51 pages • 1-hour read
Closer to Freedom
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Themes
Attenuation of Dichotomies in Slavery Studies
Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses—often in graphic detail—slavery, white supremacy, killing, sexual assault and rape, torture, surveillance, and other forms of violence. Source materials also include racist and sexist language.
Stephanie M. H. Camp asserts the “attenuation of classic social scientific dichotomies” (3) as one of Closer to Freedom’s primary themes. This attenuation is both methodological and historical.
Methodologically, Camp argues that approaching source materials through familiar dichotomies like “personal/political, material/symbolic, organized rebellion/everyday resistance, accommodation/resistance obscure as much as they reveal” (3). These dichotomous frameworks privilege an understanding of dissent, for example, as defined by its public, organized, and dramatic facets. This has been intellectually disorienting, skewing historians’ scholarship toward an assumption that men practiced dissent and were more “resistant” to enslavement than women. Thus, men were rebellious, and women were accommodationist. Women were concerned with the familial and the private, and men were concerned with the public and the political.
At the same time, Camp does not entirely abandon these dichotomies, either, which alternatively reveal as much as they obscure. Enslaved women, for example, were bound to domestic spaces more tightly than men and were denied the mobility that enslaved men were able to secure, and thus their dissent manifested differently. This dissent was more intrinsically “private” than “public” within these gender roles, but it was dissent nonetheless. Attenuating these dichotomies thus helps to redefine and acknowledge the different manifestations of dissent that exist within lives lived within dichotomies.
This attenuation (or partial dissolution) of dichotomies extends to spaces designed to geographically contain enslaved people, and Camp examines how these spaces, though occupied radically differently by enslaver and enslaved, are “shared.” Camp thus relies on these dichotomies as much as she questions them: The private and domestic are often charged with political dissent that seeps out beyond the confines of the domestic and into public space. Similarly, the public-facing dissent of insurrection is entangled with the often invisible (to enslavers and, until recently, historians) domestic dissent of women who risked their lives to feed and otherwise ensure the survival of those enacting visible rebellions.
Camp illustrates how dichotomies determined the lives of enslaved people, especially in the construction of gender roles, and thus cannot be abandoned by scholars. The attenuation of these dichotomies, however, can further reveal the ways that enslaved people created their own “rival geographies” that navigated the “shared” physical spaces of plantation geographies differently and with dissent. To see this rival imagining of the past in The Spatial History of American Slavery & The Rival Geography of Enslaved People requires a different imagining on the part of today’s scholars, who must think within dichotomies to imagine the attenuation of those dichotomies, both of which were lived by enslaved people.
Spatial History of American Slavery & The Rival Geography of Enslaved People
Camp contributes to historical work exploring the relation between race, gender, and space within American slavery. Many scholars have focused on “plantation geography” through an analysis of the built environment of slavery, focusing in particular on the plantation house. By the 18th century, plantation houses had evolved out of ramshackle wooden structures to become Georgian brick buildings that framed their surroundings, architecturally expressing and dispersing enslavers’ power. These imposing buildings “mastered” their environment, including the outbuildings known as “dependencies”—including slave quarters—upon which they looked down. The built environment mirrored and helped to reproduce enslavers’ domination over those they enslaved.
While interested in slavery’s architectural expressions and controls, Camp is particularly concerned with the wider spaces of plantation geography, including roads, woods, swamps, and other spaces that were “shared” with enslavers as well as spaces to which enslaved people had more access, such as the slave quarters.
Employing a framework that adopts the Attenuation of Dichotomies in Slavery Studies, Camp explores how enslaved people are both contained within yet also move through and sometimes beyond this plantation geography, as contrabands did in the Civil War. Building on Edward Said’s theory of the “rival geography” of the colonized, Camp pivots off Said’s interest in colonialism’s dispossession of land and colonized efforts to repossess that land. She theorizes, instead, a “rival geography” of enslaved people, focusing on plantation geography’s attempt to restrict the mobility of enslaved people and their efforts to attain mobility.
Camp argues that the study of this rival geography requires the active engagement of the imagination because the rival geography was, by definition, not charted and recorded. Fugitives from slavery who successfully made their way north, and whose later narratives and autobiographies promised to divulge “the truth” of slavery, for example, remained silent about their movements within this rival geography, as other fugitives’ lives depended on the rival geography remaining hidden. The rival geography, then, requires innovative readings of source texts that may intentionally hide the geographies that enabled enslaved people’s mobility.
This rival geography, moreover, needs to be considered within the nuances of its “rival” context. It existed as a resistance to enslavers’ assertions of power and their imposed plantation geography. However, the rival geography also sometimes exists as a space for enslaved people “without reference to their owners” (7). In theorizing a rival geography in resistance to as well as an “alternative” to plantation geography, Camp again adopts the attenuation of dichotomies that she calls for in slavery studies.
Defiant Displays: The Politics of Enslaved Women’s Bodily & Aesthetic Pleasure in the Rival Geography
Camp’s work explores the Spatial History of American Slavery & The Rival Geography of Enslaved People in its investigation of the gendered politics of mobility. Enslaved people struggled for mobility within the rival geography in order to secure a brief respite from enslavement (truancy) or to find their way to permanent liberation by way of escape to the North (fugitivism) or to Union camps (where they became human contraband).
The rival geography, however, was also a space in which enslaved people cultivated and fostered what initially appear to be trivial and risky pleasures. Camp’s work examines a range of pleasures and aesthetic displays that have lacked scholarly attention and require imaginative analysis on the part of historians. The preparations for and movement to and from illegal parties, for example, entailed great risk. This pleasure—the experience of drunkenness, of dancing, and of being in the presence of live music and other people—was visceral and embodied. However, it was also political in its insistence on the body, determined by enslavement to be exploitable and consistently rendered as a site of pain, as a site of pleasure and revitalization.
As slavery’s exploitation of the body was gendered, so too were many pleasures of the party. For enslaved women, the illegal party was a space for which they prepared “fancy” clothes. This creation occurred from the ground up, beginning with the harvesting of the crops out of which they would create thread, then cloth, and ultimately clothes. The labor that went into producing fashion came at the end of full days of forced manual labor and “second shifts” of cooking, cleaning, and mending. Not only was the creation of fancy clothes labor intensive, but wearing these clothes as women moved to and from illegal parties was dangerous: Fancy clothes made even more visually conspicuous the anomaly of a mobile woman. Some clothes were designed to be heavily starched so that they “crackled” with every step, making clandestine movement noisy.
Similar to women’s risky yet pleasurable display of fashion on their bodies is the display of abolitionist imagery on the walls of their homes. Camp examines two cases of enslaved women’s “reading” of abolitionist imagery in their respective cabin and bedroom. The possession of this material was punishable by death, but in neither case was the imagery folded up to be kept under a mattress or floorboard or even in a drawer. Instead, it was defiantly displayed.
Camp’s work redefines “dissent” most challengingly in these two contexts involving fashion and décor. Camp demonstrates that these defiant displays covering the skin of women’s bodies and the walls of their homes were not, in fact, trivial or superficial in the pleasure they produced. Women reclaimed the most personal spaces of their bodies and homes as their own, laboring—passionately—to “decorate” them, despite the enormous risks of their aesthetics. This, too, is part of the rival geography.
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