义务、尊重、爱和感激:萨尔瓦多19世纪奴隶制社会中的性别化情感

Obligations,Deference,Love,and Gratitude:Gendered Emotions in Salvador’s Nineteenth-Century Slave Society

本文在借鉴情感史学者的研究成果基础上,通过分析三份遗嘱,探讨了在19世纪巴伊亚州萨尔瓦多市中获得自由的非洲妇女与她们过去的女主人之间的复杂关系。在大西洋世界的奴隶社会中,对社区建设的不断追求主导了非洲人的生活。在这个过程中,获得自由的非洲妇女与她们的前女主人似乎建立了深厚的联系。自由在二者的复杂关系中起着决定性的作用,因为它从来不是一种恩赐或权利,而是一份礼物和一种特权,并且必须包含感激与尊重。获得自由的女奴(libertas)的遗嘱展示了她们基于互惠的道德义务和社会尊重规范的复杂情感动态,以及面对死亡和来世时维护个人荣誉的深刻需求。这些遗嘱还揭示了获得自由的女奴和前女主人之间可能产生的各种人际关系,包括义务、感激,以及真正的依恋或爱。在奴隶社会中,对女性之间关系的理解受性别认知影响,而这些认知进一步调和了对奴隶身份的社会和文化期待。在这种情境下,奴隶制度和父权制度作为密切相关的支配形式相互加强并促进。

Building on the insights of scholars of the history of emotions,this article analyzes three testaments to explore the complex relationships between freed African women and their former mistresses in nineteenth-century Salvador da Bahia.Profound connections seem to have occurred between freed African women and their mistresses,within the constant search for community building that dominated African lives in slave societies throughout the Atlantic world.Freedom was a central determinant of the complex relationships between freed African women and their former mistresses,through never being a given or a right,but rather a gift and a privilege,with its accompanying requisites of gratitude and deference.Libertas’testaments demonstrate complex emotional dynamics based on the moral obligations of reciprocity and the norms of social deference,as well as a profound need to assert one’s honor while facing death and the afterlife.They also reveal a wide range of human relationships,from obligations and gratitude to actual affection or love.The social and cultural expectations of slavery are further mediated by gendered understandings of what the ties between women should be in a slave society,where slavery and patriarchy fed off and enhanced one another as closely connected forms of domination.