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Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women & Everyday and Everyday Resistance in the Planation South, authored by Stephanie M.H. Camp offers new scholarship in the examination of space, social relations, gender, and resistance within in the South. Camp looks at everyday life on the planation to study of the movement of bodies, objects, and information to offer new light on slave resistance in new areas and reveals a different resistance not well known. She portrays the complexity of enslaved women daily life on the planation and in how their bodies & acts of resistance altered the political dynamics on the planation. By using planter papers, oral histories, and other sources is able to record planters attempts to confine slaves and control their whereabouts on plantations and the South. Camp uses the term “rival geography” to explain the resistance to colonial occupation. In her introduction Camp states, “where planter’s mapping of their farms was defined by fixed places for planation residents, the rival geography was characterized by motion: the movement of bodies, objects, and information within and around planation space” (pg. 7). Her main theme within the book is to look at the dichotomies and the history of American slavery. Place did not just revolve around the planation, but also the slave cabins, swamps, the body and lands surrounding the plantations; essentially Camp is looking at the private verse public space and how the body was seen as space. Camp argues “the body, then, can provide and has provided a ‘basic political resource’ in struggles between dominant and subordinate classed. What I found most compelling within the Camps research is the different acts of resistance bondswomen would do or how bondswomen offered different acts of resistance of bondsmen. Bondsmen had a better opportunity to run away or flee enslavement rather than women. Women may run to the swamps or hide to show resistance and control over their bodies, but they always ended up returning to the planation. Their work did not just end, when the day ended in the fields, but continued in household & family work later in the evening. Their bodies were more enchained to the plantations then the bodies of bondsmen. Camp continues the book in analyzing how rival geographies played within the Civil War and Jim Crow Era. To Camp, the Civil War created a rift within the spatial arrangements of slavery. Space originally that separated whites from blacks was beginning to dissipating and essentially groups that were kept separate no longer has their own spaces. She also continues to say how space defined within the South through the Civil War also plays an imperative role in the Jim Crow area. Here again space has a role to play and Camp states, “segregation seems as much tradition in a new form as a modern break from it” (pg. 140).
I also find it compelling that Camp uses personal testimonies, “penny papers”, songs, and illustrations to create a narrative in which she tries to establish the notion that even in the harshest conditions any human can endure there will be resistance even if it means turning the plain, uncolored tow, denim, hemp, burlap, and cotton cloth they had woven into fancy, decorative cloth to make their bodies spaces of personal expression and pleasure since the dress reflects something about the perceptions people have of their place in the world, then it would appear that many bondwomen did not concur with the south’s view of them as joyless drudges (pgs. 82-3).