Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, 1680–1807 by Michael Dickinson (review)

Abstract

The published narratives of former bondspeople are some of the most comprehensive and detailed accounts of slavery in existence. These sources can also provoke thorny debates among scholars. Often written and published in collaboration with antislavery movements, these texts have sometimes been questioned for the ways that they might distort experiences of enslavement. In Almost Dead: Slavery and Social Rebirth in the Black Urban Atlantic, 1680–1807, Michael Dickinson skillfully confronts these critiques, arguing for historians to regard enslavement narratives as “worthwhile historical evidence,” which have received “disproportionate scrutiny” in comparison with white authors (7). Dickinson’s choice to center these narratives is power ful. What results is a deeply researched and personcentered narrative of individual and community survival amid forced migrations and resettlements throughout the Atlantic world. The book’s title subverts Orlando Patterson’s theory of social death, a tactic of control employed by enslavers through family separations, name changes, and other acts of alienation.1 While Patterson saw enslaved people as permanently damaged by this vio lence, Dickinson expands on the work of scholars like Stephanie Smallwood and Vincent Brown, who use social death as a point of departure. Although enslavement was doubtlessly an experience of rupture, these scholars have suggested that despite the threat of social death, enslaved people fought to adapt and maintain networks of care in order to survive. While others whose work touches upon rebirth have focused more closely on specific locations or spaces of bondage, Almost Dead characterizes rebirth as a geographic and temporal pro cess that developed as bondspeople were forced to migrate across oceanic routes and between port cities. Dickinson’s text centers movement. The book examines the Middle Passage, as well as journeys between Bridgetown, Kingston, and Philadelphia, considering these cities for their centrality to trade networks. Philadelphia, which Dickinson notes has been traditionally thought of by early Americanists as “a hub of black freedom,” also must be understood