Essay on Belinda

Last year, for my Eighteenth Century Trans-Atlantic Feminism class, I wrote a paper on Belinda's Petition. Initially, the plan was to include it in my dissertation, but then both my advisors and me thought against it. So, now I am thinking of turning it into a stand-alone article. So today, when I began to revive some of my research around it, I found couple of things: one, Rita Dove had written a poem on Belinda's petition in her book The Yellow House on the Corner, and Raymond Winbush has published a book called Belinda's Petition. So, obviously, now my article needs some re-orientation too. So, what I am thinking is, writing an article that will be more about how the contemporary social imaginary in US has "read" and "interpreted" Belinda and her petition, and what her petition actually reveals about her. In that way, it will also be a continuation of my dissertation work on memory, re-imagination of history and contemporary significances of slavery. That's why, this bibliography.

Primary Sources:

1. Belinda's Petition

2. Dove, Rita. Belinda's Petition. In The Yellow House in the Corner

3. Winbush, Raymond. Belinda's Petition

Secondary Sources:

Books:

1.Chang, Alexandra. Slavery in the Age of Reason

2.George A. Levesque, Black Boston: African American Life and Culture in Urban America, 1750–1860 (New York, 1994), 32–33, 50 n. 32.

3.Slavery and Freedom in the Age of the American Revolution, ed. Ira Berlin and Ronald Hoffman (Charlottesville, Va., 1983)

4.http://tuftsjournal.tufts.edu/archive/2002/august/calendar/royall2.shtml

5.William C. Nell, The Colored Patriots of the American Revolution (Boston, 1855)

6.Nussbaum, Felicity A. The Global Eighteenth Century

7. Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, “Dis-Covering the Subject of the ‘Great Constitutional Discussion,’ 1786–1789,”Journal of American History 79, no. 3 (December 1992)

8.David Kazanjian, The Colonizing Trick: National Culture and Imperial Citizenship in Early America (Minneapolis, Minn., 2003)

9.T. H. Breen, “Making History: The Force of Public Opinion and the Last Years of Slavery in Massachusetts,” in Through a Glass Darkly: Reflections on Personal Identity in Early America, ed. Ronald Hoffman, Mechal Sobel, and Fredrika J. Teute (Chapel Hill, N.C., 1997)

10.Thomas J. Davis, “Emancipation Rhetoric, Natural Rights, and Revolutionary New England: A Note on Four Black Petitions in Massachusetts, 1773–1777,” New England Quarterly 62, no. 2 (June 1989): 248–63 (“Lawdable Example,” 262)

11.Scott Hancock, “‘The Law Will Make You Smart’: Legal Consciousness, Rights Rhetoric, and African American Identity Formation in Massachusetts, 1641–1855” (Ph.D. diss., University of New Hampshire, 1999)

12.f African American Literature, 1680–1865 (Charlottesville, Va., 2001), 53–55; Emily Blanck, “Seventeen Eighty-Three: The Turning Point in the Law of Slavery and Freedom in Massachusetts,” New England Quarterly 75, no. 1 (March 2002): 24–51, esp. 27–28.

13.Harris, Sharon.Executing Race: Early American Women’s Narratives of Race, Society, and the Law

14. Kaplan, Sidney. The Black Presence in the Era of the American Revolution

15.Timothy Dwight, The Charitable Blessed: A Sermon, Preached in the First Church in New-Haven, August 8, 1810 (New Haven, Conn., 1810), 22–23.

There will be things to add on to this list, as I continue to work more on this article, but for now, I can live with it. Also, this is the last day of 2009. So Happy New Year to myself and everyone else out there.