothel down in Storyville at the turn of the twentieth century, for as Emily Clark argues in her book, The Strange History of the American Quadroon, these brothels were a great equalizer, allowing all white men to experience "sexual mastery enjoyed only by elite planters before the Civil War." By democratizing white supremacy, the quadroon and others like her forged solidarity that bridge across all classes, while upholding whiteness and oppressing people of color at the same time.
Show less - Date Issued
- 2014
- Identifier
- CFH0004652, ucf:45310
- Format
- Document (PDF)
- PURL
- http://purl.flvc.org/ucf/fd/CFH0004652
