“The Waters Were Made for Her”: River Mumma beliefs in 19th and 20th century Jamaican ethnographic accounts

During her fieldwork in Jamaica in the 1920s, the American anthropologist Martha Warren Beckwith was told by an interviewee that he had seen a river mumma sitting by a pool near St Ann’s Bay, combing her long hair. The river mumma, a form of duppy or spirit, was said to inhabit ponds, lakes and rivers. Not only was she believed to be guardian of such bodies of water, but she was also accredited with the ability to cause and end droughts, bestow the power to heal and to wreak revenge. In this article I examine the folklore and spiritual beliefs surrounding the river mumma in 19th and 20th Century Jamaica and look at where her origins may lie. There is a particular emphasis on material from the late post-emancipation era as this was a time of an awakening interest in Jamaican folk cultures and a number of influential ethnographic accounts, such as Thomas Bainbury’s Jamaica Superstitions (1894) and Martha Warren Beckwith’s Black Roadways (1929), were published.

Baignades indésirables L’antisémitisme dans les stations balnéaires en Allemagne sous l’Empire allemand

Sea resort antisemitism was a widespread phenomenon in Imperial Germany and a harbinger of radicalized and violent antisemitism in the Nazi period. The article discusses the iconographic aspects of one of the most notorious examples of German sea resort antisemitism and uses a transnational approach to put it into perspective with stereotypes from the Emancipation era criticizing Jewish upward social mobility.

“Workers + Warriors”

For this special issue, we bring together an array of interdisciplinary international scholars who are working across the fields of Black studies, African diasporic studies, slavery studies, American studies, and memory studies. They debate, destabilize, interrogate, and reshape widely known and accepted methodologies within literary studies, art history, visual culture, history, intellectual history, politics, sociology, and material and print cultures in order to do justice to the hidden histories, untold narratives, and buried memories of African diasporic freedom struggles over the centuries. This collection is the result of a symposium that we held in Edinburgh, Scotland, in 2018 as part of a UK Arts and Humanities Research Council project titled Our Bondage and Our Freedom: Struggles for Liberty in the Lives and Works of Frederick Douglass and His Family (1818–1920). The inspiration for this project, which we launched in 2018 on the two-hundredth anniversary of Frederick Douglass’s birth, emerged from a determination to revisit his legendary life and pioneering works. A world-renowned freedom fighter, inspirational social justice campaigner, mythologized liberator, exemplary philosopher, breathtaking orator, and beautiful writer, Douglass dedicated his life to the fight for Black liberation by any and every means necessary. As he repeatedly maintained in the motto he endorsed for his radical newspaper, the North Star, “Right is of no sex—Truth is of no color—God is the Father of us all, and we are brethren.” Through engaging with the narratives, poetry, speeches, songs, oral testimonies, correspondence, essays, photography, drawings, paintings, and sculptures produced by and/or representing Douglass and his family members, it becomes newly possible to do justice to the psychological, imaginative, and emotional realities of iconic and unknown Black lives as lived during slavery and into the post-emancipation era. Two hundred years after Douglass’s birth, in the era of Black Lives Matter, there can be no doubt that the Douglass we need now is no representative self-made man but a fallible, mortal individual. The onus is on academics, archivists, artists, and activists to harness every intellectual tool available in order to tell the stories not only of Black women, children, and men living in slavery but of Black women, children, and men experiencing the illusory freedoms of the post-emancipation era. For Douglass’s rallying cry “My Bondage and My Freedom” it is possible to read “Our Bondage and Our Freedom.

American Slavery and Russian Serfdom in the Post-Emancipation Imagination

The abolition of Russian serfdom in 1861 and American slavery in 1865 transformed both nations as Russian peasants and African Americans gained new rights as subjects and citizens. During the second half of the long nineteenth century, Americans and Russians responded to these societal transformations through a fascinating array of new cultural productions. Analyzing portrayals of African Americans and Russian serfs in oil paintings, advertisements, fiction, poetry, and ephemera housed in American and Russian archives, Amanda Brickell Bellows argues that these widely circulated depictions shaped collective memory of slavery and serfdom, affected the development of national consciousness, and influenced public opinion as peasants and freedpeople strove to exercise their newfound rights. While acknowledging the core differences between chattel slavery and serfdom, as well as the distinctions between each nation’s post-emancipation era, Bellows highlights striking similarities between representations of slaves and serfs that were produced by elites in both nations as they sought to uphold a patriarchal vision of society. Russian peasants and African American freedpeople countered simplistic, paternalistic, and racist depictions by producing dignified self-representations of their traditions, communities, and accomplishments. This book provides an important reconsideration of post-emancipation assimilation, race, class, and political power.

Introduction

The introduction provides an overview of the abolition of Russian serfdom in 1861 and American slavery in 1865. It explores how Americans and Russians of diverse backgrounds responded to emancipation through cultural production. They created textual and visual representations of African Americans and Russian peasants in fiction, poetry, illustrated periodicals, oil paintings, and advertisements. A comparison of these depictions reveals striking similarities and differences that show how people remembered or sought to portray serfdom, slavery, and the post-emancipation era.

Popular Historical Fiction

During the post-emancipation era in Russia and the United States, authors created nostalgic historical fiction that romanticized Russian serfdom and American slavery. This chapter compares the short stories of white, Southern authors Thomas Nelson Page and Joel Chandler Harris with the mass-oriented historical fiction of Russian aristocrats Grigorii Danilevskii, Vsevolod Solov’ev, Evgenii Salias, and Evgenii Opochinin. In their literature, these privileged authors created narratives targeting middle-class readers that deliberately misrepresented the histories of slavery and serfdom during a period characterized by the acquisition of critical new rights by peasants and African Americans.

GENDER DIVERSITY, STRUKTUR KEPEMILIKAN,DAN KINERJA PERUSAHAAN: STUDI PADA PERUSAHAAN PERBANKAN DI INDONESIA

During emancipation era, women on board has been of major interest to corporate governance in recent years. The feminism already change the mindset of millenium people. This study analysis the affect of gender diversity, board size, bank size, ownership structure and capital structure on bank performance. By making use of cross sectional data for a sample of 28 conventional banks in Indonesia during period 2010-2017. Our empirical evidence shows that gender diversity (woman boardroom) has no effect to bank performance measured by Return on Equity. It is indicating that the executive has no effect to oversight the monitoring effect. It is reinforced by Bloomberg Businessweek’s research, woman on board in Indonesia in 2017 under 20 %. In addition, we found that there was a positive effect of bank size on bank perfomance. We also shows that findings of negative relationship between ownership structure and bank performance

Homes Away from Home

This book is the first comparative study of Jewish communities in Western, Central, and Eastern Europe. It analyzes how Jews used social and religious spaces to reformulate patterns of fraternity, celebration, and family formation and expressions of self-identification. It suggests that the social patterns that developed between 1890 and the 1930s were formative for the fundamental reshaping of Jewish community and remain essential to our understanding of contemporary Jewish life. Focusing on the social interactions of urban European Jews, this book offers a new perspective on how Jews confronted the challenges of modernity. As membership in the official community was becoming increasingly a matter of individual choice, Jews created spaces to meet new social and emotional needs. Cafés, hotels, and restaurants became places to gather and celebrate festivals and holy days, and summer camps served as sites for the informal education of young children. These places facilitated the option of secular Jewish belonging, marking a clear distinction between Judaism and Jewishness that would have been impossible on a large scale in the pre-emancipation era. By creating new centers for Jewish life, a growing number of historical actors, including women and youth, took the process of community building into their own hands. The contexts of Jewish life expanded beyond the confines of “traditional” Jewish spaces and sometimes challenged the desires of Jewish authorities. The book further argues that these social practices remained vital in reconstructing certain Jewish communities in the wake of the devastation of the Holocaust.

THE SENSE OF GENDER EQUALITY IN PAPUANS’ PHILOSOPHY

<p>The construct of gender in social life manifests onto its discrimination in every aspect of society. Women have a weak position and thus, become a “weapon” to weaken their own development in this growing emancipation era. Some legal efforts and the theory of feminist have developed to advocate them to grow up and get involved in various aspects of development; at least, it may suppress the level of discrimination toward women. Implementing the theory of feminism, however, should understand and see through some values that exist in society, as in Papuan women’s life. In the context of kinship, it may tie and harmonize the family bond. Therefore, the theory of feminism can be well implemented and accepted in a society which is full of togetherness, kinship, relatives, and love values.</p>