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Scripts of confidence and supplication: fear as the personal and political among the elite male slaveholders of South Carolina and Cuba 1820 – 1850
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Valerio, Liana Beatrice (2019) Scripts of confidence and supplication: fear as the personal and political among the elite male slaveholders of South Carolina and Cuba 1820 – 1850. PhD thesis, University of Warwick.
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Official URL: http://webcat.warwick.ac.uk/record=b3714922
Abstract
The emotions of elite white male slaveholders evade scholarship that examines those men within the limiting confines of hegemonic masculinity. Their fear of slave rebellion is the emotion most commonly remarked upon by scholars, but the historical tendency to depict that fear among the slaveholders of the U.S. South as having been both constant and ubiquitous belies the rarity of written examples of masculine fear in the archive, specifically in the case of South Carolina. Contrastingly, in Cuba, slaveholders on the island frequently voiced their fear of insurrection. This thesis interrogates that disparity, questioning the social and political factors which contributed to creating speech conventions that silenced fear in South Carolina, but amplified it in Cuba, adding substance to the historical account of white fear as it operated within the context of racial enslavement.
Public and private sources such as journals, correspondence, and printed pamphlets were consulted in eight archives in the U.S., Spain, and Cuba, seeking contrast between the rhetorical tone mobilised when discussing slave rebellion during public performance, and that used during less scripted repose. Written examples of fear and confidence were read according to methodologies developed by History of the Emotions scholars who emphasise the importance of interpreting behaviour and speech alongside the normative social controls governing the culture in which they were enacted. The thesis contributes the theory that stylistic ‘Scripts’ concerning fear and slave rebellion were deployed by the slaveholders of South Carolina and Cuba. Antithetical in their emotional tones, the Confidence Script of South Carolina and the Supplication Script of Cuba were both used as rhetorical methods for furthering the same agenda: the continuation of slavery. These canny manipulations of fear and confidence reveal the construction of specific, contrasting, slaveholding masculinities, opening a dialogue into the various performances of slave-ownership in the wider Atlantic.
| Item Type: | Thesis (PhD) | ||||
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| Subjects: | E History America > E151 United States (General) F History United States, Canada, Latin America > F001 United States local history F History United States, Canada, Latin America > F1201 Latin America (General) H Social Sciences > HT Communities. Classes. Races |
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| Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH): | Slaveholders -- United States -- 19th century, Slaveholders -- Cuba -- 19th century, Slaveholders -- History -- Sources, Slave insurrections, Fear, Race relations | ||||
| Official Date: | October 2019 | ||||
| Dates: |
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| Institution: | University of Warwick | ||||
| Theses Department: | Department of History | ||||
| Thesis Type: | PhD | ||||
| Publication Status: | Unpublished | ||||
| Supervisor(s)/Advisor: | Lockley, Timothy James, 1971- ; Cowling, Camillia | ||||
| Sponsors: | University of Warwick. Yesu Persaud Centre for Caribbean Studies ; Association of British American Nineteenth Century Historians | ||||
| Format of File: | |||||
| Extent: | ix, 255 leaves | ||||
| Language: | eng |
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