Counterlife: Slavery after Resistance and Social Death

Christopher Freeburg

Published by Duke University Press 2021

Counterlife

Slavery after Resistance and Social Death

Christopher Freeburg

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781478012962

Overview
Contents

About this book

Christopher Freeburg challenges the imperative to study black social life and slavery and its aftereffects through the lenses of freedom, agency, and domination and instead examines how enslaved Africans created meaning through spirituality, thought, and artistic creativity separate and alongside concerns about freedom.

Author / Editor information

Christopher Freeburg is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and author of Black Aesthetics and the Interior Life and Melville and the Idea of Blackness: Race and Imperialism in Nineteenth-Century America.

Reviews

“The boldness and ambition of Christopher Freeburg's Counterlife are apparent on every page. Freeburg challenges decades of work on U.S. slavery that highlights either slave resistance or white dominance, but often not more than that. As an alternative, Freeburg insists that we consider the many possibilities of both Black life during slavery and the ways that we now dare to imagine and reference that life.”

-- Robert F. Reid-Pharr, author of Archives of Flesh: African America, Spain, and Post-Humanist Critique

“Christopher Freeburg's theory of counterlife is the refreshing new grammar that breaks out of slavery studies' conscious and unconscious lapses into the binary of social death or social life. Counterlife adds crucial new dimensions to the study of the artistic representation of enslaved Africans. This bold, brilliant study teaches us how to stumble, with uncertainty and vulnerability, into the ever-expanding archive of slavery.”

-- Margo Natalie Crawford, author of Black Post-Blackness: The Black Arts Movement and Twenty-First-Century Aesthetics

“Counterlife is somewhat loosely defined. . . . The virtue of this more speculative approach is that it brings widely ranging works into dialogue with each other and takes seriously the ways in which writers might wish to write against moral and political expectations—not so much resisting slavery as resisting its dominant modes of representation.”

-- Colin Harrison Modern Language Review

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Acknowledgments Publicly Available Download PDF	ix
Introduction: Slavery’s Hereafter Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
1. Sambo’s Cloak Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	15
2. Kaleidoscope Views Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	40
3. Sounds of Blackness Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	65
4. The Last Black Hero Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	85
Coda: Chasing Ghosts Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	105
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	111
Bibliography Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	123
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	135

Language: English
Publisher: Duke University Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 152

eBook

Published: November 23, 2020
ISBN: 9781478012962