Marjoleine Kars: Humanities Forum
Fall 2015 Humanities Forum Lecture Series
Wednesday, December 2, 2015 · 4 - 6 PM
"Freedom Marooned: An Atlantic Slave Rebellion in the Dutch Caribbean" -- this talk examines a massive slave rebellion in the 1760s in a Dutch colony on the Caribbean coast of South America.
In 1763-1764, five thousand slaves in the Dutch colony of Berbice in South America revolted. The Berbice rebellion’s extraordinary judicial records allow an examination of the internal dynamics of rebellion. Mapping the politics among the enslaved, rather than merely their interactions with European colonists, shines a light on the many Afro-Berbicians who, eager to remain both master-less and alive, struggled to dodge all combatants, whether Dutch and their Amerindian allies, or rebels. Their inventive coping strategies, not commonly examined in slave rebellions, suggest that historians’ usual binaries of freedom and slavery, or “rebellious” and “loyal,” simplify complex dynamics. The Berbice rebellion clues us in to the existence of alternative, and competing, notions of what life beyond European slavery might look like. Focusing on the internal dynamics also exposes the importance of gender. The available evidence suggests that while men and women shared much in the rebellion, their experiences also powerfully diverged. For women, rebellion proved much less liberating than we have assumed. This talk, then, examines a major slave rebellion from the bottom up, yielding new understandings of insurgency.