Closer to Freedom

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses—often in graphic detail—slavery, white supremacy, killing, sexual assault and rape, torture, surveillance, and other forms of violence. Source materials also include racist and sexist language.

Stephanie M. H. Camp asserts the “attenuation of classic social scientific dichotomies” (3) as one of Closer to Freedom’s primary themes. This attenuation is both methodological and historical.

Methodologically, Camp argues that approaching source materials through familiar dichotomies like “personal/political, material/symbolic, organized rebellion/everyday resistance, accommodation/resistance obscure as much as they reveal” (3). These dichotomous frameworks privilege an understanding of dissent, for example, as defined by its public, organized, and dramatic facets. This has been intellectually disorienting, skewing historians’ scholarship toward an assumption that men practiced dissent and were more “resistant” to enslavement than women. Thus, men were rebellious, and women were accommodationist. Women were concerned with the familial and the private, and men were concerned with the public and the political.

At the same time, Camp does not entirely abandon these dichotomies, either, which alternatively reveal as much as they obscure. Enslaved women, for example, were bound to domestic spaces more tightly than men and were denied the mobility that enslaved men were able to secure, and thus their dissent manifested differently.