Dr. Jessica Reuther, a 2016 graduate of the African history program, has published an article in the Journal of African History. Titled “Street Hawking or Street Walking in Dahomey?: Debates about Girls’ Sexual Assaults in Colonial Tribunals, 1924–41,” Reuther’s piece centers on sexual assault investigations in colonial Dahomey. Reuther’s analysis of those investigations reveals caregiving practices among older women for girls who suffered sexual assaults as well as the vulnerability of street hawkers to such assaults. Reuther is Assistant Professor of African History at Ball State University. Read the article abstract below.
Between the judicial reorganizations of 1924 and 1941, the colonial tribunals in Dahomey heard more than two hundred cases of rape. Teenage or younger girls engaged in street hawking were the most common victims of rape who reported their assaults to these tribunals. Many of the cases stand out because market women played the dominant role in transforming girl hawkers’ experiences of sexual assault into formal grievances. The history of sexual assault in colonial Africa has largely focused on how ‘customary’ and colonial courts have or have not punished the crime of rape. This approach privileges masculine authorities’ views of sex, consent, and gender violence. This article focuses on the investigative processes in cases of sexual assault. In doing so, two gendered histories emerge: firstly, a history of elder female caregiving to girls suffering the aftereffects of sexual assaults and, secondly, a history of the vulnerability of hawkers to quotidian sexual violence.
History doctoral student Anjuli Webster was recently accepted to an international workshop at Brown University in June of 2023. Titled “Rivers on the Move,” the event will bring together environmental historians, hydrologists, and other historically-minded humanists and natural scientists to understand better how past and contemporary riparian change relate to social and political shifts, from economic development to legal frameworks. The workshop will result in an edited volume of interdisciplinary essays that aim to appeal to a wide range of riverine scholars and students. “Rivers on the Move” is organized by Bathsheba Demuth, Mark Healey,Giacomo Parrinello, and Larry Smith, with support from the Institute at Brown for Environment and Society, in collaboration with the project Shifting Shores, funded by an Emergence(s) grant of the City of Paris. Webster is currently conducting fieldwork for her dissertation, titled “Fluid Empires: Histories of Environment and Sovereignty in southern Africa, 1750-1900.”
Mariana P. Candido, Associate Professor of History, published Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola: A History of Dispossession, Slavery, and Inequality with Cambridge UP in September of 2022. Below, Dr. Candido gives us a glimpse into the making of this, her third single-authored monograph, as part of the History Department’s New Faculty Publications series.
Books are produced over years if not decades. Give us a sense for the lifespan of this book, from initial idea to final edits.
My latest book, Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola, started to take shape in 2017-2018. Thanks to an American Council of Learned Society (ACLS) fellowship in 2017-2018, I was able to spend one year reading, thinking, and writing. Until the fellowship, I was convinced I was writing a book about women in Angola based on documents I had transcribed years earlier. It was during the process of writing and reading other books and articles that I realized my book was not about women, but it was about processes of wealth accumulation in Angola from the 17th to the 19th century. In many ways, writing helped me to refine and reorganize my ideas. It made it clear that I could only understand women’s economic role in Angola if I figured out how men and women conceived of wealth and poverty. I was lucky I was able to return to archives in Angola and Portugal after I started writing my book manuscript. After months of writing, it was important to return to the archives during the 2018 summer. Doing so helped me to fill out gaps and add new information about local notions of land tenure. In many ways, Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola became a very different book from the one I had imagined I would write before the fellowship.
But there is a long history between drafting a manuscript and getting a book published. English is my third language, so, generous friends and professional copy editors helped me to polish my text. External readers and colleagues offered crucial feedback, helping me to rethink and clarify key points in my argument. Librarians and archivists help me secure copyright for illustrations and access to crucial resources. In so many ways, the publication of a book involves many people beyond the author.
Writing a book takes a long time and, when the writing is done, there is the production phase, which can also consume lots of time and energy. In the case of Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola, the production ran parallel to teaching, other commitments I had already assumed, and life events. I joined Emory in 2020, so when I arrived here, I was revising and reorganizing chapters while moving into a new place, adjusting to a new academic environment, preparing new courses, and settling into a new city during a global pandemic. In many ways, the final steps of my book took place while we were trying to understand how to survive COVID-19. Finally, my book entered production in 2021, when we were still dealing with travel restrictions, a virus spreading around the world, and supply chain challenges.
What was the research process like?
The research process involved visiting different archives and libraries in Angola, Portugal, and Brazil. I combined written documents scattered in different countries and locations to avoid relying only on colonial or administrative reports. I had access to a rich collection of judicial cases held at a storage room at the Tribunal da Comarca de Benguela, or the Benguela Court House, which contains many legal proceedings dating back to 1850. I complemented these records with earlier legal summaries available at the Angola National Archive, in Luanda, and in Portuguese archives. In these documents we can get lots of information about local people, who were often not able to produce written documents, but who appear as witnesses, litigants, or petitioners, nonetheless. These are wonderful documents for social historians.
I also tapped into a seventeenth and eighteenth century collection of documents related to Angola available at the Instituto Histórico e Geográfico Brasileiro in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. I also consulted records created by West Central African rulers, which are scattered in archives in Angola and Portugal. And to get more information on non-elite actors, such as poor women and enslaved individuals, I created a database of baptism, marriage, and burial records available at the Bispado de Luanda and the Nossa Senhora do Populo Church, in Benguela. This allowed me to include more historical actors in my narrative. In many ways, my research was Atlantic in nature and involved a wide array of types of historical records. It was long, involving several trips to Angola and Portugal, where I spent months in dusty archives reading documents from the seventeenth, eighteenth and nineteenth centuries.
Are you partial to a particular chapter or section?
This is such a difficult question! I have enjoyed researching and writing each one of the chapters. While in Chapter 1 I examine local West Central African conceptions of land access, use, and occupation, I focus on the transformations of property rights during the nineteenth century. It was such exciting research to piece together different mechanisms that West Central Africans used to claim and exercise rights over land for over two hundred years. In Chapter 3, I focus on individuals embracing written records to protect their interests. I looked at land registries, deeds, and legal cases to understand how men and women made use of multiple strategies to protect and pursue rights. In Chapter 4 and 5, I move away from clashes over land to focus on disputes over people. So, I analyzed wills, passports, licenses, fugitive adds, and public complaints to interrogate similarities and differences between ownership claims over people and land. While in Chapter 4, I focus exclusively on enslaved individuals, my attention is directed to freed individuals in Chapter 5 – and the limitations of their emancipation.
Chapter 6 was the first chapter I wrote, and it is quite strange that it ended up being one of the last ones in the book. In this chapter, I selected several cases of African women who went to the colonial court claiming ownership rights over land. Their success in securing land, however, represented dispossession of local rulers and their subjects. While some African women were able to secure private ownership of land, several populations were forced to relocate from the territories they had occupied for generations. Skillful women generated written records that supported their claim, while local chiefs relied on evidence not recognized by the colonial court as legitimate. The last chapter examines how elites and commoners expressed wealth in the accumulation of goods. It is about West Central Africans as consumers of products produced elsewhere, such as Dutch biscuits, Chinese porcelain, sugar cane alcohol produced in Brazil, and textiles made in India or England. I examined how women and men’s consumption patterns differed and changed over time. It is a book about violence, slavery, dispossession, and the imposition of new ideals that continue to affect people who live in Angola. It is an effort to understand the roots of inequality in Angola in the twentieth-first century.
How does this project align with your broad research agenda?
I have been researching and studying the history of Angola for over 20 years. In my first book, Fronteras de Esclavización: Esclavitud, Comercio e Identidad en Benguela, 1780-1850 (2011), initially published in Spanish and later translated into Portuguese, I wrote about the demographic impact of the slave trade in Angola. I have examined processes of enslavement to understand how, when, and why people were seized and enslaved. This is important because I work on the region of Africa that has lost the largest number of enslaved individuals to the transatlantic slave trade. Of the top 5 slaving ports on the coast of Africa, three of them were in West Central Africa. This means that to understand the African diaspora, we need to comprehend the background of the people who were enslaved and deported from West Central Africa. In my second book, An African Slaving Port and the Atlantic World: Benguela and its Hinterland (2013), I focused on the region of Benguela from the early 17th to the mid-19th century, trying to reconstruct the history of this region. I focused on the history of local states and their interactions with Portuguese traders. It was an attempt to bring attention to a town, Benguela, that had not received much attention from scholars until then. So, I decided to write a book about the town, its inhabitants and its connections to the Atlantic world and the interior of the African continent. So, this third book, Wealth, Land and Property in Angola: A History of Dispossession, Slavery and Inequality, is a continuation of my commitment to study the history of Angola and its global importance. This is a place that has never been isolated from the rest of the world – and I try to show this in my work.
In the process of researching and writing Wealth, Land, and Property in Angola, I came across new primary sources and questions. Now, that this book is published, I am interested in going back to my initial goal of writing a book about women in West Central Africa, 1500s-1800s. In many ways, this new book will help other scholars understand the contributions of West Central African women. I am also interested in combining Atlantic and Mediterranean histories, by focusing on the case of a single individual in a subsequent book project. This project will take me out of Angola history, since it focuses on a slave trader who became a captive in the Regency of Algiers in the late eighteenth century. It is a book that combines Atlantic and Mediterranean histories. But I need to do more archival research for both projects.
Besides these monographs, I am also in the last stages of a catalog of over 2,000 legal cases available at the Tribunal da Comarca de Benguela, in Angola. In collaboration with Dr. Mariana Dias Paes of the Max Planck Institute for Legal History, Frankfurt, and Juelma Matos at the Universidade Katyavala Bwila, Benguela, we have identified the historical legal documents available at the Court House storage room. We also wrote an introductory essay on the history of the courthouse and law in Angola, which will be the first publication about the subject in Angolan history. The global pandemic has delayed the conclusion of this project due to the challenges to finalize the revisions of some catalog entries. This catalog will soon be published by the Max Planck Institute and the Universidade Katyavala Bwila.
So, my interest in history of Angola is not over and, I am sure, will lead to new books, articles and edited collections.
Virginia opossums on an American persimmon tree. Lithograph by Wm. E. Hitchcock. Published in John James Audubon’s The Quadrupeds of North America (New York: V.G. Audubon, 1849), No. 14, Plate LXVI. Image is in the public domain.
Doctoral student Stephanie N. Bryan recently published an article in Southern Spaces. Titled “‘The Emblem of North American Fraternity’: Opossums and Jim Crow Politics,” the piece examines the cultural meanings behind opossum hunting and consumption during Jim Crow apartheid among freed people of African descent and whites throughout the South. An editorial associate for Southern Spaces, Bryan is producing a dissertation on the ways in which marginalized plant and animal species indigenous to the southeastern US—such as opossums, persimmons, muscadines, and pokeweed—survived and sometimes thrived amid destructive land use and entered into diets, cultures, economies, and politics. Drs. Allen Tullos and Patrick Allitt serve as Bryan’s dissertation advisers. An earlier version of Bryan’s Southern Spaces article was a highly-recommended piece by the committee that grants the Sophie Coe Prize, which is the longest-running and most generous prize for writing in food history in the English language, given once a year for an essay or article of up to 10,000 words on any aspect of the history of food.
The 2022 Loren & Gail Starr Fellows in Experiential Learning recently presented the projects for which they received funding over the summer. These fellowships were created in 2022 through a generous donation from Loren and Gail Starr. They provide summer funding from $500 to $3000 for experiential learning projects proposed by History majors, joint majors, or minors. The Starr Award aims to support students who wish to use the knowledge and skills they have acquired in history courses to create or participate in projects outside of the classroom. Bold, creative, and off-the-beaten path proposals are encouraged. The 2022 Fellows outdid themselves with creative historical projects. Learn more about the inspiring work they recently shared with History Dept. faculty, students, and staff below:
Edina Hartstein Presenting StoryMap on Trafficking in Women and Children
Senior Film Studies Honors student and History Major Kheyal Roy-Meighoo created a spectacular animated film on Asian American History that explored the dynamics of racism in the present and past. We look forward to posting an update with a link to the film in the future.
The narrative around Columbus Day helped uphold “the new racial order that would emerge in the US in the 20th century, one in which the descendants of diverse ethnic European immigrants became ‘White’ Americans,” historian Malinda Maynor Lowery wrote in a 2019 article for The Conversation.
Eventually, Native Americans began to challenge the history behind it.
Inspired by the Civil Rights Movement, Native American activists in the late 1960s formed the Red Power Movement, built on principles of self-determination and cultural pride. At a 1977 United Nations conference in Geneva, Indigenous delegates from around the world resolved “to observe October 12, the day of so-called ‘discovery’ of America, as an International Day of Solidarity with the Indigenous Peoples of the Americas.”
Dr. Polly J. Price, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law, Professor of Global Health, and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently appeared on MSNBC’s The Mehdi Hasan Show to discuss the COVID-19 pandemic in historical context. Price is the author of Plagues in the Nation: How Epidemics Shaped America, just published in May of 2022 by Beacon Press. Watch the clip of Price in the embedded video below or on YouTube at “Why Wasn’t America More Prepared For Covid-19?“
Polly J. Price on the Mehdi Hasan Show, July 27, 2022.
Dr. Mary L. Dudziak, Asa Griggs Candler Professor of Law at the Emory University School of Law and Associated Faculty in the History Department, recently discussed her newest book in a Q&A with Tevah Gevelber of Responsible Statecraft. Dudziak argues that many Americans have long had a disconnect with wars fought in the name of their country, well before the aftermath of the Vietnam War (commonly seen as the origin of that disconnect). Dudziak also discusses how the consolidation of war powers in the executive branch, and specifically the hands of the president, has contributed to widespread detachment among American citizens from wars fought outside the U.S. Read an excerpt from their conversation below along with the full article here: “Why are Americans so unplugged from the wars in their own name?“
It’s common to point to the end of the military draft after the U.S. war in Vietnam as the point when most of the polity lost direct engagement with war. American civilians lost a more fundamental connection with war much earlier, however: when U.S. wars became foreign wars, after the Civil War and warfare with American Indian nations. Americans came to understand war in a visceral way during the Civil War. Battles happened in settled areas. U.S. civilians were war casualties. Family and friends of soldiers arrived at devastated battlefields looking for their loved ones, so they were not immune from the sensory experience of war.
Flyer for new doctoral program in African American Studies.
Emory has launched a new doctoral program in African American Studies, the first of its kind in the U.S. Southeast. The interdisciplinary program will draw on the expertise of more than 50 scholars across schools at Emory, including from the College’s Department of History. Dr. Walter C. Rucker, Professor of African American Studies and History, will serve as core faculty in the program and as the Director of Graduate Studies. The program will be built around four of the pillars of African American Studies: interdisciplinarity, intersectionality, community engagement, and transnationalism. The first cohort of four doctoral students is expected to begin in the fall of 2023. Read more information about the program on the AAS website, as well as in the following coverage in the press:
Dr. Malinda Maynor Lowery, Cahoon Family Professor of American History and a member of the Lumbee tribe of North Carolina, was one of fifteen Emory community members to travel earlier this year to Okmulgee, Oklahoma, to meet with members of the Muscogee Nation. Before the founding of Emory, Michelle Hiskey of the Emory News Center writes, the Muscogee “lived, worked, produced knowledge on, and nurtured the land where Emory’s Oxford and Atlanta campuses are now located.” The journey to Oklahoma was part of a broader Emory initiative, commissioned by President Fenves and co-led by Lowery, to memorialize Indigenous peoples who previously lived on land now owned by Emory, including through the development of “physical reminders and remembrance rituals on campus, such as a Muscogee (Creek) Language Path that highlights Muscogee language and knowledge.” Learn more about this endeavor, the Indigenous Language Path Working Group, on their website here. Also see the Emory News Center’s piece “In Oklahoma, Emory builds relationships with the Muscogee Nation,” which includes the quote from Lowery below.
“At Emory, we want to embrace a spirit of accountability,” said Malinda Maynor Lowery (Lumbee), Emory College of Arts and Science’s Cahoon Family Professor of American History and co-chair of the Indigenous Language Path Working Group. “But frankly, we’re not sure how to do that without the direction of the Muscogee Nation.”
