Description
Explores the legacies of slavery in Southern cities along the Gulf and Atlantic coasts
Cities are fraught sites in the national imagination, turned into identity markers when urban and rural indicate tastes rather than places. Cities bring chaos, draining the lifeblood of the nation like a tick draws blood from its host, to paraphrase Thomas Jefferson's anti-urban polemics, which might have been written during any election yearcenturies or months ago. Racism and anti-urbanism were born conjoined during the Revolution. Like their Atlantic coastal counterparts in the US North, Southern cities similarly polyglot and cosmopolitanresist the dominant, mutually inclusive prejudices of the nation that fails to contain them on its eroding, flooding coasts.
Captive City explores the paths of slavery in coastal cities, arguing that captivity haunts the hospitality cultures of Charleston, New Orleans, Savannah, and Baltimore. It is not a history of urban slavery, but a l
