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

Stephanie M.H. Camp

Jun 2021 · Tantor Media Inc · Narrated by Diana Blue

About this audiobook

Recent scholarship has explored the lives of enslaved people beyond the watchful eye of their masters. Building on this work and the study of space, social relations, gender, and power in the Old South, Stephanie Camp examines the everyday containment and movement of enslaved men and, especially, enslaved women. In her investigation of the movement of bodies, objects, and information, Camp extends our recognition of slave resistance into new arenas and reveals an important and hidden culture of opposition. She brings new depth to our understanding of the lives of enslaved women, whose bodies and homes were inevitably political arenas. Through Camp's insight, truancy becomes an act of pursuing personal privacy. Illegal parties ("frolics") become an expression of bodily freedom. And bondwomen who acquired printed abolitionist materials and posted them on the walls of their slave cabins (even if they could not read them) become the subtle agitators who inspire more overt acts. The culture of opposition created by enslaved women's acts of everyday resistance helped foment and sustain the more visible resistance of men in their individual acts of running away and in the collective action of slave revolts. Ultimately, Camp argues, the Civil War years saw revolutionary change that had been in the making for decades.

About the author

Stephanie M. H. Camp is associate professor of history at the University of Washington, Seattle. She is the author of Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantations South and coauthor of New Studies in the History of American Slavery.

Diana Blue received her BFA in drama from Hofstra University and her MA in theater education from Emerson College. She is a classically trained actor, choreographer, and voice performer who resides in Connecticut. Additionally, she is passionate in her work as a K-12 theater educator and director.