I feel like I didn't know anything more by the end of the comment then at the start.

Can you word it again but more clearly?

It currently reads like a signal of what you have memorised, rather than an effort to increase the knowledge of the reader.

Dunno. A lot of the slavery in Africa went partly as the result of British abolitionists.

The united states of america was pretty late to the party of abolishing slavery.

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 West, and specifically America, is blamed not so much for slavery but for the following things all together:

1. Chattel Slavery

2. Racism as a form of pseudo-scientific theory that established why different "races" were of lower quality than others, and thus any member of the lower race deserved to be enslaved by members of the higher race.

3. Laws in various states of the U.S that established black people could be enslaved when traveling in that state, or that free black people traveling in the region would not be allowed to do so https://medium.com/luminasticity/the-free-slave-8336f214da45

4. After finding slavery unacceptable, the U.S with its pseudo-scientific cover of Racism in much of the country still treated black people as if they were enslaved, and often killed them for no particular reason discernible to reason.

5. One can argue as to the exact point that Black people became equal in the U.S, some might argue that it isn't the case yet, but anyone fairly arguing would have to concede that there are a number of Black people still living who were at least children when it was not the case that this state of equality existed - even if they wanted to argue that it does exist now.

on edit: changed either to still

> The West is blamed for slavery when it is the West that set the norm that slavery is unacceptable.

Not sure who is blaming the West for slavery, but whatever.

The West did set the norm that slavery is unacceptable, but only after embracing slavery on a vast scale for centuries, overlapping to a great degree with the Enlightment and with the birth of representative democracy. I think that is the underlying dissonance - the founding fathers expounded at length on equality, liberty from arbitrary rule and so on, while the South prospered on the back of slavery. A similar criticism could be made of French revolutionaries, and British liberals of the 17th/early 18th centuries.

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

I 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.

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.

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.

I made the point because it seems to be a relatively unknown fact.

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