ISBN:
9781009127974
Language:
English
Pages:
1 Online-Ressource (xv, 384 pages)
Series Statement:
Cambridge studies on the American South
DDC:
306.36208460973
Keywords:
Enslaved older people Social conditions
;
Slaveholders Social conditions
;
Older people Social conditions
;
Slavery History
;
United States Race relations
;
History
Abstract:
Old Age and American Slavery explores how antebellum southerners, Black and white, adapted to, resisted, or failed to overcome changes associated with old age, both real and imagined. Slavery was a system of economic exploitation and a contested site of personal domination, both of which were affected by concerns with age. In examining how individuals, families, and communities felt about the aging process and dealt with elders, David Stefan Doddington emphasizes the complex social relations that developed in a slave society. In connecting old age to the arguments of Black activists, abolitionists, enslavers, and their propagandists, the book reveals how representations of old age, and experiences of aging, spoke to wider struggles relating to mastery, paternalism, resistance, and survival in slavery. The book asks us to rethink long-standing narratives relating to networks of solidarity in the American South and it illuminates the violent and exploitative nature of American slavery.
URL:
https://doi.org/10.1017/9781009127974
Permalink
