Activating Emancipation boldly interrogates our knowledge of the history of slavery, emancipation, race, and Islam in Mauritania, where slavery was abolished only in 1981 and criminalized in 2007. It centers on the voices and stories of Ḥrāṭīn peoples, a complex and ambiguous social category encompassing people with mixed free and servile ancestral backgrounds. The stigma of enslavement, along with their racialized status as Black, has placed them at the bottom of a social hierarchy dominated by Arab and Amazigh elites, racialized as “White.” 

In this groundbreaking study, Ḥrāṭīn historian Khaled Esseissah mobilizes oral and written sources to confront a long tradition in which Ḥrāṭīn are rendered invisible or shown as passive victims of oppression and narrates a new history of Ḥrāṭīn contributions to the building of modern Mauritania. Despite being emancipated or born free, Ḥrāṭīn men and women continued to face “White” threats to reenslave them or subject them to economic, religious, and sexual exploitation. Esseissah demonstrates that only by “activating their emancipation” have the Ḥrāṭīn challenged Arab dominance. He unravels complex and varied Ḥrāṭīn strategies, including engaging with French colonizers through collaboration and revolt, appealing to the Qur’an and Ḥadith, acquiring wealth, building political power, engaging in nationalist struggle, and exercising communal agency to support others, garner respectability, and assert their autonomy during the colonial period. He also illuminates Ḥrāṭīn adwaba, or villages of emancipation, as critical sites of slave liberation and freedom. In so doing, Activating Emancipation reframes the story of abolition in colonial Mauritania that is often either ignored or told from the French colonial perspective, which sees abolition merely as a legal event. The Ḥrāṭīn experience of emancipation is long and complex, challenging simple binaries between bondage and free labor, between colonial and anticolonial. 

Activating Emancipation reorients academic studies and international media coverage of Ḥrāṭīn communities, demonstrating the broad range of Ḥrāṭīn historical experiences that are not understood, or even visible, to many in Mauritania, Africa, and beyond. It provides a grounded historical analysis that moves us beyond both the orientalist and apologetic Muslim discourses that have long characterized journalistic, popular, and even scholarly debates about slavery, Islam, and Ḥrāṭīn experience in Mauritania.

Extensive archival and anecdotal sources support Michael Mullin's description of slavery as it was practiced in tidewater Virginia, on the rice coast of the Carolinas, and in Jamaica and Barbados. Drawing upon case histories, Mullin offers new and definitive information about how African people met and often overcame the challenges and deprivations of their new lives through religion, family life, and economic strategies.

Published in Boston in 1833, Lydia Maria Child’s An Appeal in Favor of That Class of Americans Called Africans provided the abolitionist movement with its first full-scale analysis of race and enslavement. Controversial in its own time, the Appeal surveyed the institution of slavery from historical, political, economic, legal, racial, and moral perspectives and advocated for the immediate emancipation of the enslaved without compensation to their enslavers. By placing American slavery in historical context and demonstrating how slavery impacted—and implicated—Americans of all regions and races, the Appeal became a central text for the abolitionist movement that continues to resonate in the present day.

This revised and updated edition is enhanced by Carolyn L. Karcher’s illuminating introduction, a chronology of Child’s life, and a list of books for further reading.

A 2018 CHOICE Outstanding Academic Title
 
New scholarship provides insights into the archaeology and cultural history of African American life from a collection of sites in the Mid-Atlantic
 
This groundbreaking volume explores the archaeology of African American life and cultures in the Upper Mid-Atlantic region, using sites dating from the eighteenth through the twentieth centuries. Sites in Delaware, Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and New York are all examined, highlighting the potential for historical archaeology to illuminate the often overlooked contributions and experiences of the region’s free and enslaved African American settlers.
 
Archaeologies of African American Life in the Upper Mid-Atlantic brings together cutting-edge scholarship from both emerging and established scholars. Analyzing the research through sophisticated theoretical lenses and employing up-to-date methodologies, the essays reveal the diverse ways in which African Americans reacted to and resisted the challenges posed by life in a borderland between the North and South through the transition from slavery to freedom. In addition to extensive archival research, contributors synthesize the material finds of archaeological work in slave quarter sites, tenant farms, communities, and graveyards.
 
Editors Michael J. Gall and Richard F. Veit have gathered new and nuanced perspectives on the important role free and enslaved African Americans played in the region’s cultural history. This collection provides scholars of the Mid-Atlantic and Northeast regions, African American studies, material culture studies, religious studies, slavery, the African diaspora, and historical archaeologists with a well-balanced array of rural archaeological sites that represent cultural traditions and developments among African Americans in the region. Collectively, these sites illustrate African Americans’ formation of fluid cultural and racial identities, communities, religious traditions, and modes of navigating complex cultural landscapes in the region under harsh and disenfranchising circumstances.