Keywords
John Canoe
Resistance
Entertainment
Ambiguity
Inversion
Body
19th Century
How to Cite
Abstract
This article constitutes the first step of a more extensive study about slave resistance within societies where slavery was a systematic practice, throughout the Americas. It focuses on the analysis of the festival of John Canoe in the nineteenth century Antebellum South, and explores the ambiguity of the feast as an arena that would explain the possibility of a surreptitious critic of the enslaved population. It also emphasizes, amongst others, the bodily transgressions of enslaved people within the celebration. The text seeks, in last, to argue in favor of a definition that slave resistance needs to be considered as a more inclusive phenomenon where hidden strategies of insubordination have their practice.The journal Memoria y Sociedad is registered under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International Public License. Thus, this work may be reproduced, distributed, and publicly shared in digital format, as long as the names of the authors and Pontificia Universidad Javeriana are acknowledged. Others are allowed to quote, adapt, transform, auto-archive, republish, and create based on this material, for any purpose (even commercial ones), provided the authorship is duly acknowledged, a link to the original work is provided, and it is specified if changes have been made. Pontificia Universidad Javeriana does not hold the rights of published works and the authors are solely responsible for the contents of their works; they keep the moral, intellectual, privacy, and publicity rights.
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