Casting this as a slave narrative may be under-selling it.
The whole point was that he went far enough away (sailing, Australia) to not only speak with the anger of the injustice (what happened to him), but to target the structural aspects (how enslavers are made) and how the justification was built in to the Constitution. In so doing, he anticipated the evolution of structuralism, post-structuralism, and critical theory.
It seems to have been just one historian who found and validated the story. The author sister was the subject of fawning but incomplete treatment (her story was sympathetic, not damning); the historian found the author's work and traced the author's sailor gigs to validate the connections.
There can be an element of passivation to history: "don't worry, we're understanding more and getting better". Thanks to both the author and the historian, it appears much was understood even then, and we shouldn't rest on tides that might not be rising.
Critical theory has fatal flaws and anger almost never leads to insight or the right incentives, but how else would normalized and profitable injustice be stripped of a legal veil?
>There can be an element of passivation to history: "don't worry, we're understanding more and getting better". Thanks to both the author and the historian, it appears much was understood even then, and we shouldn't rest on tides that might not be rising.
At the same time, written grievances from nearly 200 years ago that do not anticipate the abolition of slavery and every other civil rights innovation championed by none other than the United States, including favorable amendments to the Constitution, are likely not as relevant as you or the historian in question may think. It may be valuable for scholars of history to make sense of the past but not for people trying to make sense of current politics or law.
>Critical theory has fatal flaws and anger almost never leads to insight or the right incentives, but how else would normalized and profitable injustice be stripped of a legal veil?
Normalized and profitable injustice is usually unconstitutional and violates the Bill of Rights. Yet we are subjected to this narrative that the Constitution is the problem. The West is blamed for slavery when it is the West that set the norm that slavery is unacceptable. These conundrums would be funny if they weren't so sad and potentially dangerous.
Thanks, I was trying to find a way to word the caveat that you put here really well. I am glad writings like this can be found. Further glad that people study it.
But the point of slave narrative being a genre that was "homegrown" in the states is so awkwardly touched here. Calling in to question the influence of white editors and how that likely silenced some narratives completely ignores why there aren't similar narratives from many other places.
Worse, it continues with the common narrative that slavery was solely a United States thing. Specifically pushing that the published narratives were specifically edited to shape a more positive view of the nation. Ignoring any other reason edits may have happened.
It might be interesting to compare the two. In fact, I would hope that such a comparison appears in Schroeder's new edition. A university press is exactly where I'd expect to find a "critical edition" or recension of a 150-year-old narrative that exists in multiple versions. If university-press publication is appropriate for a critical edition of Shakespeare or Pulci, it seems equally appropriate for a critical edition of John S. Jacobs. You're not paying for the transcription, you're paying for the scholarship.
The only weird things about this story, to me, are:
(1) The book-jacket design screams modern pop, where I personally would have gone with a more "serious"-looking design, like you'd find on a Penguin Classic, or even on an Erik Larson novel.
(2) It's not clear what they mean "rediscovered"; I scanned the article looking for the traditional discovery narrative, like "he inherited a manuscript" or "a yellowed newspaper clipping" or whatever. Here it looks like the "rediscovery" was basically that it came up in a Google search and he said "oh that's neat, someone should republish that in real print, on paper." Which is fine and great; we should republish more out-of-print work. It's just not the traditional media narrative of a "rediscovered" or "resurfaced" lost work; it's more like a tracing of the familiar narrative beats from which the actual plot (the physical discovery of a lost work) has been surgically removed.
Heugh. You're right about the cover. It looks like it was made to stand out in a brick-and-mortar Black History Month display. It feels out of place among other Black Studies titles from U. of Chicago in "seriousness" relative to the significance of its subject. [1]
> "...it's more like a tracing of the familiar narrative beats from which the actual plot (the physical discovery of a lost work) has been surgically removed."
I think that stories like this represent what's going to be the new normal for discovery practices in the humanities.
Although I understand your disappointment, all that's changed is that physical discovery has gone digital and had that not been the case in this instant the likelihood of Jacob's narrative being resurfaced is altered.
This is an example of it working out well, as far as I can tell. It couldn't get any better than how it turned out.
Who else but a middle-aged post-graduate, in the middle of the first Trump administration, trying to get his dissertation published, looking for work, applying exercising his academic know-how to scratch his own itch, taking advantage of open source intelligence, corresponding with colleagues, transforming "from an interpretive literary scholar into an old-fashioned archive hound", could have pulled this of?
(Because we know there's no way he'd even think about financing a trip to Australia to kick the research off the old fashion way)
What better way for this to return to the fore in 2024?
You say the plot of the beat has been surgically removed, nay, I say beat goes on!
We used to bang on papyrus, and pass credentials for access to microfilm. White-gloved hands daintily turn delicate pages...tired eyes glean call numbers scrawled onto hastily sheared scrap paper.
This makes me wonder the modern day slave narratives that will not be understood as such for another 100+ yrs. There are more enslaved people now than ever.
> Well over 90 percent of enslaved Africans were sent to the Caribbean and South America. Only about 6 percent of African captives were sent directly to British North America. Yet by 1825, the US population included about one-quarter of the people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere.
> In the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana, and Brazil, the enslaved death rate was so high and the birth rate so low that they could not sustain their population without importations from Africa. Rates of natural decrease ran as high as 5 percent a year. While the death rate of the US enslaved population was about the same as that of Jamaican enslaved persons, the birth rate was more than 80 percent higher in the United States.
> In the United States enslaved persons were more generations removed from Africa than those in the Caribbean. In the nineteenth century, the majority of enslaved in the British Caribbean and Brazil were born in Africa. In contrast, by 1850, most US enslaved persons were third-, fourth-, or fifth-generation Americans.
> Slavery in the US was distinctive in the near balance of the sexes and the ability of the enslaved population to increase its numbers by natural reproduction. Unlike any other enslaved society, the US had a high and sustained natural increase in the enslaved population for a more than a century and a half.
The last point may be the most important. The US banned the importation of slaves in 1808. The enslaved were treated like livestock and that's why they still had slaves in the 1860s.
For context, that article is focused on the Americas since it is an American History institute. Those stats aren't even including the 1500 years of Arab and Ottoman trade of African slaves.
https://archive.is/LsJXJ
Casting this as a slave narrative may be under-selling it.
The whole point was that he went far enough away (sailing, Australia) to not only speak with the anger of the injustice (what happened to him), but to target the structural aspects (how enslavers are made) and how the justification was built in to the Constitution. In so doing, he anticipated the evolution of structuralism, post-structuralism, and critical theory.
It seems to have been just one historian who found and validated the story. The author sister was the subject of fawning but incomplete treatment (her story was sympathetic, not damning); the historian found the author's work and traced the author's sailor gigs to validate the connections.
There can be an element of passivation to history: "don't worry, we're understanding more and getting better". Thanks to both the author and the historian, it appears much was understood even then, and we shouldn't rest on tides that might not be rising.
Critical theory has fatal flaws and anger almost never leads to insight or the right incentives, but how else would normalized and profitable injustice be stripped of a legal veil?
I feel like critique in an academic context is a tool for communication, one way among many of understanding a system (or systems).
However, that same critique is easily moralized in a political context, and communication stops cold.
In the political context it is just blame, in academia it is structural analysis.
>There can be an element of passivation to history: "don't worry, we're understanding more and getting better". Thanks to both the author and the historian, it appears much was understood even then, and we shouldn't rest on tides that might not be rising.
At the same time, written grievances from nearly 200 years ago that do not anticipate the abolition of slavery and every other civil rights innovation championed by none other than the United States, including favorable amendments to the Constitution, are likely not as relevant as you or the historian in question may think. It may be valuable for scholars of history to make sense of the past but not for people trying to make sense of current politics or law.
>Critical theory has fatal flaws and anger almost never leads to insight or the right incentives, but how else would normalized and profitable injustice be stripped of a legal veil?
Normalized and profitable injustice is usually unconstitutional and violates the Bill of Rights. Yet we are subjected to this narrative that the Constitution is the problem. The West is blamed for slavery when it is the West that set the norm that slavery is unacceptable. These conundrums would be funny if they weren't so sad and potentially dangerous.
Thanks, I was trying to find a way to word the caveat that you put here really well. I am glad writings like this can be found. Further glad that people study it.
But the point of slave narrative being a genre that was "homegrown" in the states is so awkwardly touched here. Calling in to question the influence of white editors and how that likely silenced some narratives completely ignores why there aren't similar narratives from many other places.
Worse, it continues with the common narrative that slavery was solely a United States thing. Specifically pushing that the published narratives were specifically edited to shape a more positive view of the nation. Ignoring any other reason edits may have happened.
The united states of america was pretty late to the party of abolishing slavery.
Cool story, but I wish this were published into the public domain online.
It's kind of weird that a 150-year-old slave narrative is being sold by a University press.
At any rate, here's the original text from the Australian paper: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/rendition/nla.news-articl...
Excellent find! That text actually begins here, much more poorly OCRed:
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/rendition/nla.news-articl...
https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/rendition/nla.news-articl...
so that the GUI version is probably easier to read ( https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/60178733 , https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/60177234 ).
Also, TFA itself links to a transcription of the (according to TFA, "chopped ... excising most of its political arguments") Leisure Hour reprint:
https://docsouth.unc.edu/neh/jjacobs/jjacobs.html
It might be interesting to compare the two. In fact, I would hope that such a comparison appears in Schroeder's new edition. A university press is exactly where I'd expect to find a "critical edition" or recension of a 150-year-old narrative that exists in multiple versions. If university-press publication is appropriate for a critical edition of Shakespeare or Pulci, it seems equally appropriate for a critical edition of John S. Jacobs. You're not paying for the transcription, you're paying for the scholarship.
The only weird things about this story, to me, are:
(1) The book-jacket design screams modern pop, where I personally would have gone with a more "serious"-looking design, like you'd find on a Penguin Classic, or even on an Erik Larson novel.
(2) It's not clear what they mean "rediscovered"; I scanned the article looking for the traditional discovery narrative, like "he inherited a manuscript" or "a yellowed newspaper clipping" or whatever. Here it looks like the "rediscovery" was basically that it came up in a Google search and he said "oh that's neat, someone should republish that in real print, on paper." Which is fine and great; we should republish more out-of-print work. It's just not the traditional media narrative of a "rediscovered" or "resurfaced" lost work; it's more like a tracing of the familiar narrative beats from which the actual plot (the physical discovery of a lost work) has been surgically removed.
Heugh. You're right about the cover. It looks like it was made to stand out in a brick-and-mortar Black History Month display. It feels out of place among other Black Studies titles from U. of Chicago in "seriousness" relative to the significance of its subject. [1]
> "...it's more like a tracing of the familiar narrative beats from which the actual plot (the physical discovery of a lost work) has been surgically removed."
I think that stories like this represent what's going to be the new normal for discovery practices in the humanities.
Although I understand your disappointment, all that's changed is that physical discovery has gone digital and had that not been the case in this instant the likelihood of Jacob's narrative being resurfaced is altered.
This is an example of it working out well, as far as I can tell. It couldn't get any better than how it turned out.
Who else but a middle-aged post-graduate, in the middle of the first Trump administration, trying to get his dissertation published, looking for work, applying exercising his academic know-how to scratch his own itch, taking advantage of open source intelligence, corresponding with colleagues, transforming "from an interpretive literary scholar into an old-fashioned archive hound", could have pulled this of?
(Because we know there's no way he'd even think about financing a trip to Australia to kick the research off the old fashion way)
What better way for this to return to the fore in 2024?
You say the plot of the beat has been surgically removed, nay, I say beat goes on!
We used to bang on papyrus, and pass credentials for access to microfilm. White-gloved hands daintily turn delicate pages...tired eyes glean call numbers scrawled onto hastily sheared scrap paper.
The same beat carries on my friend...
[1]: https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/subject/su10.html
It's ironic even after 150 years, the person is still facing the same issue.
This makes me wonder the modern day slave narratives that will not be understood as such for another 100+ yrs. There are more enslaved people now than ever.
[flagged]
> Well over 90 percent of enslaved Africans were sent to the Caribbean and South America. Only about 6 percent of African captives were sent directly to British North America. Yet by 1825, the US population included about one-quarter of the people of African descent in the Western Hemisphere.
https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-reso...
For people wondering how this is possible:
> In the Caribbean, Dutch Guiana, and Brazil, the enslaved death rate was so high and the birth rate so low that they could not sustain their population without importations from Africa. Rates of natural decrease ran as high as 5 percent a year. While the death rate of the US enslaved population was about the same as that of Jamaican enslaved persons, the birth rate was more than 80 percent higher in the United States.
> In the United States enslaved persons were more generations removed from Africa than those in the Caribbean. In the nineteenth century, the majority of enslaved in the British Caribbean and Brazil were born in Africa. In contrast, by 1850, most US enslaved persons were third-, fourth-, or fifth-generation Americans.
> Slavery in the US was distinctive in the near balance of the sexes and the ability of the enslaved population to increase its numbers by natural reproduction. Unlike any other enslaved society, the US had a high and sustained natural increase in the enslaved population for a more than a century and a half.
The US prohibited importing slaves in 1807-08 so a forced breeding program evolved to continue slavery in the South.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_breeding_in_the_United_S...
The last point may be the most important. The US banned the importation of slaves in 1808. The enslaved were treated like livestock and that's why they still had slaves in the 1860s.
Yep.
The US and Brazil knew how to breed enslaved people.
Therefore today, Brazil has the largest slave descended population, and the US has the second largest.
For context, that article is focused on the Americas since it is an American History institute. Those stats aren't even including the 1500 years of Arab and Ottoman trade of African slaves.
https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-reso...
If you want to share statistics, it's not hard at all to find them.
Though I wonder what point, if any, you're trying to make?
Either way, it was taking humans and using them as forced labor, treating them as if they didn't deserve human rights.
I made the point because it seems to be a relatively unknown fact.