A slave narrative resurfaces after nearly 170 years
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
The whole point was that he went far enough away (sailing, Australia) to not only speak with the anger of the injustice (what happened to him), but to target the structural aspects (how enslavers are made) and how the justification was built in to the Constitution. In so doing, he anticipated the evolution of structuralism, post-structuralism, and critical theory.
It seems to have been just one historian who found and validated the story. The author sister was the subject of fawning but incomplete treatment (her story was sympathetic, not damning); the historian found the author's work and traced the author's sailor gigs to validate the connections.
There can be an element of passivation to history: "don't worry, we're understanding more and getting better". Thanks to both the author and the historian, it appears much was understood even then, and we shouldn't rest on tides that might not be rising.
Critical theory has fatal flaws and anger almost never leads to insight or the right incentives, but how else would normalized and profitable injustice be stripped of a legal veil?
Can you word it again but more clearly?
It currently reads like a signal of what you have memorised, rather than an effort to increase the knowledge of the reader.
So structuralism in literary theory is that the structure of a text is the important thing which can end up being a lot like those articles you see every now and then "There are only 10 basic plots in the world, here they are" or some stuff like that (I obviously say this as someone who does not much care for structuralism so take my words with a giant grain of salt)
on edit: clarification
The first sentence is the important part. "Structuralism" is in no way related to "structural" or "institutional" racism. "Structuralism" is what the next sentences are describing, and it doesn't matter if you understand them; they were probably added as ample evidence that the first sentence was true, and possibly as stuff to google if you're interested in a subject completely unrelated to this discussion about the article.
Structuralism is some French theories about how creative writing should be structured.
However, that same critique is easily moralized in a political context, and communication stops cold.
In the political context it is just blame, in academia it is structural analysis.
Going far away won't help with targeting enslavers. If you're enslaved in Africa, the enslavers are in Africa.
That is a bit of a word salad. How about just calling spade a spade. This is an account of hypocricy of america's freedom mythology
It's kind of weird that a 150-year-old slave narrative is being sold by a University press.
At any rate, here's the original text from the Australian paper: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/rendition/nla.news-articl...
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/rendition/nla.news-articl...
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/rendition/nla.news-articl...
so that the GUI version is probably easier to read ( https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/60178733 , https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/60177234 ).
Also, TFA itself links to a transcription of the (according to TFA, "chopped ... excising most of its political arguments") Leisure Hour reprint:
https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jjacobs/jjacobs.html
It might be interesting to compare the two. In fact, I would hope that such a comparison appears in Schroeder's new edition. A university press is exactly where I'd expect to find a "critical edition" or recension of a 150-year-old narrative that exists in multiple versions. If university-press publication is appropriate for a critical edition of Shakespeare or Pulci, it seems equally appropriate for a critical edition of John S. Jacobs. You're not paying for the transcription, you're paying for the scholarship.
The only weird things about this story, to me, are:
(1) The book-jacket design screams modern pop, where I personally would have gone with a more "serious"-looking design, like you'd find on a Penguin Classic, or even on an Erik Larson novel.
(2) It's not clear what they mean "rediscovered"; I scanned the article looking for the traditional discovery narrative, like "he inherited a manuscript" or "a yellowed newspaper clipping" or whatever. Here it looks like the "rediscovery" was basically that it came up in a Google search and he said "oh that's neat, someone should republish that in real print, on paper." Which is fine and great; we should republish more out-of-print work. It's just not the traditional media narrative of a "rediscovered" or "resurfaced" lost work; it's more like a tracing of the familiar narrative beats from which the actual plot (the physical discovery of a lost work) has been surgically removed.
> "...it's more like a tracing of the familiar narrative beats from which the actual plot (the physical discovery of a lost work) has been surgically removed."
I think that stories like this represent what's going to be the new normal for discovery practices in the humanities.
Although I understand your disappointment, all that's changed is that physical discovery has gone digital and had that not been the case in this instant the likelihood of Jacob's narrative being resurfaced is altered.
This is an example of it working out well, as far as I can tell. It couldn't get any better than how it turned out.
Who else but a middle-aged post-graduate, in the middle of the first Trump administration, trying to get his dissertation published, looking for work, applying exercising his academic know-how to scratch his own itch, taking advantage of open source intelligence, corresponding with colleagues, transforming "from an interpretive literary scholar into an old-fashioned archive hound", could have pulled this of?
(Because we know there's no way he'd even think about financing a trip to Australia to kick the research off the old fashion way)
What better way for this to return to the fore in 2024?
You say the plot of the beat has been surgically removed, nay, I say beat goes on!
We used to bang on papyrus, and pass credentials for access to microfilm. White-gloved hands daintily turn delicate pages...tired eyes glean call numbers scrawled onto hastily sheared scrap paper.
The same beat carries on my friend...
Or not to stand out, but to blend in. :) ...Ah, but the cover design on the actual publisher's website is different! And indeed more "serious"-looking.
https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/U/bo213795...
On top of that, we could argue that the concept of people depending on the good will of a specific employer/master to be able to survive will also be considered as the capitalist successor to slavery.
They destroyed these irreplaceable historical documents because those documents offended their modern sensibilities.
I believe history should be preserved. Even lying propaganda has value to historians.
https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-reso...
> In the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana, and Brazil, the enslaved death rate was so high and the birth rate so low that they could not sustain their population without importations from Africa. Rates of natural decrease ran as high as 5 percent a year. While the death rate of the US enslaved population was about the same as that of Jamaican enslaved persons, the birth rate was more than 80 percent higher in the United States.
> In the United States enslaved persons were more generations removed from Africa than those in the Caribbean. In the nineteenth century, the majority of enslaved in the British Caribbean and Brazil were born in Africa. In contrast, by 1850, most US enslaved persons were third-, fourth-, or fifth-generation Americans.
> Slavery in the US was distinctive in the near balance of the sexes and the ability of the enslaved population to increase its numbers by natural reproduction. Unlike any other enslaved society, the US had a high and sustained natural increase in the enslaved population for a more than a century and a half.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_breeding_in_the_United_S...
The US and Brazil knew how to breed enslaved people.
Therefore today, Brazil has the largest slave descended population, and the US has the second largest.
If you want to share statistics, it's not hard at all to find them.
Though I wonder what point, if any, you're trying to make?
Either way, it was taking humans and using them as forced labor, treating them as if they didn't deserve human rights.