This chapter works through multiple valences of queerness in relation to blackness. Alongside the presence of non-normative sexual practices, intimacies, and identifications within black literatures this chapter looks at ways that blackness is often posited as already queer, part of the residue of having been hailed as property. In this reading, blackness destabilizes or “queers” the category of the person. This happens through the blurring of the categories of person and object as well as the possibility of making a distinction between an individual and a collective social identity. We might consider this person-object blurriness to be one of the effects of the processes of commodification that enslavement entailed. This estrangement from personhood though enfleshment, objectification, and loss of the mother also introduces literary possibilities of resistance in a queer register, including movements to mourn and re-find the mother, sonic resistance, and other uses of the flesh to produce forms of embodiment that evade traditional forms of capture. Here, queerness is related to finding different ways to describe orientations toward the world and pleasure.

This chapter examines how people of the Black diaspora in the United States have articulated their histories and experiences in comics and graphic novels, and how they have developed singular aesthetic strategies to counter a white comics imaginary and its stereotyped depiction of Black bodies and culture, in order to construct more accurate images of themselves. This includes revisiting American history – particularly enslavement and Civil Rights activism – through a Black lens and with Black readers in mind. This historical rewriting engages with the social, political, and cultural contributions of Black people, filling voids and questioning occlusions. The chapter studies groundbreaking works of this nature by authors such as Kyle Baker, Roland and Taneisha Laird, and Joel Christian Gill. It also highlights the importance of graphic novels depicting the Black communal experience in the context of resistance to violence and the fight for social justice. Finally, it discusses the importance of Black embodiment and the embracing of Black culture, from early works such as Jackie Ormes’s strips in the 1950s to contemporary graphic novels like Ebony Flowers’s Hot Comb (2019).

Many Black intellectuals and artists have called for a counter-historiography that would redress the silencing of Black voices and the inadequate representation of Black experiences in earlier comics. This chapter identifies three categories of graphic historiographies, each with thematic and formal recurrences: those that propose a frontal look at the context of enslavement, from the horrors of the Middle Passage to the violence of the plantation world; those focusing on the political and social struggles of Black communities after the Civil War, from the Jim Crow era and the courageous actions of Civil Rights leaders to twenty-first-century police brutality; and, finally, those that imagine new Black futures in the mode of speculative fiction, while metaphorically referencing past forms of exploitation and repression. The chapter studies the specific devices of several of these works, including the use of temporal shifts in the graphic adaptation of Octavia Butler’s Kindred, the reliance on oral history and photo-based illustrations in John Lewis’s Run, Book One, the depiction of Black women’s subordination in Shirlene Obuobi’s ShirlyWhirlMD webcomic, and the futuristic metaphors of slavery and capitalism in Roxane Gay’s The Sacrifice of Darkness.

Volume 2 of The Cambridge History of Global Migrations presents an authoritative overview of the various continuities and changes in migration and globalization from the 1800s to the present day. Despite revolutionary changes in communication technologies, the growing accessibility of long-distance travel, and globalization across major economies, the rise of nation-states empowered immigration regulation and bureaucratic capacities for enforcement that curtailed migration. One major theme worldwide across the post-1800 centuries was the differentiation between “skilled” and “unskilled” workers, often considered through a racialized lens; it emerged as the primary divide between greater rights of immigration and citizenship for the former, and confinement to temporary or unauthorized migrant status for the latter. Through thirty-one chapters, this volume further evaluates the long global history of migration; and it shows that despite the increased disciplinary systems, the primacy of migration remains and continues to shape political, economic, and social landscapes around the world.

The European conquest of the seven islands of the Canarian archipelago lasted almost a century (1402-1496). It was carried mostly by private adventurers backed by the legal rights of the Castilian crown and supplied by private financiers, who expected a quick return. It brought the destruction of the native population of all its islands, the erasure of their names, language, custom, economy, land ownership, ecological environment, beliefs, culture, social structure, and political organization. The means by which it was achieved were enslavement, deportation, disease, and the strategic use of terror. Acculturation, miscegenation, and the building of a colonial society based on plantation agriculture and long-distance trade did the rest to erase any trace of the indigenous culture. Genocide, in the case of the Canary Islands, can be understood both as a process of attrition, following its use by Fein and Rosenberg, and as an outcome, the aggregate result of thousands of specific instances of violence. It also was a prelude, a necessary learning ground and a blueprint of the European conquest and settler colonialism in the Antilles begun in the 1490s. The American conquest proved a much faster application of the same template for genocide, over a vast territory.

'Urbicide' is a Latin formation - as deployed in this chapter, it refers to the total or near-total destruction of cities (poleis) of the ancient Greek/Hellenic world between the 6th and the 4th centuries BCE. Urbicide was an extreme measure of interstate politics, but not as rare as one might have predicted - or hoped. It represented the other, dark side of the ancient Greeks' fierce attachment to their own native polis. In some cases a polis might be removed from the map once and for all (e.g. Arisba on the island of Lesbos). In others, it might be only temporarily annihilated (Thebes). In all cases, the possibility of largescale enslavement of formerly free Greek citizens was ever-present, and often was realised.

After freedom, there were many realities, scenarios, and imaginings. Mostly, there were just questions that would soon be answered. How would families like the Qualls-Harper-Payton-Colemans and the parents of the Sunflower Seven – those examined in this work – climb, and under what conditions, if any, would their subsequent generations thrive? Would the compromises made in a rural Slave Republic continue to distort the pursuit of a more egalitarian union? In the pockets of our nation where anti-slavery movements had formed, would new appeals for African Americans’ full citizenship mobilize the once enslaved and their descendants and provide moral, social, and ethical guardrails, not just political and economic ones?

This chapter surveys the evidence for the use of people and animals as substitutes for prostheses and assistive technology by individuals with a variety of impairments and disabilities. It considers the role that enslavement played in the lives of the impaired and disabled in antiquity, and how the presence of enslaved individuals may have affected the development and adoption of assistive technology, noting that this is a key difference in ancient and contemporary assistive technology usage.

Chapter 1 deals with the Municipal Council of Luanda and the politics of Portuguese governors in Angola in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, detailing how the Municipal Council of Luanda was involved in illegal wars , treachery and robbery in capturing and enslaving Angolans and shipping them to Brazil on behalf of Portugal. It demonstrates how the Municipal Council of Luanda became the site of political intrigue, jealousy, deceit and mutiny in a political landscape in which the main drive was for economic gain; the enslavement of Angolans was the key part of that package. The methods deployed to capture them – wars, pillage, treachery – formed the basis for Mendonça’s Vatican court case.

Chapter 8 examines the law governing the exploitation of people’s labour by fighting organizations. The chapter focuses on the international crimes of enslavement and forced labour in armed conflict, as well as the recruitment of children, with a focus on how prohibitions and crime definitions apply to the predatory exploitation of labour in the context of irregular warfare.

African economies were globally integrated yet regionally autonomous. This chapter addresses volume and direction of slave trade, continental and regional export value, and theories of economic growth and enslavement. Details address the varying regional peaks in slave trade as related to warfare, population, regional social orders, and gender relations. The overseas diaspora grew to 10% of the African total of some 140 million. African economies felt the effects of imperial rivalries and global trade, notably in textiles. (Large-scale colonial rule came only after 1870.) The eighteenth century brought expanding overseas slave trade and its steady incursions into domestic economies. The nineteenth century brought a mix of economic changes. Silver became key to African currencies; peasant agricultural exports rose, but only the post-1870 exports of South African diamonds and gold exports exceeded slave-trade earnings. In the ‘second slavery’, African enslavement reached a mid-century peak, in parallel to current maritime Asian and New World plantations. Analysis of African economies benefits from growing collections of empirical data; contending theories on enslavement, the domestic economy, and overseas trade – developed over half a century of analysis – can be strengthened in global context.

This essay surveys the literate culture of the antebellum and Civil War eras among marginal southerners – African Americans, both free and enslaved, and poor and middle-class whites – and explores examples of the ways reading and writing, though quite distinct in formal pedagogies, blended together in the literary lives of the self-educated. Focused especially on Basil Armstrong Thomasson, a yeoman farmer in North Carolina whose diary records his reading practices as well as original verse, and John M. Washington, a Virginia man who kept a diary while enslaved, the essay presents a study in the surprising complexity and variegation of the textual landscape such people inhabited and helped create. It also discusses the scarcer archival traces of the literacy practices of ordinary southern women.

Linking the royal Tudor archive to the Tudor/Stuart stage, this article discloses the ways the stage constructs race in the service of nation and empire. From Elizabeth I’s proclamations calling for the expulsion of ‘blackamoors’ to George Peele’s The Battle of Alcazar, English conceptions of blackness expose the multifaceted nature of racial formation in the early modern period. The construction of race in early modern England is intimately linked to nascent and emergent English imperial ambitions and dependent upon trade, traffic, and enslavement, particularly in Africa. While previous scholarship on The Battle of Alcazar has focused on the Mediterranean milieu and the seemingly elastic racial signification of the identity marker, Moor, this study shifts both the geographical and racial focus to argue that the Atlantic and Africa are significant sites of imperial interest for the English and that blackness is being discursively produced in order to signal race.