| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1

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| Book Review | The American Historical Review, 111.1 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Canada and the United States

Stephanie M. H. Camp. Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South. (Gender and American Culture.) Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press. 2004. Pp. xi, 206. Cloth $39.95, paper $18.95.

Joining a growing number of scholars of enslaved women in the Americas, Stephanie M. H. Camp studies bondwomen's resistance through "places, boundaries, and movement." Using planter papers, oral histories, and other familiar sources, she documents planters' efforts to confine slaves and regiment their motion (the "geography of containment"), enslaved women's movement despite these restraints (the "rival geography"), and the "perpetual conflicts" that arose as a result (pp. 13, 6). The "rival geography" provided not autonomy but chances for creativity, play, rest, and, ultimately, resistance to planters' domination. Camp's conceptually ambitious project works well with her carefully delimited parameters. Chronologically, she explores the antebellum decades and the Civil War, although she is deeply versed in colonial and comparative scholarship. She makes deft use of colonial architecture, nineteenth-century paternalism, law, the black Atlantic, and print culture to anchor individual bondwomen in a broader present and a long past. She examines the entire South but only its plantation slaves. She also excludes religion, theft, and fugitives from her scope. The book's brevity and admirable cohesion reward this approach. Avoiding the word "slave," meanwhile, is one of the book's arguments: "slave" implies a static "state of being," while "bondperson" draws attention to legal status and "enslaved person" suggests an "active historical process" (p. 143). Anyone skeptical that terminology matters should consider substituting "enslavers" for "slaveholders" and "masters," two terms which efface violence and privilege owners' point of view.

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