Curse upon the Nation

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A01=Kay Wright Lewis
African American history
African diaspora
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American history
American Revolution
Author_Kay Wright Lewis
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black mobility
Category1=Non-Fiction
Category=HBJK
Category=JBSL
Category=JFS
Category=JFSL
Category=NHK
Category=NHTS
colonial period
COP=United States
correspondence
court documents
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eq_history
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_non-fiction
eq_society-politics
extermination
historical trauma
John Locke
Language_English
marginalized groups
Newspapers
PA=Available
political tracts
Price_€50 to €100
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psychology of slavery
Race
Racialized fears
racism
slave economy
slave rebellions
slavery
softlaunch
white supremacy

Product details

  • ISBN 9780820351278
  • Weight: 560g
  • Dimensions: 152 x 229mm
  • Publication Date: 15 Aug 2017
  • Publisher: University of Georgia Press
  • Publication City/Country: US
  • Product Form: Hardback
  • Language: English
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From the inception of slavery as a pillar of the Atlantic World economy, both Europeans and Africans feared their mass extermination by the other in a race war. In the United States, says Kay Wright Lewis, this ingrained dread nourished a preoccupation with slave rebellions and would later help fuel the Civil War, thwart the aims of Reconstruction, justify Jim Crow, and even inform civil rights movement strategy. And yet, says Lewis, the historiography of slavery is all but silent on extermination as a category of analysis. Moreover, little of the existing sparse scholarship interrogates the black perspective on extermination. A Curse upon the Nation addresses both of these issues.

To explain how this belief in an impending race war shaped eighteenth- and nineteenth-century American politics, culture, and commerce, Lewis examines a wide range of texts including letters, newspapers, pamphlets, travel accounts, slave narratives, government documents, and abolitionist tracts. She foregrounds her readings in the long record of exterminatory warfare in Europe and its colonies, placing lopsided reprisals against African slave revolts—or even rumors of revolts—in a continuum with past brutal incursions against the Irish, Scots, Native Americans, and other groups out of favor with the empire. Lewis also shows how extermination became entwined with ideas about race and freedom from early in the process of enslavement, making survival an important form of resistance for African peoples in America.

For African Americans, enslaved and free, the potential for one-sided violence was always present and deeply traumatic. This groundbreaking study reevaluates how extermination shaped black understanding of the Atlantic slave trade and the political, social, and economic worlds in which it thrived.

KAY WRIGHT LEWIS is an assistant professor of history at Howard University.