Reading Group

Reading group (fall 2023 & spring 2024)

This monthly reading group explores myriad dimensions, perspectives, and interpretative frameworks for understanding the many pasts and enduring presents of slavery and unfreedom. It forms part of the year-long Sawyer Seminar, “Global Slavery, Fugitivity and the Afterlives of Unfreedom,” whose many activities and events are further described here. The reading group will engage work that was important in defining the field as well as scholarship that is shaping its future directions.

This group is open to all Indiana University faculty, students, and staff, as well as the broader Bloomington community.

  • Location: Hamilton Lugar School of Global and International Studies, GA 3134
    • Location for April 25th: GA 2134
  • Contact for further information and access to readings: Genie Yoo (yoojh@iu.edu).
Spring Readings

Fall schedule and readings

Key Concepts and Debates on Slavery, Racialization & Gender

  • Orlando Patterson, “Authority, Alienation and Social Death,” in Slavery and Social Death, 35-76 
  • Suzanne Miers, “Slavery: A Question of Definition” 
  • Vincent Brown, “Social Death and Political Life in the Study of Slavery,” American Historical Review, December 2009 
  • Noel Lenski, “Framing the Question: What is a Slave Society,” in Lenski and Catherine m. Cameron (eds.), What is a Slave Society? The Practice of Slavery in Global Perspective (Cambridge University Press, 2018).
  • Jennifer Morgan “Refusing Demography” in Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship, and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic, and “Partus sequitur ventrem: Law, Race, and Reproduction in Colonial Slavery.” 
  • Alys Weinbaum, “Human Reproduction and the Slave Episteme” in The Afterlife of Reproductive Slavery: Biocapitalism and Black Feminism’s Philosophy of History. 
  • Marissa Fuentes, selections from Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive.  
  • Nira Wickramasinghe, Slave in a Palanquin: Colonial Servitude and Resistance in Sri Lanka (Columbia University Press, 2020) selections. 

Processes of Enslavement & Forms of Violence

  • John Thornton, “The Process of Enslavement and the Slave Trade,” in Critical Readings on Global Slavery 
  • Richard M. Eaton, “Introduction,” in Indrani Chatterjee and Richard Eaton, eds., Slavery and South Asian History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 2–7. 
  • Pier Larson, “Horrid Journeying: Narratives of Enslavement and the Global African Diaspora” 
  • Sowande’ Mustakeem, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (University of Illinois Press, 2016) selections 
  • Alicia Schrikker & Nira Wickramasinghe (eds.), Being a Slave: Histories and Legacies of European Slavery in the Indian Ocean (Leiden University Press, 2020) selections 
  • Gerrit Knaap, “Slavery in the Dutch Colonial Empire in Southeast Asia: Seventeenth-Century Amboina Reconsidered,” Slavery & Abolition 43, 3 (2023): 499-516. 
  • Saidiya Hartman, “Markets and Martyrs” in Lose Your Mother.  

Forms of Slavery and Unfreedom around the Globe

  • Anthony Reid, “Introduction: Slavery and Bondage in Southeast Asian History,” in Reid (ed.), Slavery, Bondage and Dependency in Southeast Asia (St Martin’s Press, 1983). 
  • Indrani Chatterjee and Richard M. Eaton (eds.), Slavery & South Asian History (Indiana University Press, 2006) selections 
  • Nancy E. van Deusen “Introduction” to Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth Century Spain. 
  • John Monteiro Selections of Blacks of the land: Indian slavery, settler society, and the Portuguese colonial enterprise in South America. ”  
  • Tatiana Seijas “The Rise and Fall of the Transpacific Slave Trade” in Critical readings on global slavery, reprinted from Asian slaves in colonial Mexico: from chinos to Indians.  
  • Kate Ekama, Lisa Hellman & Matthias van Rossum, “Slavery and Labour Coercion in Asia – Towards a Global History,” in Ekama et al (eds.), Slavery and Bondage in Asia, 1550-1850 (De Gruyter, 2022) 

Spring schedule and readings

Fugitivity, Marronage, and Abolitionism

  • Richard Price, Maroon Societies: Rebel Slave Communities in the Americas, selections.  
  • Stuart Schwartz, “Rethinking Palmares: Slave Resistance in Colonial Brazil,” in Critical Readings on Global Slavery 
  • Indrani Chatterjee, “Slavery, Semantics, and the Sound of Silence,” in Indrani Chatterjee and Richard Eaton, eds., Slavery and South Asian History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 287–315 
  • Manisha Sinha, The Slave’s Cause: A History of Abolition (Yale University Press, 2017) selections. 
  • Neil Roberts, Freedom as Marronage, selections.  
  • Christopher Schmidt-Nowara “Slavery, Freedom, and Abolition in Latin America and the Atlantic World.” 

Unfree and Coerced Labor Practices

  • Clare Anderson, “Convicts and Coolies: Rethinking Indentured Labour in the Nineteenth Century,” Slavery & Abolition 30, 1 (2009): 93-109 
  • Richard B. Allen, “Slaves, Convicts, Abolitionism and the Global Origins of the Post-Emancipation Indentured Labor System,” Slavery & Abolition 35, 2 (2014): 328-348 
  • Clare Anderson, “Convicts, Commodities, and Connections in British Asia and the Indian Ocean, 1789-1866,” International Review of Social History 64 (2019): 205-227 
  • Kris Manjapra, “Plantation Dispossessions: The Global Travel of Agricultural Racial Capitalism,” in Sven Beckert & Christine Desan. eds. American Capitalism: New Histories (Columbia University Press, 2018) 
  • Daniel Nemser, selections from Infrastructures of Race: Concentration and Biopolitics in Colonial Mexico. 

Memorialization, Representations, and the Afterlives of Slavery & Unfreedom

  • Mapule Mohulatsi, “Black Aesthetics and Deep Water: Fish-People, Mermaid Art and Slave Memory in South Africa,” Journal of African Cultural Studies 35, 1 (2023): 121-133 
  • Anne Eichmann, “From Slave to Maroon: The Present-Centredness of Mauritian Slave Heritage,” Atlantic Studies 9, 3 (September 2012): 319-335 
  • Nidhi Mahajan, “Remembering Slavery at the Bin Jelmood House in Qatar” (2021) https://merip.org/2021/08/remembering-slavery-at-the-bin-jelmood-house-in-qatar/  
  • Ana Lucia Araujo, Slavery in the Age of Memory: Engaging the Past (Bloomsbury Academic, 2020) selections 
  • Marcelo D'Salete, selections from Angola Janga: Kingdom of Runaway Slaves. 
  • Charles Walker and Liz Clark, selections from Witness to the Age of Revolution: the Odessey of Juan Bautista Tupac Amaru.   

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This Sawyer Seminar is funded by the Mellon Foundation.