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Lädt ... The Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family (2022. Auflage)von Kerri K. Greenidge (Autor)
Werk-InformationenThe Grimkes: The Legacy of Slavery in an American Family von Kerri K. Greenidge
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Melde dich bei LibraryThing an um herauszufinden, ob du dieses Buch mögen würdest. Keine aktuelle Diskussion zu diesem Buch. Anyone taught a reductive version of history that painted southerners, northerners, and abolitionists as monolithic cultures - needs to read this book. Greenidge is an expert storyteller who weaves together lives that were could be both valuable influences and problematic, lives that can't easily be told apart from the relatives, places and future generations they touched. I thought I knew a great deal about the Grimke family from past readings. Turns out there is a much more complex story. ( ) Sarah and Angelina Grimke are revered figures in American history, famous for rejecting their privileged lives on a plantation in South Carolina to become firebrand activists in the North. Their antislavery pamphlets, among the most influential of the antebellum era, are still read today. Yet retellings of their epic story have long obscured their Black relatives. The author shifts the focus from the white abolitionist sisters to the Black Grimkes and deepens our understanding of the long struggle for racial and gender equality. Sarah and Angelina’s older brother was notoriously violent and sadistic, and one of the women he owned bore him three sons. While Greenidge follows the brothers’ trials and exploits in the North, her narrative centers on the Black women of the family. The author reclaims the Black Grimkes as complex, often conflicted individuals shadowed by their origins. Most strikingly, she indicts the white Grimke sisters for their racial paternalism. They could envision the end of slavery, but they could not imagine Black equality: when their Black nephews did not adhere to the image of the kneeling and eternally grateful slave, they were cruel and relentlessly judgmental. I feel like I was one of Greenidge's target audiences for this book, and she really got me. I will be totally honest that I ordered this based on the title referencing The Grimkes, assuming it would be a new biography of the famous abolitionist sisters, Angelina and Sarah. And it is, partially. But instead of focusing solely on the sisters, and instead of focusing on their good works as abolitionists who escaped their Southern slave-holding family, Greenidge opens up her readers eyes to a more complete picture of the larger family. She focuses on not just the famous sisters and their children, but also on their brother who abused one of his enslaved women and had three boys with her. Nancy Weston and her sons, Archie, Frank, and John are a focus of the book as the Grimke sister's Black cousins. Greenidge continues on to the next generation as well, exploring the life of Archie's only daughter, nicknamed Nana, who was a famous Black author but who also was told almost nothing of her father's life as an enslaved child. Even though she was only the first generation removed from slavery, she knew almost nothing of the trials of her father or grandmother. Greenidge does not give anyone a pass in this book. Sarah and Angelina are called out for supporting abolition, but focusing more on the need to redeem the white slaveholder than out of true support of the Black people who were enslaved. And she points out how long it took for them to accept even "the colored elite" (as she terms them) as friends. "The colored elite" were the upper class of Black Americans - some had been freed for a long time or were never enslaved, some came out of slavery with some education and resources, most had lighter skin. "The colored elite" does not get a pass from Greenidge either, as she points out how little empathy most had for the enslaved people who had not had the benefit of any education, family, or resources. It's a dense book with a lot of names (also a ton of Angelinas, Sarahs, and even Nanas!) so it took really close reading. And it is obviously a disturbing topic. This is one of those books though that I think is necessary reading to show that there is another telling of some famous figures of the era that, while they did a lot of good, do not deserve blind reverence. Highly recommended when you are in the mood for something both scholarly and passionate. Zeige 3 von 3 keine Rezensionen | Rezension hinzufügen
AuszeichnungenPrestigeträchtige AuswahlenBemerkenswerte Listen
Biography & Autobiography.
History.
African American Nonfiction.
Nonfiction.
HTML: New York Times Book Review â?¢ 100 Notable Books of 2022 That the Grimke sisters had Black relatives in the first place was a consequence of slavery's most horrific reality. Sarah and Angelina's older brother, Henry, was notoriously violent and sadistic, and one of the women he owned, Nancy Weston, bore him three sons: Archibald, Francis, and John. While Greenidge follows the brothers' trials and exploits in the North, where Archibald and Francis became prominent members of the postâ??Civil War Black elite, her narrative centers on the Black women of the family, from Weston to Francis's wife, the brilliant intellectual and reformer Charlotte Forten, to Archibald's daughter, Angelina Weld Grimke, who channeled the family's past into pathbreaking modernist literature during the Harlem Renaissance. In a grand saga that spans the eighteenth century to the twentieth and stretches from Charleston to Philadelphia, Boston, and beyond, Greenidge reclaims the Black Grimkes as complex, often conflicted individuals shadowed by their origins. Most strikingly, she indicts the white Grimke sisters for their racial paternalism. They could envision the end of slavery, but they could not imagine Black equality: when their Black nephews did not adhere to the image of the kneeling and eternally grateful slave, they were cruel and relentlessly judgmentalâ??an emblem of the limits of progressive white racial politics. A landmark biography of the most important multiracial American family of the nineteenth century, The Grimkes suggests that just as the Hemingses and Jeffersons personified the racial myths of the founding generation, the Grimkes embodied the legacyâ??both traumatic and generativeâ??of those myths, which Keine Bibliotheksbeschreibungen gefunden. |
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Google Books — Lädt ... GenresMelvil Decimal System (DDC)973.5092History and Geography North America United States 1809-1845Klassifikation der Library of Congress [LCC] (USA)BewertungDurchschnitt:
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