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A slave narrative resurfaces after nearly 170 years
- pvg 2y agohttps://archive.is/LsJXJ https://archive.is/LsJXJ
- TacticalCoder 2y ago[flagged]
- dang 2y agoThis post is not only off topic but abusive. We've asked you several times to stop posting flamewar comments and political battle comments to HN. I don't want to ban you, because you've been here a long time and have also posted good comments, but if you keep ignoring these requests, we won't have much choice. If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it. p.s. Threads are especially sensitive to initial conditions, so posting flamebait as the first comment is especially bad.
- vetinari 2y ago[flagged]
- marxisttemp 2y agoWhat political agenda is the OP pushing? Please be specific.
- vetinari 2y ago[flagged]
- pvg 2y agoYou still need to explain what's wrong with this article for anyone to understand what your objection is. Otherwise the whole thing turns into advocacy for a kind of 'snowflake's veto' on anything someone might dislike or be uninterested in.
- HeatrayEnjoyer 2y agoThe only political "agenda" I see it's sharing is a narrative that wasn't possible to share at the time due to the horror of slavery.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- dang 2y agoI don't agree. It's an interesting historical story, and historical material has always been welcome on HN. There's much to be intellectually curious about there, and no need to be provoked onto an ideological track. For those who do feel provoked, the appropriate response is (1) not to comment, and (2) to look elsewhere for things that do gratify your intellectual curiosity. There are 29 other threads on the front page, and hundreds more within one click.
- stonesthrowaway 2y ago[flagged]
- qazwse_ 2y agoWhat about the article is flamebait?
- tolerance 2y agoWhat about this particular article makes it flamebait or narrative-pushing? It's a feature for the art section and far as NYT articles go...mild.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- oooyay 2y agoHow is a story that tells the story of someone who was a slave and the brother of a famous American author "flamebait", "political", or "ideological"? Frankly, take a look at the juxtaposition of your comment to the GP. They're insinuating even printing this story is somehow the mission of American Democrats - more directly that American Democrats are responsible for printing the story of international slaves. If that were even remotely true then that's absolutely shameful. The world had slaves for a long time across multitudes of generations, societies, and cultures. We should know their history lest we be damned to repeat it.
- dang 2y agoIt does apply to articles, but classifying this one as "ideological or political battle" is quite excessive. I thought it was intellectually interesting, quite apart from current political affairs, and I'm sure a lot of other readers will as well. They should be allowed to discuss the article in an intellectually curious way [1], without getting drowned out by other people's political reflexes [2]. [1] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=curiosity%20optimiz%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor... [2] https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sort=byDate&type=comment&query=reflective%20reflex%20by:dang https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&sor...
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- explain 2y ago[flagged]
- iambateman 2y agoCool 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-article60177234.txt https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/rendition/nla.news-articl...
- quuxplusone 2y agoExcellent find! That text actually begins here, much more poorly OCRed: https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/rendition/nla.news-article60178733.txt https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/rendition/nla.news-articl... https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/rendition/nla.news-article60177234.txt 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/60178733 , https://trove.nla.gov.au/newspaper/article/60177234 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 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.
- lazyeye 2y ago[flagged]
- neogodless 2y agohttps://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-resources/historical-context-facts-about-slave-trade-and-slavery 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.
- lazyeye 2y agoI made the point because it seems to be a relatively unknown fact.
- estebank 2y ago> 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-resources/historical-context-facts-about-slave-trade-and-slavery https://www.gilderlehrman.org/history-resources/teacher-reso...
- echoangle 2y agoFor 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.
- w10-1 2y agoCasting 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?
- csours 2y agoI 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.
- wakawaka28 2y ago[flagged]
- taeric 2y agoThanks, 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.
- KittenInABox 2y agoThis 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.
- nemomarx 2y agoI expect we'll see stories out of Saudi Arabia or trafficked labor in SEA more and more as it becomes historical
- ossobuco 2y agoI believe that, in the future, prison labor in the USA will be recognized as one of the largest examples of modern slavery. On top of that, we could argue that the concept of people depending on the good will of a specific employer/master to be able to survive will also be considered as the capitalist successor to slavery.
- tourmalinetaco 2y agoPersonally I would relate the latter to feudalism, especially as monopolies grow ever imminent within the majority of fields.
- ossobuco 2y agoConsidering that capitalism has consistently led to monopolies since its inception, wouldn't it be reasonable to conclude that monopolies are inherent to the system?
- RecycledEle 2y agoRegrettably, Texas public universities have destroyed most of the original documents about slavery they had from the era of slavery. Almost every document freeing slaves was destroyed. They destroyed these irreplaceable historical documents because those documents offended their modern sensibilities. I believe history should be preserved. Even lying propaganda has value to historians.