Bound Together?

Abstract

This introduction reviews the historiographical trajectory of the “slave community” and “resistance” paradigms and argues that the assumption of group solidarity underpinning them continues to inform much of the current-day scholarship on slaves and free people of African descent in the hemispheric Americas. After briefly reviewing the four contributions to this journal issue, this article proposes as an alternative the “unsentimental approach” to slavery studies and points to a number of recent publications that collectively stand as a harbinger of this historiographical seachange, one that does not shy away from evidence of economically exploitative slaveholding among free people of African origin, intra-slave violence, or alliances that linked enslaved and free people of African descent to other groups.