|
View the H-Slavery Discussion Logs by month
View the Prior Message in H-Slavery's November 2009 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] View the Next Message in H-Slavery's November 2009 logs by: [date] [author] [thread] Visit the H-Slavery home page.
From: Ibrahim Sundiata [mailto:sundiata@brandeis.edu]
Colleagues, a query:
In 2002 I published a work ("Brothers and Strangers")at Duke in
which I posited that there was an "Old Dixie Narrative" that molded
North American views of slavery:
"This view of history says: Slavery was confined to Dixie and slaves grew
cotton. Nowhere else in the history of humanity has slavery existed and
nowhere else were human beings chattel. Africans, in this version of
history, were selected slaves because they were black. Racism, not
economic interest, drove the slave trade and slavery, which existed as
the ultimate form of psychosexual torture. The numbers immolated in the
holocaust of the "Middle Passage" and in the cotton fields ran into the
hundreds of millions. At the popular level, the Old Dixie Narrative
floats in the American collective consciousness...."
My query is that, avoiding postmodern discussions of metanarratives,
what constitutes a historical "master narrative"? Any good and
cogent sources (books or articles) would be greatly appreciated.
Thank you,
Ibrahim K. Sundiata
Samuel and Augusta Spector Professor of History and African and
Afro-American Studies
Brandeis University
Member, Council on Foreign Relations
 Humanities & Social Sciences Online 
|