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I build a framework for exploring conflicting narratives in ethnographic interviews, public policy discussions, and news media, grounded in a critical engagement of allegory. I construct a genealogy of legitimacy, gender, race, enslavement, and tribal identity, focusing on disjunctures between mainstream online family-tree programs and the family-making histories of African American, Navajo, and white queer mothers. I suggest that “traditional” family tree structures can be read as allegories for how society defines legitimate families. I argue that grafted trees function as more useful metaphors for family relationships. I consider ethnographic allegory through the family-making stories of one African American lesbian. I then turn to a discussion of the “family values” politics of the 1990s to consider sociopolitical allegory as a lens through which to explore connections between public news media, public policy discussions, and law. Genealogical allegory completes this theoretical framework of nesting analytical lenses.

This introduction begins with the destruction of Emmett Till’s face and reclamation of his flesh, laid bare without the appearance of age, to illustrate a major premise of this book: Black age is the prism through which the abuses of liberal humanist dispossession, as well as black cultural, political, and historical reclamation, are visible. As an analytical tool, age swings between broad historical scales on which modern black racial formation occurred through colonialism and enslavement and a smaller, national scale spanning from the mid-twentieth century to the present.

Jazz dance, a uniquely American dance form, is rooted in and informed by African movement idioms and aesthetics that travelled to the United States with the trafficking of African peoples, commonly referred to as The Middle Passage or the trans-Atlantic slave trade. During the enslavement era, African dances were transformed to African-American dances with the addition of various movements derived from whites. Post-enslavement and throughout the 20th century, African-American dance evolved in several different directions, one of which was jazz dance. While the term “jazz dance” was not coined until the 1920s, the primary “ancestry” of jazz dance can be found by studying African dance forms and how they changed in the context of plantation life. By decentralizing the primacy of non-African cultural contributions, jazz dance can be more appropriately understood as an amalgamation of cultural influences that informed and created this uniquely American dance form, which remains persistently African at its core.

In Chapter 3, a variety of well-recognized historical processes are discussed as being manifestations of alienation in the modern world. Phenomena such as modes of production, Diasporic exile, maroonage, agency, and uneven development of modern world landscapes and geographies are all linked together through the concept of alienation. It is argued that various processes of alienation are directly related to the emergence of the social world that maroons and others created in the Great Dismal Swamp between 1607 and 1860. New concepts developed by the author, such as the “Capitalistic Enslavement Mode of Production” and “autexousia,” as an alternative to typically murky “agency” conceptualizations, are discussed in some detail. Finally, details on important regional historical developments are provided throughout.

This chapter recuperates the black female subject, Tituba, from obscurity, reinstating her and her story into the national discourse. Tituba's story is one of migration and repatriation. She accomplishes circuitous journeys, exemplary of enslavement in reverse, travelling from Barbados back into slavery to Salem, Massachusetts, and then back home again to Barbados. Tituba's migrations chronicle the (gendered) violence that is often deemed too horrific to tell, within which the diasporic subject is fixed. However, revealing these horrors facilitates the scripting of an alternative discourse that resists the masculinist narrative, and redeems and reinstates the subject. Alternatively, Tituba's mobility lends itself to transnational alliances as her travels challenge the concept of place, identity and belonging. Tituba advocates for transnational feminism which operates within an antiracist and anti-imperialist ideological framework.

Chapter one sets the context by detailing the various laws and restrictions imposed upon Southern free people of color over the course of the antebellum era, and particularly the 1850s, when moves to expel or enslave free blacks reached a crescendo. “Voluntary” enslavement legislation and debates therefore represented the culmination of a pro-slavery rhetoric which assumed slavery was a positive good. Such legislation also facilitated the shift towards an “idealized” biracial South of black slaves and free white people. The chapter contextualizes the ever-more restrictive legislation towards free people of color enacted prior to the 1850s. It then considers those laws debated and passed during this decade and the early 1860s, and suggest broader implications of their severity. Comparing and contrasting legislative action across the South, despite somewhat imbalanced surviving evidence and different degrees of legislation against free blacks, reveals the motivations behind expulsion and enslavement laws. Moreover, while the coming of war meant some laws were never enacted or enforced, debates over expulsion and enslavement offer a stark reminder of the direction in which the American South was travelling - towards the enslavement of all free people of color.

Chapter four considers expulsion and enslavement from the perspective of free people of color themselves. Drawing upon “feelings”, emotions and the importance of familial and community ties, it illustrates how free blacks who submitted enslavement petitions were often enmeshed in spousal or other affective relationships which crossed the boundary between slavery and freedom. These people placed their families before their legal status when requesting bondage. A sense of place in which one belonged underscored the petitioners' desire for enslavement, and while their rhetoric often focused on economic benefits of slavery to whites, free people of color themselves were prioritizing their own personal relationships. Love and affection for family members with whom the petitioners wished to live was cited as the primary motivational factor in many enslavement cases, and the often poignant testimony of the petitioners reveals the extent of romantic attachment to spouses, as well as love for wider kin networks within affective communities.

The conclusion suggests a re-conceptualization of the meanings of slavery, freedom, and the significance of affective relationships under a system of racial oppression. While it is surprising that neither pro-slavery advocates nor proponents of the later “Lost Cause” drew greater attention to free blacks' enslavement requests as a propaganda tool, the explanation relates to contemporary discourses about slavery and freedom. Unhindered by bondage, free people of color were at “liberty” to attempt legally to change their status. But this “choice” provoked among slaveholders feelings of unease about black initiative even when the requests were for slavery itself. Enslavement petitioners were workers attempting to secure subsistence, who were engaged in a process of individual bargaining which was itself limited by coercion and discrimination. Their motivations were multi-faceted but beyond the performance of perceived white benevolence expressed in the immediate language of petitions, they also expose the complex ties that existed among and between free people of color, the enslaved, and white society. Family relationships assumed priority over legal status for free black petitioners.

This chapter addresses aspects of everyday life, particularly family life and labor, among enslaved Africans in the Gulf. It examines how enslaved Africans negotiated the bonds of slavery and interdependence and found ways of resistance. Space for controlling aspects of their own lives was limited, but during the boom in the date and pearl industries around the turn of the century and particularly once the British began to grant manumission certificates, the possibility of flight brought greater leverage to slaves to negotiate their terms of service. This chapter further examines family life among enslaved Africans, particularly how bonds of enslavement affected marriage, concubinage, and childbirth.

An account of the involvement of Highland Scots in the trading of Africans into and within the colonies of the Caribbean and the Americas. The chapter describes the slave trade in its full and proper sense – beginning with kidnap, continuing in the conversion of human beings into commodities, and extending to all parts of the plantation economies within, and beyond, British control. Wherever people were enslaved, they were traded. From the millions of personal histories, mostly lost, this chapter ends with what can be recovered of the life of one man – a slave called Inverness.