Bøker av Chelsea Berry

Illuminates the competing understandings of poison and power in the Atlantic worldBy the time of the opening of the Atlantic world in the fifteenth century, Europeans and Atlantic Africans had developed significantly different cultural idioms for and understandings of poison. Europeans considered poison a gendered "weapon of the weak" while Africans viewed it as an abuse by the powerful. Though distinct, both idioms centered on fraught power relationships. When translated to the slave societies of the Americas, these understandings sometimes clashed in conflicting interpretations of alleged poisoning events.In Poisoned Relations, Chelsea Berry illuminates the competing understandings of poison and power in the Atlantic World. Poison was connected to central concerns of life: to the well-being in this world for oneself and one's relatives; to the morality and use of power; and to the fraught relationships that bound people together. The social and relational nature of ideas about poison meant that the power struggles that emerged in poison cases, while unfolding in the extreme context of slavery, were not solely between enslavers and the enslaved-they also involved social conflict within enslaved communities.Poisoned Relations examines more than five hundred investigations and trials in four colonial contexts-British Virginia, French Martinique, Portuguese Bahia, and the Dutch Guianas-bringing a groundbreaking application of historical linguistics to bear on the study of the African diaspora in the Americas. Illuminating competing understandings of poison and power in this way, Berry opens new avenues of evidence through which to navigate the violence of colonial archival silences.

"To date, every scholarly book on the history of medicine and slavery has a single author. Each is thus beholden to the practical limitations of single-authored texts. "Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery," by contrast, brings together scholars of diverse places and empires around the Atlantic to make a novel intervention into these histories by including diverse actors, wide-ranging periodization, and spanning across multiple empires. Contributors provide perspectives on sites in Africa, Europe, and the Americas. They examine the historical constructions of health and medicine among indigenous Americans, enslaved and free Africans and their descendants, and Europeans and Euro-Americans. The collection serves as a state-of-the-field picture of the history of slavery and medicine. Contributors include several award-winning historians, such as Lauren Robin Derby, Sharla Fett, and Leslie Schwalm; authors of important, recent monographs on slavery and medicine, such as Deirdre Cooper Owens and Rana Hogarth; and emerging scholars in the field of slavery and medicine. The variety of contributors in terms of rank, expertise, and experience allows the volume to take stock of the past, present, and future of a field of inquiry whose development has accelerated in the last decade. "Medicine and Healing in the Age of Slavery" illuminates the everyday practices of dealing with disease and illness that were fundamental to the order of slavery and the construction of race. The history of medicine and healing is a core facet of the early Atlantic World: bodies both sick and well were specific sites for contests of power, cultural exchange, and identity-making. The volume demonstrates how larger cosmologies of the Atlantic World-such as Enlightenment rationalism, Taino Zemis (stone idols), and various Afro-Atlantic spiritual traditions from Haitian Voodoo to Yoruba-constructed medicine and healing. Not only are the chapters in the collection topically diverse, they collectively cover the temporal breadth of Atlantic slavery. Essays span from the early enslavement of indigenous people in the Caribbean to the emancipation of slaves in the United States. Likewise, contributors consider the British, Portuguese, Spanish, French, and Dutch empires. By breaking down traditional temporal and geographical borders, the contributors ask to what degree the spaces of enslavement around the Atlantic shared the experienced disease, healing, and medicine, and to what degree they were historically specific and contingent. The volume complicates Western biomedicine's assumptions as a unique healing tradition, revealing how its modern instantiation depended to a significant extent on the bodies and expertise of enslaved and free people of color in colonial spaces. Ultimately, the collection uses this comprehensiveness to argue that medical and healing traditions framed the Atlantic slave system's lived experience. Its essays' foundational nature positions the volume to provoke future studies in both medical and Atlantic history"--