Book contents
- The Cambridge Companion to Early American Literature
- The Cambridge Companion to Early American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I How to Read (in) Early America
- Part II Readings in Early America
- 7 Accident, Disaster, and Trauma
- 8 Settler Kitsch
- 9 Like a Prayer
- 10 Varieties of Bondage in the Early Atlantic
- 11 The Erotics of Early America
- Part III Early American Places
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
10 - Varieties of Bondage in the Early Atlantic
from Part II - Readings in Early America
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 November 2021
- The Cambridge Companion to Early American Literature
- The Cambridge Companion to Early American Literature
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Figures
- Contributors
- Introduction
- Part I How to Read (in) Early America
- Part II Readings in Early America
- 7 Accident, Disaster, and Trauma
- 8 Settler Kitsch
- 9 Like a Prayer
- 10 Varieties of Bondage in the Early Atlantic
- 11 The Erotics of Early America
- Part III Early American Places
- Select Bibliography
- Index
- Cambridge Companions To …
Summary
Racialized subjection in the English Atlantic continues to be associated overwhelmingly, if not exclusively, with Africans, in part because of the magnitude and colossal significance of African chattel slavery to the plantation complex in particular and to the institutions of capitalist modernity in general. To be sure, workforces in the Atlantic became increasingly Africanized in the eighteenth century. Yet laboring people in the early years of settlement were by no means monochromatic; rather, they were, in Gary Nash’s classic account, red, white, and black. In Barbados and other New World colonies, plantation societies were built on expropriated Native lands and the coerced labor of Indigenous and African peoples. This chapter concentrates on a range of literary and extraliterary sources – plays, proto-ethnographic texts, the early novel, and pamphlets – to investigate the conjoined yet distinct histories of territorial dispossession and labor extraction. It argues that the continued expansion of plantation agriculture in the early Atlantic, supported by African chattel slavery, had, as its inevitable corollary, the diminution of Native American territorial sovereignty.
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- The Cambridge Companion to Early American Literature , pp. 163 - 178Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021