Slavery & Conspiracy

It’s been quiet on the reading front as of late. I’ve been traveling to some archives, and working on a chapter. But with SHEAR fast approaching, I’m doing some reading to prepare. One of the books I absolutely loved was Greg L. Childs, Seditious Spaces: Race, Freedom, and the 1798 Tailor’s Conspiracy in Bahia, Brazil. This is an episode that has long fascinated me, thanks in part to the author’s wonderful article from about 10 years ago. And the book only deepens my fascination. It is at once a history of the revolt, but more than that it is a reflection on what is political, who can be political, and how we as scholars can find that. He productively moves past what he terms “the problem of veracity” in the study of slave rebellions. Rather than trying to figure out what was merely talk and what amounted to action, Childs shows us that talk was action. He maps the organizing on the ground, and then traces the operation of that organizing activity upwards. “It is exactly at the point hwere intimacy becomes replaced with abstraction” he writes “that we might interrogate the efficacy of what I have previously termed diverse unevenness.” (16). Another point that I took from this was his chapter on the Age of Revolutions in the Portugese empire, encouraging us to think about an era of reform alongside an era of rebellion (which he takes up in Chapter 2).

This short write up doesn’t do the book justice. I will be thinking about speech and the political in slave societies differently thanks to this book. And it is one I know I’ll return to again and again.