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Books by Franklin
Knight
Slave Society in Cuba during the
Nineteenth Century /
The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism
The Modern Caribbean /
Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, and Society in
the Atlantic World, 1650–1850
The
Slave Societies of the Caribbean
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Interview with Franklin Knight
By Jeremy Pope
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Jeremy Pope, JHU
PhD Candidate in Egyptology (Department of
Near Eastern Studies)
During
Professor Ben Vinson’s research sabbatical
this semester and next, the Center for
Africana Studies is under the stewardship of
Acting Director Franklin Knight, the
Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Professor in
the Department of History. Professor Knight
has been a faculty member at Johns Hopkins
since 1973, with primary interests in Latin
American and Caribbean social and economic
history |
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Jeremy: How did you first
become interested in historical research and
teaching—and in Caribbean history specifically?
Dr. Franklin
Knight: I gravitated to historical research and to
Caribbean history while a student at the University of
the West Indies, Mona in Kingston, Jamaica largely under
the influence of two extraordinarily gifted historians,
the late Professor Elsa Goveia and Professor Sir Roy
Augier. Together they taught me that the Caribbean was a
very important location from which to examine the wider
history of the world. Having graduated with honors with
a degree in history I guess the die was cast. I then
went on to graduate school and specialized in Latin
American history with an emphasis on the Caribbean.
Jeremy: Whom would you
identify as the principal influences upon you as a
scholar?
Dr. Franklin
Knight: I have a long list to whom I am profoundly
grateful and they start with a series of excellent and
demanding teachers at Calabar High School, a high school
largely for boarding students, then on the outskirts of
the city of Kingston. It was a school that genuinely
endeavored to encourage all-round excellence and
discipline. There under the influence of Walter Murray
White, a mathematician; John Hearne, a novelist; Oswald
Fisher, a geographer; and Walter Foster a historian, I
slowly learned to think independently, to read
enthusiastically, and to write clearly.
I also got a solid
foundation in Latin and Spanish that would serve me well
later. At the University of the West Indies I gravitated
to history and the indelible influence of Goveia and
Augier. Later at the University of Wisconsin I would
benefit from the exacting tutorship of John Leddy Phelan
in Latin American history, Jan Vansina in African
history and Philip Curtin in World history. But beyond
my teachers, I learned a lot from peers and colleagues
along the way. Colin Palmer, Blanca Silvestrini, Bernard
Semmel, Jack Greene, Orest Ranum, Louis Galambos, Manuel
Moreno Fraginals, Fe Iglesias, Oscar Zanetti, Alejandro
García, Anthony Maingot, Barry Higman, Nigel Bolland,
and Teresita Martínez Vergne are some of the individuals
to whom I owe special debts.
Jeremy: In what ways have
Johns Hopkins and Baltimore changed since you first
joined the faculty here in 1973?
Dr. Franklin
Knight: Both have changed significantly—and not just
in their external physical appearances. When I arrived
at Johns Hopkins it was not only undergoing the recent
change to a co-educational institution, but would also
in the next years move from a predominantly graduate
institution to a predominantly undergraduate institution
on the Homewood campus. This had, and continues to have,
profound significance for Johns Hopkins. The
institutional culture has also been profoundly altered
in various ways, although not all attributable to the
expansion of the university. When I arrived there was a
far greater sense of community. Faculties regarded
departmental boundaries as administrative conveniences
rather than fiefdoms. Even the administration was not
regarded as an entirely separate world. The
administrative sector was small relative to the size of
the faculty and all the senior administrators were
outstanding scholars in their respective fields. It was
possible not only to know most of the administrators,
but also to know what they did.
Jeremy: During this same
period, what changes have you noticed in the way in
which historians and other scholars conceptualize that
group of subjects which are now called "Africana
Studies”?
Dr. Franklin
Knight: Africana Studies was not a designation that
I think would be commonly found in the early 1970s.
Programs or departments called themselves by their
focus: African Studies; Black Studies; Afro-American
History; African and African American Studies. Africana
connotes a merging, melding and integration of all such
studies. In the case of the Johns Hopkins example the
field of Diaspora studies constitutes an integral
component of these interdisciplinary endeavors, and the
conventional Atlantic focus is broadened to include
Indian Ocean, Pacific and continental European
Diasporas. Africana Studies, like historical studies in
general, are certainly more sophisticated conceptually
and theoretically than anything offered in the 1960s and
1970s.
Jeremy: Within the fields of
Africana Studies and of history, what recent works and
approaches have struck you as particularly interesting
and promising avenues for research?
Dr. Franklin
Knight: History in general and Africana Studies in
particular have been having a great season of innovation
and creative expansion. While the great sweeping
narratives are still alive in history, the trend is
toward more focused multidisciplinary studies,
recognizing that there is no single explanation for
anything. Grand narratives are complemented, and maybe
overtaken, by the careful analysis of events. More
sources, archival and non-textual (in the sense of
script) are included. The studies that impress me most
have a globalizing interconnectedness as well as a
revisionist posture.
Francisco Scarano
and Alfred McCoy illustrate what I mean in Colonial
Crucible: Empire in the Making of the Modern American
State and Policing America’s Empire. In Africana
studies I like the interesting studies of scholars such
as Genaro Rodriguez, Teresita Martínez Vergne, Richard
Turits, Ben Vinson, Jane Landers, David Eltis, Ruth Iyob,
David Northrup, Barry Higman, Paul Lovejoy, William
Darrity, Indrani Chatterjee, and Nigel Bolland. This is
a highly selective and self-serving list, of course.
They are not all, strictly speaking, Africana field
historians, but historians whose work enormously enrich
the general field of history, especially that of the
African Diaspora. And at the moment the African Diaspora
field remains one of the most exciting new fields of
historical research.
Source: Horizons: Newsletter of the Center for Africana
Studies at JHU, Spring 2010
Links:
Krieger JHU /
History JHU
Franklin W. Knight
is Leonard and Helen R. Stulman Professor of History at
Johns Hopkins University and president of the Latin
American Studies Association. Knight's research
interests focus on the general history of Latin America
and the Caribbean as well as on American slave systems.
His major publications include
Slave Society in Cuba during the Nineteenth Century
(1970),
The Caribbean: The Genesis of a Fragmented Nationalism,
2d rev. edn. (1990),
The Modern Caribbean, co-edited with Colin A.
Palmer (1989),
Atlantic Port Cities: Economy, Culture, and Society in
the Atlantic World, 1650–1850, co-edited with
Peggy K. Liss (1991), and
The Slave Societies of the Caribbean (1997). He
was also co-translator of
Sugar and Railroads, A Cuban History, 1740–1840
by Oscar Zanetti and Alejandro Garc|f8a (1998). Knight
is currently writing a monograph,
Spanish American Creole Society in Cuba, 1740–1840, and
the Rise of American Nationalism.
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The Haitian
Revolution by Franklin W. Knight—The Haitian
Revolution represents the most thorough case study of
revolutionary change anywhere in the history of the
modern world.1
In ten years of sustained internal and international
warfare, a colony populated predominantly by plantation
slaves overthrew both its colonial status and its
economic system and established a new political state of
entirely free individuals—with some ex-slaves
constituting the new political authority. As only the
second state to declare its independence in the
Americas, Haiti had no viable administrative models to
follow. The British North Americans who declared their
independence in 1776 left slavery intact, and theirs was
more a political revolution than a social and economic
one. The success of Haiti against all odds made social
revolutions a sensitive issue among the leaders of
political revolt elsewhere in the Americas during the
final years of the eighteenth century and the first
decades of the nineteenth century.2
Yet the genesis of
the Haitian Revolution cannot be separated from the
wider concomitant events of the later eighteenth-century
Atlantic world. Indeed, the period between 1750 and 1850
represented an age of spontaneous, interrelated
revolutions, and events in Saint Domingue/Haiti
constitute an integral—though often overlooked—part of
the history of that larger sphere.3
These multi-faceted revolutions combined to alter the
way individuals and groups saw themselves and their
place in the world.4
But, even more, the intellectual changes of the period
instilled in some political leaders a confidence (not
new in the eighteenth century, but far more generalized
than before) that creation and creativity were not
exclusively divine or accidental attributes, and that
both general societies and individual conditions could
be rationally engineered.5
HistoryCooperative
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Sister Citizen: Shame, Stereotypes, and Black Women in
America
By Melissa V.
Harris-Perry
According to the
author, this society has historically exerted
considerable pressure on black females to fit into one
of a handful of stereotypes, primarily, the Mammy, the
Matriarch or the Jezebel. The selfless
Mammy’s behavior is marked by a slavish devotion to
white folks’ domestic concerns, often at the expense of
those of her own family’s needs. By contrast, the
relatively-hedonistic Jezebel is a sexually-insatiable
temptress. And the Matriarch is generally thought of as
an emasculating figure who denigrates black men, ala the
characters Sapphire and Aunt Esther on the television
shows Amos and Andy and Sanford and Son, respectively.
Professor Perry
points out how the propagation of these harmful myths
have served the mainstream culture well. For instance,
the Mammy suggests that it is almost second nature for
black females to feel a maternal instinct towards
Caucasian babies.
As for the source
of the Jezebel, black women had no control over their
own bodies during slavery given that they were being
auctioned off and bred to maximize profits. Nonetheless,
it was in the interest of plantation owners to propagate
the lie that sisters were sluts inclined to mate
indiscriminately.
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A Wreath for Emmett Till
By Marilyn Nelson; Illustrated by
Philippe Lardy
This memorial to
the lynched teen is in the Homeric
tradition of poet-as-historian. It is a
heroic crown of sonnets in Petrarchan
rhyme scheme and, as such, is quite
formal not only in form but in language.
There are 15 poems in the cycle, the
last line of one being the first line of
the next, and each of the first lines
makes up the entirety of the 15th. This
chosen formality brings distance and
reflection to readers, but also calls
attention to the horrifically ugly
events. The language is highly
figurative in one sonnet, cruelly
graphic in the next. The illustrations
echo the representative nature of the
poetry, using images from nature and
taking advantage of the emotional
quality of color. There is an
introduction by the author, a page about
Emmett Till, and literary and poetical
footnotes to the sonnets. The artist
also gives detailed reasoning behind his
choices. This underpinning information
makes this a full experience, eminently
teachable from several aspects,
including historical and literary—School
Library Journal |
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The White Masters
of the World
From
The World and Africa, 1965
By W. E. B. Du Bois
W. E. B. Du Bois’
Arraignment and Indictment of White Civilization
(Fletcher)
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Ancient African Nations
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Negro Digest / Black World
Browse all issues
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Enjoy!
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The
Death of Emmett Till by Bob Dylan
/
The Lonesome Death of Hattie Carroll
/
Only a Pawn in Their Game
Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson Thanks America for Slavery /
George Jackson /
Hurricane Carter
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The Journal of Negro History issues at Project Gutenberg
The
Haitian Declaration of Independence 1804
/
January 1, 1804 -- The Founding
of Haiti
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