"No man's yoke on my shoulders": The politics of death in the Plantation South
by Clark, Lauren Creight, M.A., SARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE, 2009, 77 pages; 1466473

Abstract:

This work progresses an understanding of the ways bondsmen and -women employed death to resist the "social death" or "living death" of enslavement. Chapter One explores the personal and political proclamations articulated in the slave funeral. With each funeral, enslaved women and men defied a belief inherent to slavery: the value of the slave ended at the body and with the body.

Chapters Two and Three focus on the ways corporeal death challenged enslavement. Chapter Two uncovers the lengths mothers pursued to save their children from slavery and claim ownership over their biological reproduction through abortion and infanticide.

Chapter Three extends this focus to the implications of self-ownership through suicide. It concludes with a discussion of revolutionary suicides performed through the murder of oppressors. At the core of each act of death, infanticide, suicide or murder, is the utilization of death to express resistance.

 
AdviserPriscilla Murolo
SchoolSARAH LAWRENCE COLLEGE
SourceMAI/ 47-06, p. , Aug 2009
Source TypeThesis
SubjectsBlack history; American history; Women's studies
Publication Number1466473
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