Don’t Forget Who Actually Gave Birth to the Nation: Analyzing the Slave Community, Women, and Gendered Resistance through The Birth of a Nation

Compiled by Olivia Atkinson
B.A., Political Science, African American Studies, University of Alabama, 2016
M.A., Women’s Studies, University of Alabama, May 2018

Abstract

The film The Birth of a Nation focuses on Nat Turner and the insurrection he led in Southampton County, Virginia. This rebellion is an important historic event, and it has been duly remembered and historicized. It is undeniable that the rebellion is an important act of slave resistance, but focusing only on the central figure, Turner, ignores the contributions of countless others that helped in this effort. This section of the syllabus focuses on the slave community and works to give a voice to those who are often silenced when this history is told. It also looks at different forms of resistance that do not necessarily fall under “traditional” categories of resistance, such as love, family, and community building. Further, it pays particular attention to women, who were largely silenced and ignored throughout the film. Women were often central figures in resistance efforts, but because their resistance oftentimes looked different than physically fighting it is disregarded. So, the goal of this project is to give a voice to those characters within this story whose voices have been written over or taken away. Understanding the slave community is key to gaining a fuller knowledge of this event.  

Primary and Secondary Sources

GENERAL OVERVIEW
  • John W. Blassingame, The Slave Community: Plantation Life in the Antebellum South (New York: Oxford University Press, 1972). 

PLACE MATTERS: GEOGRAPHY OF PLANTATIONS/FIELD & HOUSE SLAVE RELATIONSHIPS
 *Geography of Plantations
  • Clifton Ellis and Rebecca Ginsburg, ed. Cabin, Quarter, Plantation: Architecture and Landscapes of North American Slavery (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2010).
  • John Michael Vlach, Back of the Big House: The Architecture of Plantation Slavery (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1993).
 
*Slave Quarters, Family Construction, & Community Building  
  • Larry Hudson, “To Love and to Cherish: The Slave Family,” To Have and To Hold: Slave Work and Family Life in Antebellum South Carolina, (Athens: University of Georgia Press, 1997)
  • Marie Jenkins Schwartz, “Family Life in the Slave Quarters: Survival Strategies,” OAH Magazine of History 15, no. 4 (2001): 36-41. 
  • James H. Sweet, “Defying Social Death: The Multiple Configurations of African Slave Family in the Atlantic World,” The William and Mary Quarterly 70, no. 2 (2013): 251-272.
 
WOMEN AS AGENTS, ACTORS & DIFFERENT METHODS OF RESISTANCE
 *General Understanding of Enslaved Women's Experiences
  • Stephanie Camp, Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004).
  • Angela Davis, “Reflections on the Black Woman’s Role in the Community of Slaves,” The Massachusetts Review 13, no. 1/2 (1972): 81-100.
  • David Berry Gaspar & Darlene Clark Hine, eds. More Than Chattel: Black Women and Slavery in the Americas (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1996).
  • Darlene Clark Hine, “’Ar’n’t I a Woman?: Female Slaves in the Plantation South’ Twenty Years After,” The Journal of African American History 92, No. 1 (2007): 13-21.
  • Brenda E. Stevenson, “The Question of the Slave Female Community and Culture in the American South: Methodological and Ideological Approaches,” The Journal of African American History 92, no. 1 (2007): 74-95.
  • Deborah Gray White, Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South, (New York: W. W. Norton, 1999).
 
*Gendered Resistance
  • Stephanie Camp, “The Pleasures of Resistance: Enslaved Women and Body Politics in the Plantation South, 1830-1861,” The Journal of Southern History 68, no. 3 (2002): 533-572.
  • Mary E. Frederickson & Delores M. Walters, eds. Gendered Resistance: Women, Slavery, and the Legacy of Margaret Garner, (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2013).
  • Renee K. Harrison, Enslaved Women and the Art of Resistance in Antebellum America, (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2009).
  • Stephanie Li, “Motherhood as Resistance in Harriet Jacob’s Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,” Legacy 23, no. 1 (2006): 14-29.
  • Sergio Lussana, My Brother Slaves: Friendship, Masculinity, and Resistance in the Antebellum South (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 2016).
  • Jennifer L. Morgan, “Deluders and Seducers of Each Other,” Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 166-195.
  • Gary Y. Okihiro, “Strategies and Forms of Resistance: Focus on Slave Women in the United States,” In Resistance: Studies on African, Caribbean, and Afro-American History, (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1986).
 
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