In a long overdue contribution to geography and social theory, Katherine McKittrick offers a new and powerful interpretation of black women’s geographic thought. In Canada, the Caribbean, and the United States, black women inhabit diasporic locations marked by the legacy of violence and slavery. Analyzing diverse literatures and material geographies, McKittrick reveals how human geographies are a result of racialized connections, and how spaces that are fraught with limitation are underacknowledged but meaningful sites of political opposition. Demonic Grounds moves between past and present, archives and fiction, theory and everyday, to focus on places negotiated by black women during and after the transatlantic slave trade. Specifically, the author addresses the geographic implications of slave auction blocks, Harriet Jacobs’s attic, black Canada and New France, as well as the conceptual spaces of feminism and Sylvia Wynter’s philosophies. Central to McKittrick’s argument are the ways in which black women are not passive recipients of their surroundings and how a sense of place relates to the struggle against domination. Ultimately, McKittrick argues, these complex black geographies are alterable and may provide the opportunity for social and cultural change. Katherine McKittrick is assistant professor of women’s studies at Queen’s University.

A convergence of histories and aesthetic paradigms for disentangling the body from space and place The artists in this volume interrogate the geographic implications of particular histories on specific spaces. From the intimate cartographies of a body to the imagined and constructed contours of the Black Atlantic; from the ecology of the North York Moors to the ruins of slave auction blocks, plantation fields, lynching trees and Underground Railroad routes in North America, to a magical realist vision of a river-bound voyage in Guyana.

Harriet Jacobs's Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is one of the most compelling accounts of slavery and one of the most unique of the one hundred or so slave narratives—mostly written by men—published before the Civil War. The child and grandchild of slaves—and therefore forbidden by law to read and write—Harriet Jacobs was defiant in her efforts to gain freedom and to document her experience in bondage. She suffered physical and sexual abuse at the hands of her master at the age of eleven. In 1842, she fled North and joined a circle of abolitionists that worked for Frederick Douglass's newspaper. In 1863, she and her daughter moved to Alexandria, Virginia, where they organized medical care for Civil War victims and established the Jacobs Free School.

12 Tears of a Slave: Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl is a slave narrative that was published in 1861 by Harriet Ann Jacobs, using the pen name ""Linda Brent."" This book is an in-depth chronological account of Jacobs's life as a slave, and the decisions and choices she made to gain freedom for herself and her children. It addresses the struggles and sexual abuse that young women slaves faced on the plantations, and how these struggles were harsher than what men suffered as slaves. This book is considered sentimental and written to provoke an emotional response and sympathy from the reader toward slavery in general and slave women in particular for their struggles with rape, the pressure to have sex at an early age, the selling of their children, and the treatment of female slaves by their mistresses. Published by W2G Publishing Copyright 2014 Write2Grow LLC www.Write2Grow.org/Tears ISBN 978-1-304-85959-4 247 Printed Pages

Although millions of African American women were held in bondage over the 250 years that slavery was legal in the United States, Harriet Jacobs (1813-97) is the only one known to have left papers testifying to her life. Her autobiography, Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl, holds a central place in the canon of American literature as the most important slave narrative by an African American woman. Born in Edenton, North Carolina, Jacobs escaped from her owner in her mid-twenties and hid in the cramped attic crawlspace of her grandmother's house for seven years before making her way north as a fugitive slave. In Rochester, New York, she became an active abolitionist, working with all of the major abolitionists, feminists, and literary figures of her day, including Frederick Douglass, Lydia Maria Child, Amy Post, William Lloyd Garrison, Susan B. Anthony, Harriet Beecher Stowe, Fanny Fern, William C. Nell, Charlotte Forten Grimke, and Nathan Parker Willis. Jean Fagan Yellin has devoted much of her professional life to illuminating the remarkable life of Harriet Jacobs. Over three decades of painstaking research, Yellin has discovered more than 900 primary source documents, approximately 300 of which are now collected in two volumes. These letters and papers written by, for, and about Jacobs and her activist brother and daughter provide for the thousands of readers of Incidents--from scholars to schoolchildren--access to the rich historical context of Jacobs's struggles against slavery, racism, and sexism beyond what she reveals in her pseudonymous narrative. Accompanied by a CD containing a searchable PDF file of the entire contents, this collection is a crucial launching point for future scholarship on Jacobs's life and times.

Collected here in this omnibus edition are three influential autobiographies of prominent women whose rose up from slavery to greatness. Essential reading for anyone interested in African American Heritage. Included are Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl by Harriet Jacobs, Narrative of Sojourner Truth by Sojourner Truth, and The History of Mary Prince, a West Indian Slave by Mary Prince. Slavery is a terrible thing, but it is far more terrible and harrowing for women than for men. Harriet Jacobs was owned by a brutal master who beat his slaves regularly and subjected them to indignations that were far worse. Jacobs eventually escaped her master and moved to a northern state. Though she was unable to take her children with her at the time they were later reunited. Read her powerful and compelling story. Sojourner Truth transformed herself from a runaway slave into a well-known campaigner for abolition and women's rights. Her dedication to her principles and her fiery speaking style electrified the abolition movement and brought her fame. This is an extraordinary story about the triumph of an extraordinary women. Mary Prince was the first woman slave to write of her experience. Her recollections are vivid, powerful, and lyrical. Upon its publication the book had a galvanizing effect on the abolitionist movement in England.

The authors of this pioneering book attempt to address this problem by utilizing survey techniques, originally developed in environmental economics, to place an economic value on the benefits provided by the voluntary sector in the UK.