“Recaptive Shipmate Journeys through the Carceral Spaces of the U.S. Slave Trade Suppression,” Sharla Fett, Occidental College

Professor Fett’s most recent work focuses on the capture of slave ships off the American coast on the eve of the Civil War  (in the early 1860s). She offers a new view of a heretofore unexamined “middle passage”—the return of these recaptured people to Africa—that included the detention and containment of “liberated”/recaptive Africans in spaces ranging from US jails and forts to ship holds to special “receptacles” used in Liberia.  She will unravel the question about how slavery-based practices of detention continued into suppression procedures for “managing” large numbers of recaptive Africans and how recaptives sought to resist and reclaim those spatial constraints.

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