Stephanie M. H. Camp’s\u00a0Closer to Freedom\u00a0<\/em>is a history of American slavery that uniquely focuses on the impact of the enslaved body’s location\u00a0within ‘spaces,’ and the\u00a0critical role of environments on individual sovereignty. This concept builds\u00a0upon postcolonial philosopher Edward Said’s recognition of “rival geography,” wherein an oppressed group fights for space, both temporal and spatial, in opposition\u00a0to\u00a0the invading, materially superior power. (Camp 7) Slave women were not only subject to most of the same physical and psychological tortures as their male counterparts, but took on additional responsibilities and\u00a0abuse stemming from their status as women.<\/p>\n

Mr. highbeejonathan’s comment regarding slaves in the process of becoming “their own masters” struck me as poignant.\u00a0Camp spends much of the book detailing how\u00a0bondwomen kept personal identities though remaining masters of their own bodies. By designing their own styles of clothing to counteract the rags of servitude they were forced to wear, women used what Camp refers to as the “politics of the body” to subvert the system,\u00a0not to mention entertain themselves. (Camp 60)\u00a0In Camp’s telling, women’s bodies were not merely the subjects of whips and sexual violence, but were an important space in which they expressed their inner\u00a0power. (Camp 68, 70)<\/p>\n

Knowledge played a key role in slave resistance, and Camp points out that women were placed in a structural disadvantage in this regard. While bondmen were sometimes given the required written permission by their masters to travel, typically for work of some sort, women were rarely trusted with such liberties. (Camp 72) Not only did this result in lack of geographic know-how necessary for escape and insider trade secrets, but rendered the price of being caught without a pass at such trivial events as slave parties all the more risky. (Ibid) Both these tickets and the previously mentioned use of clothing\u00a0are examples of Camp’s reliance on material history, or the history of ‘things’, presently in vogue among historians. Travel passes, in particular, could make the difference between life and death for a slave, providing meaning far more\u00a0than scribbled-on scrap of paper. (Camp 15)<\/p>\n

The idea of ‘movement’ is mentioned often in\u00a0Closer to Freedom<\/em>, as mobility is a basic freedom that universally defines what it means to be a human being. By being reduced to property, slaves were subject to the patriarchal strictures inherent to Southern plantations. Camp’s work makes the powerful case that their actions\u00a0nonconformity are not merely useful in providing compelling historical context of the period, but were significantly disruptive tactics that vexed societal overseers within their own time.<\/p>\n

In employing the work of political scientists, (James Scott in his discussion on the balance between “opposition” and “consent” among controlled populations), geographers (David Harvey’s identification of the importance of the “temporal and the spatial” in the lives of historical actors), and historians such as Stephanie McCurry and Mark M. Smith (bringing the reader the importance of the era’s focus on “boundaries of landownership” and\u00a0“improvement,” respectively), Camp\u00a0provides a technicolor academic perspective to a very particular subject too often written in a, excuse the pun, black-and-white manner. The ‘movement’ begun by the feet of slaves in traversing the boundaries of the plantation through escapes or by dancing the night away,\u00a0served to pave the way for more overt political and social black movements to come.<\/p>\n

Bibliography<\/p>\n

Camp, Stephanie M. H.\u00a0Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women & Everyday\u00a0Resistance in the Plantation South.\u00a0<\/em>Chapel Hill: The University of North Carolina Press, 2004.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Stephanie M. H. Camp’s\u00a0Closer to Freedom\u00a0is a history of American slavery that uniquely focuses on the impact of the enslaved body’s location\u00a0within ‘spaces,’ and the\u00a0critical role of environments on individual sovereignty. This concept builds\u00a0upon postcolonial philosopher Edward Said’s recognition of “rival geography,” wherein an oppressed group fights for space, both temporal and spatial, in opposition\u00a0to\u00a0the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":31,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-271","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271","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\/31"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=271"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":273,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/271\/revisions\/273"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=271"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=271"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/courses.shroutdocs.org\/hist571-fall2016\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=271"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}