People as property: Representations of slaves in early American newspaper advertisements
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Susanna Mäkinen
Abstract
Using van Leeuwen’s (1996) categories of social actor representations, this paper investigates the ways in which slaves were represented in four types of slavery-related advertisements (for sale, want to buy, runaways and captured runaways). The materials consist of 860 notices in total, and they are collected from eighteenth and nineteenth -century newspapers in Massachusetts, New York, Virginia and South Carolina. Of particular interest are the two aspects simultaneously present in slavery: how the advertisements can represent their subjects, on the one hand, as human individuals and, on the other hand, as someone’s property. The study examines, for example, the use of nomination and various kinds of categorization strategies used to represent the slaves, as well as the ways in which they are explicitly referred to as “property”. Examination of the advertisements shows that the representational strategies differ somewhat depending on the type of advertisement as well as the geographical area. Furthermore, the various representational possibilities also indicate that the advertisers could, by their word choices, choose either to highlight the slaves’ status as property or to leave it more implicit in the texts.
Acknowledgements
The author wishes to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the “Philological Colloquium” group for their valuable comments on earlier versions of this paper, as well as the Finnish Cultural Foundation for funding.
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© 2017 Walter de Gruyter GmbH, Berlin/Boston
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Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Articles
- Linguistic representations of the social margins in Early and Late Modern English
- “He said he was going on the scamp”: Thieves’ cant, enregisterment and the representation of the social margins in the Old Bailey Sessions Papers
- Referential NPs as subtle expressions of attitude in infanticide trials, 1674–1775
- The public representation of homosexual men in seventeenth-century England – a corpus based view
- Representations of prostitutes and prostitution as a metaphor in nineteenth-century English newspapers
- The language of “Ribbonmen”: A CDA approach to identity construction in nineteenth-century Irish English threatening notices
- People as property: Representations of slaves in early American newspaper advertisements
- Book Reviews
- Russi, Cinzia: Current Trends in Historical Sociolinguistics
- Early Germanic Languages in Contact (NOWELE Supplement Series 27):
- Bunčić Daniel:Biscriptality. A sociolinguistic typology
- Walsh, Olivia: Linguistic Purism. Language Attitudes in France and Quebec
- Letras del desierto. Edición de un corpus epistolar para su estudio lingüístico. Región de Tarapacá, Chile:
- Historische Mündlichkeit. Beiträge zur Geschichte der gesprochenen Sprache (Kieler Forschungen zur Sprachwissenschaft 7):
