In\u00a0<\/span>Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South<\/span><\/em>, Stephanie Camp\u2019s central argument revolves around the notion of movement within confined spaces as well as the \u201crival geography\u201d that existed between the enslaved and their owners during the antebellum era. Although Camp claims that her book revolves around the struggles of bondswomen and their everyday resistance in the Old South,\u00a0<\/span>Closer to Freedom<\/span><\/em>\u00a0<\/span>covers both the actions and roles of enslaved men and women when it comes to resisting white authority in the Old South. While slaveholders in the Old South exercised control over their bound laborers through the use of restraints from \u201cpasses, tickets, curfews, and roll calls [that] all limited slave mobility\u201d (pg. 13), enslaved men and women operated against their oppressive owners by etching out forms of mobility for themselves in the face of constraint. By engaging in a practice called truancy, enslaved people sought temporary escape from their owners to spaces such as woods, swamps, and even slave cabins where the enslaved could essentially exercise more autonomy than the fields that they worked in and other open spaces on the plantation. According to Camp, truancy \u201cdisturbed and in some cases alarmed slaveholders\u2026 [It] never became an acceptable part of plantation life in planters\u2019 minds. Rather it was the source of a fundamental conflict of interest between owner and owned\u201d (pg. 36).<\/span><\/p>\n

I agree with both\u00a0<\/span>Andrew<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>and\u00a0<\/span>Taylor<\/a>\u00a0<\/span>that Camp tends to shy away from using the word \u201cslave\u201d in her book. By using the words \u201censlaved\u201d or \u201cbondpeople,\u201d she undeniably gives the people she writes about more agency as it not only \u201cimplies the active historical process involved in subjugating those who where enslaved… [but also] connotes a status rather than a state of being\u201d (pg. 143).\u00a0On the other hand, I also appreciated Camp\u2019s attention to geography and movement especially when it came to exploring the ways in which enslaved people resisted and conducted their life under \u201cwhite rule\u201d through areas of open space. I personally thought Camp\u2019s thesis created\u00a0an in-depth picture of the ways in which enslaved people carved out lives for themselves using \u201crival geography,\u201d which\u00a0provided slaves a \u201cspace for private and public creative expression, rest and recreation, alternative communication, and importantly, resistance to planters\u2019 domination of slaves\u2019 every move\u201d (pg. 7). \u00a0In the end,\u00a0not only was Closer To Freedom<\/em> an ambitious work\u00a0that gives further substance and depth to the experience of slavery from the perspective of both enslaved men and especially women,\u00a0it also\u00a0discloses several features of slavery and Southern society that are normally not made explicit. Instead of merely touching the surface of the ways in which slaves coped with their existence in the South, Camp humanizes the enslaved in the process and fundamentally\u00a0connects\u00a0their efforts to the dramatic events following the American Civil War.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

In\u00a0Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, Stephanie Camp\u2019s central argument revolves around the notion of movement within confined spaces as well as the \u201crival geography\u201d that existed between the enslaved and their owners during the antebellum era. Although Camp claims that her book revolves around the struggles of bondswomen […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":41,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-261","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/41"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=261"}],"version-history":[{"count":6,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":269,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/261\/revisions\/269"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=261"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=261"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=261"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}