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Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. By Stephanie M. H. Camp. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2004. Pp. 224. $39.95 cloth; $18.95 paper.)
In Closer to Freedom, Stephanie Camp provides readers with a creative interpretation of gender and day-to-day resistance among nineteenth-century Southern slaves. Her approach to this topic is imaginative. Part of her thesis considers the "geography of containment," a concept she employs to describe slaveholders' use of restraint in exercising control over their bound laborers. The second part of her thesis suggests that bondpeople etched out "mobility in the face of constraint" that operated against their owners' efforts. Borrowing from the work of Edward Said, the author concludes that "bondpeople created a 'rival geography' ... characterized by motion: the movement of bodies, objects, and information within and around plantation space" (7). Closer to Freedom explores the rival geography between the enslaved and their owners, noting that it operated in clandestine ways during the antebellum era and in visible, overt, and sometimes offensive ways during and immediately following the Civil War.
Readers will...