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  • Slavery's Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans During the Age of Revolutions by Rashauna Johnson
  • John Garrison Marks
Slavery's Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans During the Age of Revolutions. By Rashauna Johnson. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2016. Pp. xxii, 236. $49.99, ISBN 978-1-107-13371-6.)

In Slavery's Metropolis: Unfree Labor in New Orleans During the Age of Revolutions, Rashauna Johnson has produced an essential new contribution to the literature on urban slavery in the United States and the Atlantic world. By introducing the concept of "confined cosmopolitanism," Johnson pushes back against the tendency of slavery studies to associate mobility with freedom and in so doing reorients the way we think about urban slavery (p. 3). She carefully explores the tension between the "geographies of containment" that slave masters attempted to create in New Orleans and the "geographies of resistance" [End Page 946] that the enslaved and people of African descent in the city constructed to subvert white control (p. 6). Johnson argues convincingly that although mobility, autonomy, and multicultural fluency offered enslaved people opportunities to move closer to freedom, it could also expose them "to capture, kidnapping, rape, and even death" (p. 14). This tension played out in New Orleans throughout the Age of Revolutions as the mobility of enslaved people "became central to the New Orleans economy," transforming the city into a modern, capitalist metropolis in the empire of slavery (p. 12).

Organizing her study around the different spaces within which this tension of containment and resistance played out, Johnson brilliantly recreates the social and cultural worlds of enslaved people in all of their complexity. Slavery's Metropolis is built on meticulous, exhaustive, and altogether outstanding research, as Johnson gleans a remarkable level of detail and nuance from the archival record. Through the creative use of court documents, notarial records, Works Progress Administration interviews, newspaper accounts, and a host of other sources—all of which were recorded in multiple languages—Johnson adeptly examines not just the world of New Orleans slavery, but also the everyday lives of enslaved people, in a way that is as impressive as it is edifying. This incredibly detailed portrait of the worlds of enslaved people in New Orleans offers a new way of understanding how slavery operated in urban spaces that existed at the crossroads of national and imperial boundaries.

Slavery's Metropolis also sits on a solid theoretical foundation, and Johnson's ability to weave together theories of gender, power, incarceration, and culture is impressive. Her analysis of the gender dynamics of white men's consumption of black masculinity and her chapter on the incarceration and punishment of enslaved people are particularly interesting. As scholars and the public have begun paying greater attention to mass incarceration's roots in the Reconstruction era, Johnson's argument in chapter 4, that "slavery and incarceration worked in tandem to produce modernity," and, more plainly, that "There was nothing post-slavery about mass incarceration," will surely generate further discussion (p. 127).

Johnson offers some of her most important and cogent observations in her conclusion, when she comments on New Orleans's place within the broader context of the urban United States and Atlantic world. In both the public imagination and scholarly discourse, the exceptional nature of race and slavery in New Orleans has made it, for many, a place to which other cities and regions cannot be compared. Johnson engages straightforwardly with that notion, arguing that the continued focus on New Orleans's "cultural uniqueness… obscures the concrete ways that circuits of capital, communication, and migration" rooted the city within the "American expansionist project and Atlantic plantation complex" (p. 205). Johnson's is the clearest and best articulation I have seen of this objection to New Orleans exceptionalism, and her claim that "New Orleans was no exception in the modern world; it was an exaggeration" stands out as both concise and convincing (p. 205).

Given the book's focus on space, more maps might have complemented Johnson's analysis, particularly in her chapter on neighborhoods. Yet in the end, this is a mere quibble with a book that is beautifully written and impressively sourced. Ultimately, by carefully...

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