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Camp, Stephanie M. H.

Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South

UNC Press (Chapel Hill)

2004



OUR SYNOPSIS: Stephanie M. H. Camp foregrounds how enslaved women carved out space for resistance throughout their everyday lives, pushing back against enslaver attempts to control them by manipulating their space. They created a “rival geography,” a dangerous act but one that provided “space for private and public creative expression, rest and recreation, alternative communication, and importantly, resistance to planters’ domination of slaves’ every move.” (7) Gendered experiences of slavery such as enslaved women’s disproportionate nighttime labor around their quarters and the sexualization of women’s bodies, provided additional space for both oppression and resistance.  Women also engaged in periods of truancy, reclaiming time for themselves through temporary flight and sometimes having secret social gatherings. They also turned their quarters into homeplaces.

BIG QUESTIONS:

  • How does Camp’s emphasis on space and time on plantations inform understandings of histories of capitalism?

  • What do you make of Camp’s approach to the role of the body, or bodies, in resistance?

FEATURE QUOTES:

  • “What follows is an exploration of this unstable underground, of women’s participation in it, and of planters’ outraged responses to it. Closer to Freedom explores the entanglement of gender, race, space, and slavery in the American South.” (8)

  • “Investigating everyday forms of resistance does more than draw us into secret worlds; it alerts us to the hidden origins of the most dramatic historical events. Revolutionary moments may make spectacular breaks with the past, but they also are formed by them, spilling over from the old constraints and making the most of new opportunities to do visibly what formerly had been cloaked.” (10)

PRIMARY SOURCES:

BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:

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