History through Natalie Zemon Davis’ eyes: the pleasure of discovery and the pleasure of telling about it

In deze rubriek brengt Historica een onderzoeker voor het voetlicht die vanuit haar of zijn discipline reflecteert op de (mogelijke) meerwaarde om te werken vanuit een genderperspectief. Op die manier willen Historica en de VVG actief het wetenschappelijke én publieke debat rond genderonderzoek stimuleren.

Natalie Zemon Davis (1928) is one of the first women who acquired a leading position in academia. Currently working on the history of Suriname, the scope of her research has broadened from Lyon to Western Europe to North Africa and the New World. Focusing on early modern history, she has published nine monographs and more than seventy articles over the course of forty years. She has taught at Brown, the University of Toronto, Berkeley, and Princeton. She has also received honorary degrees from institutions across the United States and Europe and has served as president of the American Historical Association. In 2010, Davis was awarded the Holberg International Memorial Prize and she received the 2012 National Humanities Medal from President Barack Obama. Her creativity, original analyses and lively writing style make her an inspirational historian, with an enduring fascination for history.

Rose Spijkerman and Greetje Bijl

Your life – your background, the elopement with your husband, the accusation of being a communist because of your political engagement, your professional life at several renowned universities such as Berkeley and Princeton, and of course your research – resembles the adventurous stories you wrote about historical figures such as Bertrande de Rols#1 and Leo Africanus (al-Hasan al-Wazzan).#2 What would be the focus or perspective(s) if you wrote a historical work on your own life?

That is a difficult question. Recently I gave a short lecture on the period in my life during the fifties and early sixties after the House Committee on Un-American Activities accused my husband Chandler Davis of communist activities. #3 A main reason he had come to their attention was that we had published a pamphlet protesting against the committee’s actions. I had done the research and writing but he had signed the printer’s bill. Our passports were withdrawn, my husband got subpoenaed (ed. summoned to court) by the HUAC, after which he was fired from the University of Michigan, fought a court case claiming that HUAC was unconstitutional, and went to prison for five months. I called my lecture Experiencing exclusion, scholarship after inquisition and used the word inquisition because I wanted to bring in historical examples. For example Galileo Galilei (1564-1642), who was banned and placed under house arrest for the rest of his life after his inquisition. He was also ordered to retract his writings on the Copernican theory and not to publish other work. He got around this situation by turning to publishers in the Protestant Netherlands, who were happy to oblige. The publisher even mocked the Inquisition in his introduction. Galileo interested me because he exemplifies resilience. I thought about this quality, his continuing publications, and I appreciated the people who dared come to see him when he was under house arrest. You make your comparisons with your own situation.

In a difficult period such as we experienced, you can feel terrible. I did at first, especially because we had lost our passports. How could I go to the French archives in the town of Lyon without my passport? But finally I found a way around this. My doctoral thesis was on Protestantism and the Printing Workers of Lyon: A Study in Religion and Social Class (1959)#4, and I began to read the actual books that these men had printed. They were in local rare book libraries, and I did not need a passport to get there! This turned me in the direction of the history of the book, and other fascinating topics related to Lyon and sixteenth-century France. I just loved doing all those projects along with my dissertation, so I wrote several of them up at the same time. I guess you could say that another theme in my life is having different interests, although many of them have a certain shared thematic unity.

Furthermore, I think solidarity, comradeship and networks are extraordinarily important in life. During this difficult period, I was working on my dissertation, but we had no connection to the university, since my husband was fired. Therefore, networks were crucial. I tried to create them by going to meetings of scholarly societies and making friends there. I made very good ones, especially women friends. That was extraordinary. My husband and I had our three children during those years, and it was delightful to meet women who experienced the same situation of combining scholarly work and children. That solidarity was important. I had a cooperative husband, but thinking back on it, I cannot imagine how I managed. I have wonderful memories of my women friends from that time, scholars such as Helen Tanner, Rosalie Colie and Nancy Roelker, who were not shocked by my husband having to testify because of the HUAC. All three were fine scholars and pioneers, both in regard to being women academics, as well as in their field of research. We talked to each other of history and authors, and about family matters, too. These relations were intellectually very rewarding as well as giving emotional support. They made up for the people who were afraid to talk to me during the Red Hunt years.

That was a difficult period in my life, it is not good to have these things happening to you. I do not want to romanticize these kinds of events, but if they happen, it is important to be as resilient as you can and to seek solidarity and networks with people who care about you. That would be the themes that I would want to focus on when I had to write a story of my own life. My lecture focused on a very difficult period on purpose. Not because I want to sentimentalize, but if difficulties arise, you try to find the best way around.

You have said that in interpreting the past, you have drawn upon insights from your own experience. In Women on the Margins you place yourself in a dialogue with the three seventeenth-century women you portray. #5 Can you tell us more about the role of the historian in historical research? To what extent is your own personality ‘involved’ in your research?

I think you should look at it this way: to begin with, the self and one’s insights can be a resource. Interest, empathy and enthusiasm allow you to identify with people and their interesting predicaments in the past. What you bring to this identification does not come from your own experience only: you learn from others and read the literature, but the self is a resource that draws you toward a subject. You draw both on your research and your own insights when you try to think about how someone in the past understands or reacts to a situation. However, when working on sources, I think one reads with double vision. Your personal involvement can never be a determining factor; what counts finally is the evidence you have and the different ways that evidence can be interpreted. You cannot create a world. A historian has to limit his or her empathy when trying to understand a historical topic or person. Creating distance does not occur automatically, you have to decide as you are working. I like to think of the process as tacking back and forth between moments of empathy and imagined identification and moments of distance and strangeness. There is always a role for that leap of closeness even in topics very distant in time or subject matter. If you were working on people in prehistoric periods, there is a moment when you want to think: what was he or she like? But of course you have to be aware that it is very hard to penetrate a subject. I do not know what your own topics are, I hope you will tell me in a little bit, but let us say you are working on a subject that is heavily statistical like grain prices. At some point you would also think about how the prices got to this situation: was it just the weather, was there hoarding going on, what was the government policy? All of these questions involve decisions of a kind, rational or irrational, and can involve feelings. So you use both modes of relating to your subject: you are close some of the time, but you are also aware of how hard it can be to penetrate a subject. And your bottom line is always evidence. I think this is something that is relevant for all kinds of historical research, not just when you are working on specific individuals.

You often focus on individuals, who can be placed in the larger context of the period, the society and its ideas, in which they lived. Why is this such a fruitful method for you?

My work indeed focuses often on individuals, like my current research on a slave family. However, I have also studied a process such as the charivari (ed. in Dutch ‘volksgericht’), a text like the letters of remission in Fiction in the Archives: Pardon Tales and Their Tellers in Sixteenth-Century France; or a transaction as in my book on The Gift in Sixteenth-Century France.#6 But it is true that at some point when writing about these themes, I want the text to become alive and to bring in the human element. When I was working on The Gift, I did not want to leave this transaction as simply a process of obligation or non-obligation, I wanted to have cases where I could see it in action. I think that historians are both diachronic (studying development through time) and synchronic (considering a subject without taking its history into account). To understand how things work synchronically I consider experience a part of it: understanding what individual people were thinking and feeling and what they were doing helps you to see how a process works.

I feel that today there is new work done, focusing on the longue durée. An example is a book from the American historian Thomas Laqueur about the way we treat and respect our dead.#7 The book covers several centuries and is cross-cultural, but it is a human story since he takes good cases along the way to make his point. Not all longue durée histories are like that. I heard a lecture about hoarding during several millennia. That’s a great topic! But in the lecture, hoarding was only analyzed as a long-term biological phenomenon. I thought, that is not the most interesting thing to do with it. The minute I think about hoarding, I start to ask about rhythms of exchange in a society and ways of using space. You both place a practice like hoarding in a larger setting, and consider the experiential, micro-aspects of long-term history as well. Let’s put these techniques together!


You describe the men and women in your work in such a way that readers can almost always empathize with them. Do you have to empathize with the historical figures you study?

Well, you should try to understand them. You may be dealing with people that are very unsavory or disagreeable. You do not have to like them, but you must try to understand them as best you can. I try to find out what my historical subjects said, how they viewed their own time and how they stood in their own period. I am studying a slave family over four generations in the eighteenth century, and three of the women have relations with and children by free white men. In all cases, the women remained slaves. I am interested in how these men who had a long term relation were viewed by their contemporaries. In nineteenth-century Suriname, just before the time of abolition, there are cases of men who freed and then married their black wives. Would that have happened in the eighteenth century? I am trying to find ways to imagine what their feelings were, since the men do not say what they feel. How am I doing this? First I am looking at the very few occasions in which prestigious white men had long term relations with black people, and see what kind of reputation the white men had. One man actually married a free black woman and he got away with it. I do not know about his social life, but he was a very sought after for his business savvy in the plantation world of Suriname. His black wife, the celebrated Elisabeth Samson (1715-1771), died a few years after their marriage, but he was quite devoted to her, I think. She was a very successful businesswoman, and had big plantations. So this marriage did not take a stand against slavery. But it does have implications for racism. I looked up the people who served as witnesses at their betrothal. I saw a little circle of families who were not as racist as their fellow white Surinamers. They were not anti-slavery, but they were willing to go along with these ‘mixed marriages’. Earlier Elisabeth Samson had taken her case to the Estates-General, since the government of Suriname had forbidden the marriage of a black person and a white person. She won her case on that grounds that she was a free woman and a Christian, and therefore the Suriname government finally accepted such a marriage. The pressure against it was more social pressure. To return to your question of how you can place people in their own time and correct your own views, one way is to find evidence from the network surrounding the people you study – those they bring to their betrothal ceremonies, or have as godparents for their children, or choose as executors of their wills. This is how you can learn something of how people are regarded in their own day.

Women were part of your story already, but when did you start writing about women in particular? Who influenced you?

The first time I especially wrote something about women was when I was at the University of Michigan, as a graduate student. In 1950-51, I took a seminar on social roles of men and women in the Italian Renaissance given by a very interesting professor, who suggested that I could do my term paper on Christine de Pizan (1364-c.1430). She was a poet, historian and moralist in late medieval France. She hired women as scribes and her books were illustrated by women. I wrote a paper on her as ‘the first professional literary woman’, and subsequently my professor wanted me to work on De Pizan for my dissertation. I thought: he is asking me to do this because I am a woman and it is a woman thing. I did not want to do that. I also wanted to do my thesis on working class people and Christine de Pizan was associated with aristocratic circles and the royal court. Furthermore, at that moment I was trying to be a historian myself, and I saw Christine as more related to my personal struggle, not so much to my intellectual goals. I did not feel that I was letting down feminism, but at that point I did not connect De Pizan with the grand historical processes that I as a radical historian wanted to study. I could not see the historical study of a literary woman related to major social transformations in history. However, when I started on the printing workers, I always kept material about their wives, their pregnancies and child-rearing. I was interested in women, but I could not see that there was significant history there.

In the sixties I was very active in the feminist movement on my campus at the University of Toronto, trying to improve the situation for women graduate students and also for the reform of the faculty. I considered myself a feminist. My marriage was based from the beginning on the notion of equality. I was always politically active, so my being part of the feminist movement came easily. But what made a difference to me as a historian was meeting my friend Jill Ker Conway. She finished her thesis at Harvard, which was not an easy place to get a PhD in Women’s History. Her thesis was on the first generation of women who got PhD’s in America, and she showed how it connected with other important transformations in U.S. history. It was then that I understood how to make this link: you could talk about the female case when working on transformations in society. Jill and I then went on to found a course in Women’s History, one of the first such courses in North America, and I began with Christine de Pizan!


What is your opinion on the current status of Women’s History?

Firstly, it is now very widely practiced and innovative and informative books are being published. With regard to the state of the field, I think that one of the most important constructive changes has been the post-colonial move. This move widened the field, it broadened the range in women’s experience, the range in gender relations. It did not swallow gender studies, it added to it. It is critically important that gender studies should be inclusive in this way, and I think it now is. I noticed this at the Berkshire Conference on the History of Women in Toronto in 2014. My marvelous colleague Franca Iacovetta was head of the conference program, and she organized several sessions on Indigenous peoples – from Canada, the United States, New Zealand, and beyond. I thought this was very important and very creative. This kind of broadening of scope allows the field to advance and continue to be transformative. We obviously do not ignore the history of women in the Netherlands, in Canada or elsewhere in Europe or America, but to see it now in a broader geographical perspective and allow different fields to speak to each other about it. The field has to transform, otherwise the same theoretical books are reread over and over again in the advanced courses at universities. With regard to the undergraduate level in Canada, half of the students are first generation Canadians from immigrant families. I am so glad that they are taking these courses in Women’s History and Gender. It means so much for politics, citizenship and the gender experience. The courses themselves are not political. They should be good undergraduate courses, but should not have a focus only on European history. At universities in Toronto these courses bring children from immigrant families to a new way of thinking about gender, which they do not necessarily get at home. Yet they can still be who they want to be.


Do you think the discipline of Women’s History still needs to be improved, or is the shift towards Gender History a good development?

To me this did not feel like a shift: if you work on women, you work on men, it is relational. You focus on the women, but you see them relationally – to each other and to men. My friend Joan Scott pointed out that I actually used the word gender already in a key note for a conference at Harvard in 1974. I was trying to get across the idea that you have to see women in multiple relations. Some people felt during the next years that by using gender you were giving up on women’s solidarity. I never felt that. In the early 2000s, I gave a talk in Paris, where I said that sometimes it is better to start a topic without an initial gender or a women’s question. Then you may find something you had never suspected about gender itself. I did not start with gender as my main question in my work on The Gift and the letters of remission in Fiction in the Archives, but I ended up with many surprising findings on gender, both in regard to gift transactions and in regard to stories told to get pardoned. One woman in the Paris audience did not agree at all. She said, “It has got to start with women. If we don’t do it, they won’t do it!” I respect her view. I do not agree with it, but it is important to take it into consideration. What I noticed about the articles in Historica is that they have both women and men in them. You are making sure that the gender element is central and it is not only narrowed down to history where women are the only actors.


You have already mentioned that you are currently working on the history of Suriname. Can you tell us more about this research?

I first learned about Suriname in the early 1990s, when I was writing about the artist and entomologist Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717) for Women on the Margins. Her most famous work was about the butterflies and other insects of Suriname and the plants on which they fed. To understand what she was doing and experiencing there, I read not only the colonial archives, but the books written about Suriname by people who had lived or visited there. One was The Narrative of a Five Years Expedition against the Revolted Negroes of Surinam (1796) by Scottish-Dutch officer John Gabriel Stedman (1744-1797). This book describes his life as a mercenary fighting against the Maroons. He also talked about his years of intimacy with the beautiful young slave woman Joanna. Another book was by a learned Jewish man, David de Isaac Cohen Nassy, who had been a plantation owner. He wrote a history and description of Suriname and talked a lot about what the Jewish settlers had done there. I was astonished by both these books. What an amazing place! I decided then that one day I would come back and do research on them. And so now I have two major projects. One, called Braided Histories, is on four generations of a slave family, starting in Africa. I already told you a little about it. Stedman and Joanna are the third generation.

The other project is on the Jewish Nassy family. There is a double question here. First is to understand how they negotiated their own emancipation as Jews. The Jews were not full citizens in Suriname and there was still much anti-Semitism. The paradox or the irony, especially in the first generation of the seventeenth century, was that these Jewish families were simultaneously enslaving Africans. They were not alone; these families lived in a world where everybody was doing it. The Africans themselves had slaves, although these were often captured in the war. I tried to think about this question in an article I just published in January – ‘Regaining Jerusalem: eschatology and slavery in Jewish colonization in Suriname’#8. It takes a look at the first generation and tries to think about that question. It is a double story of their own deliverance from a kind of enslavement: many of these people had descended from Catholic families in Spain and Portugal. When they left these countries and came to the Netherlands, they could retake the Judaism that their families had been forced to abdicate. There was excitement about the end times, returning to Jerusalem and the prophecy that Jews should be spread all over the world before the Messiah returns. There was also the economic side: these Jewish families were not an exception, everybody was making money in the slave trade and at plantations.

I tell the story through the first David Nassy (1612-1685), one of the founders of the Jewish presence in Suriname. How come he and others in his group did not identify with the black slaves? You could say that the Jewish families were just a part of society, everybody believed in slavery. They really did not identify their plea with the plea of black people. The Bible allows enslavement, and so the families moralized it. Slaves from West-Africa were already circumcised, and boys born of a Jewish man and a slave woman were circumcised. The very small number of slaves that were freed usually became full Jews. They were part of the Jewish congregation and there were mixed marriages as well. This was not the case for Christian slaves, for whom it was much more difficult to become a member of the Christian congregation. I do not mean that the Jews in Suriname were egalitarian; it happened by a kind of racist inclusion. To us that seems like a contradiction, but they did not regard it as a contradiction.


Can you tell us something about the different coping strategies of male and female slaves?

One way women hoped to get free was by giving good service to their female owners, and then hoping to be freed in the mistress’s will, if not before. Another way for a woman to seek manumission (ed. to be freed) was by agreeing to become a concubine of white men. Here, of course, I am talking about a situation in which they are given that chance (as was the case with my Joanna and her mother) and not simply repeatedly raped. In the favorable case, they hoped the men would purchase their freedom or at least that of any children they had had. If they were freed, they could go and live in Paramaribo. In fact, there were many more women freed than men, and more persons of color than black people. In the documents, you can tell whether someone is freed because the word vrij is literally in front of their name throughout the rest of their lives. For the vast majority of women who remained on the plantation, they might try for themselves or their daughters to become house slaves, and work at sewing or cooking or take care of the big house. At least the life was less demanding than work in the sugar fields.

The coping strategies of men were threefold. The first was running away to the Maroons, which women actually did too. Maroons were African refugees who escaped from slavery and formed independent settlements in the rain forests. A second is seeking status within the male world on the plantation. There are different ways of doing this: by being a real man, a good dancer for example, by being a healer, a shaman or a priest. You could also become a Bassia – that is the word from the Creole language that the slaves spoke – an overseer of the other slaves. He had to be someone who slaves could trust. That was a way of getting a certain amount of prestige and authority in the community. Some men hoped by such service they might get freed by their owner. In Africa, men won prestige by having multiple wives, but in Suriname there were not enough women to go around. Many plantations throughout most of the eighteenth century had fewer women slaves than men. If the Bassia tried to have more than one wife at a time it would lead to fights. Of course, any sex with a white woman was out of the question, and was punishable by death. Here is a major contrast between the coping strategies of men and women.

Slaves tried to manipulate the world of the plantation as best they could. I published an essay a few years ago where I described the clandestine courts slaves set up on some plantations to arbitrate disputes and punish wrongdoing among themselves – to keep their own peace and buffer themselves from the violence of planters and their white officers. Here is another example. Any time the planters set out on an armed expedition to try to track down runaway slaves or capture Maroons, black slaves were part of it, as carriers of the white-folks’ equipment and often as armed riflemen. You might wonder how the slaves felt about pursuing their fellows. Of course, they had to do this or else they would be punished themselves. But during these expeditions there was always the chance that you could run away yourself or that you could learn the trails in case you ever wanted to run away. There was also a reward given to slaves who could show that they had killed a Maroon. That is how the settlers turned the black population against each other. But some slaves did it. In the early 1770s, the government set up a group of 300 Black Rangers – slaves that had shown they were good riflemen, and were given their freedom and sent off to fight against Maroons who were still rebellious. Some slaves took that path to freedom. Maybe some of them did not try too hard to find the Maroons. Who knows? Meanwhile some tribes of Maroons had made a deal with the Suriname government that they would stop raiding the plantations – that is, a peace treaty. The government would stop attacking them, if the Maroons would stop their raids on the plantations and send back runaway slaves. In return the government would give them each year a substantial amount of food, textiles and firearms. I found out that the Maroons sometimes returned only a few runaway slaves, getting a bounty for it, but let the other runaway slaves stay with them free. The government was furious when it found out about this. But the fact that the Maroons made this agreement, even if reluctantly, shows the extension of a world that accepts slavery. The Maroons acknowledged that they could be free by returning other runaway slaves. It was a world that had not yet the notion, except for a very few people, that nobody should be enslaved. Only in 1863, the Dutch finally abolished slavery.


By working on the history of Suriname, you are studying a part of Dutch history that is neglected in our point of view. While working on this subject, did you observe how the Dutch cope with their history of slave trade and plantations in Suriname?

For the last twenty-five years, there has been wonderful work done in the Netherlands on the social and economic history of slavery and the slave trade in Suriname, especially by scholars at Leiden. I think of Gert Oostindie, Pieter Emmer, and Alex van Stipriaan among the older generation and Karwan Fatah-Black and Jessica Roitman among the younger, just to give a few examples. My main concern is that there is not enough cooperation and exchange between the historians who are working on Suriname and the other Dutch colonies in the Caribbean and the East Indian colonies on the one hand and the historians working on the history of the Netherlands on the other. The historians working on the Netherlands could do much more with the colonies – use them for comparative purposes or think more about the impact of slavery on what is going on in the home country. I hope this will be changed soon, in fact it is already starting to change. The same thing happened in Women’s History. At first the historians of women in Europe and North America were not looking at the colonies elsewhere or even non-European experience. How fruitful it was to bring in the history of the colonies to Women’s History. ‘Mainstream Dutch history’ will really be better if it pays more attention to the colonies. It would be really great if young people would start working on Suriname. The history of women in the colonies – slave and free – needs lots of attention.


In the Netherlands, there is much discussion on the subject of ‘Zwarte Piet’? What is your opinion on this subject? Is it a blind spot in Dutch society?

I went on a boat tour, ‘The Black Heritage Amsterdam Tour’, organized by Jennifer Tosch.#9 She is a wonderful woman with Surinamese-American origins, and during the tour tells about the history of the VOC, WIC and the Dutch slave trade. The people on the boat that particular day were mostly from Suriname, many of them lived in the Netherlands. At the end of the boat trip Jennifer always takes people to the house of a VOC merchant from a wealthy family, their wealth acquired through slave trade. In the last room she spoke about racism in the Netherlands today and she might even have mentioned Black Pete, I forget. The next tour of the house was standing in the doorway and a woman of this group interrupted Jennifer by saying: ‘You should not talk about that; we do not have racism in the Netherlands.’ I think Black Pete is just symbolic of a deeper problem; the woman’s saying there is no racism in the Netherlands seems to me to be the problem. Black Pete is a way to get to these questions. I guess the thing to do is to find more ways to talk about it and to inform people, for example with these boat tours. To understand more clearly what racism is, where racism operates, why this woman did not think she had said anything racist. The areas we can work on as historians, by setting up exchanges and conversations. The Women’s History courses I was talking about can be a place where a lot of this can happen at the same time. If students from families of color join these courses, you have a setting for exchange that can be constructive.


To conclude, after all those years of research, you have never seemed to lose your curiosity and joy. What is for you the most intriguing aspect of historical research?

(with glimmering eyes) The pleasure of discovery and the pleasure of telling about it. Discoveries can be so surprising. At times it is nice that you thought that something would be the case and it turns out to be true, but it is actually better when you are surprised by what you find. I enjoy thinking about the past and I like to tell about it. I feel history is a gift from the past that is left for you.


Notes:
1#    Bertrande de Rols was the wife of sixteen-century French peasant Martin Guerre, When her husband disappeared his place was taken by an impostor, pretending to be Martin Guerre. Natalie Zemon Davis studied Bertrande’s role in the events in The Return of Martin Guerre (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press 1983).
2#    Leo Africanus (c. 1494-c. 1554?), born al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan al-Fasi, was a Berber Andalusi diplomat, who was imprisoned by pirates and brought to the Pope in Rome, where he was baptized in 1520. He is most famous for writing Descrittione dell’Africa (1550), on the geography of North Africa. Natalie Zemon Davies wrote about Leo Africanus in Trickster Travels: In Search of Leo Africanus, a Sixteenth-Century Muslim between Worlds (New York: Hill & Wang 2006).
3#    The House Committee on Un-American Activities (HUAC) (1938-1975) was an investigative committee of the United States House of Representatives, first known as the House Committee on Internal Security. From 1945 onwards the HUAC focused mainly on suspected communist activities.
4#    Natalie Zemon Davis, Protestantism and the Printing Workers of Lyon: A Study in Religion and Social Class (Doctoral dissertation University of Michigan 1959).
5#    Women on the Margins. Three Seventeenth-Century Lives (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 1995). Davis portrays the Jewish-German merchant Glikl bas Judah Leib (1646-1724), the French Ursuline nun and visionary Marie de l’Incarnation (1599-1672) and the German naturalist and scientific illustrator Maria Sibylla Merian (1647-1717).
6#    Society and Culture in Early Modern France (Stanford CA: Stanford University Press 1987); The Gift in Sixteenth Century France (Oxford: Oxford University Press 2000).
7#    Thomas W. Laqueur, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains (Princeton: Princeton University Press 2015).
8#    ‘Regaining Jerusalem: Eschatology and Slavery in Jewish Colonization in Seventeenth-Century Suriname’, The Cambridge Journal of Postcolonial Literary Inquiry 3, Special Issue 01 (2016) 11-38. Editor's note: eschatology is a branch of theology concerned with the final events in the history of the world or of humankind.
9#    http://www.blackheritagetours.com/