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WOMEN’S ROLE IN THE SLAVE TRADE B Ipsen, Pernille: Daughters of the Trade. At - lantic Slavers and Interracial Marriage on the Gold Coast. University of Pennsylvania, 2015, O 269 pages. Price: 388 DKK . psen’s book sets out to explore the politics Iof gender and race in the pre-colonial and colonial period on what was then known as the Gold Coast (now called Ghana). The top - O ic is approached from the perspectives of women – the daughters of the trade – and the larger, transatlantic relations they were part of in Osu (a part of the capital Accra) as well as K . In the book, it is described how these women should not be seen (only) as victims of the trade, but also as women who benefitted from the trade by virtue of their status as ‘free’ African women with linkages R to the Danish fort Christiansborg. More specifically, the book has a focus on the insti - tution of cassare (marriage in Portuguese), meaning marriage practices between Danish E men at the fort and (Euro)African women on the Gold Coast in the 18th century. These marriages form a point of departure for un - derstanding the shifting perceptions of gen - V der and race in the pre-colonial and colonial period as well as of the broader perspectives of the slave trade. By describing the lives of these daughters of the trade, whose existence have been I erased from our memories, the book is shed - ding light on new and surprising perspectives on the slave trade which is often perceived to be a male ‘business’. The reason for the invis - E ibility of the women’s stories may be that these marriages were tolerated, but not ac - cepted, in Copenhagen, and that the women did not follow their husbands when they left the fort. Consequently, only few sources are W available on this topic. In addition, the colo - nial period brought about a stronger segrega - tion between Africans (including the (Euro) African women) and the white male staff of S the fort. As such, the book contributes with KKFc1-16.qxp_KKF a 3/03 08/08/16 13.19 Side 93

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valuable insights through its meticulous doc - of the book – is demonstrated by the fact that umentation of the women’s stories – perhaps several attempts were made to regulate and also rather disturbing insights for the Ga peo - undermine the institution. The most persis - ple of Osu, reminding them of their role in tent attempts came from the religious author - the preservation of the slave trade, as well as ities, as especially the chaplains were con - for the Danish/Ghanaian descendants of the cerned about these intimate relations. A bish - staff from the fort who were perhaps not op wrote about the need for teaching the aware of their forefather’s former wives. gospel of Christianity to the wives and the One of the main points of the book is that offspring of these marriages and for support - the cassare marriages were advantageous for ing the children. He also encouraged the both parties and served to maintain relations Danish husbands to ask the wives to follow and build alliances between the Ga trading them back to Copenhagen. Thus, Christian families in Osu and the Danish staff at the schools were established and the offspring fort. The marriages took place in accordance were trained according to the existing gen - with the Ga customs underlining the need to dered division of labour. respect local traditions. It is described that Throughout the period the Danish hus - “Women on the Gold Coast not only helped bands had to balance between on the one their European husbands survive and resettle hand the dominant, racialised discourses le - in Africa; they also helped them as translators, gitimising the preservation of the slave trade cultural ambassadors, and trading partners” – including the general notion of ‘the Afri- (p. 9). The front cover of the book is a paint - cans’ as one uniform, lower-ranking group of ing of Sara Malm, the cassare wife of Wulff people – and on the other hand the practices Joseph Wulff (a Danish assistant at the fort), of the cassare marriages with specific (Euro)- illustrating her hybrid identity as a (Euro) African women who had to separate them - African woman dressed in mainly European selves from African women and to some ex - clothes but with a traditional African head - tent assimilate themselves to European culture scarf and gold jewellery to mark her differ - in the later period of these marriage practices. ence from other African women. Through However, this balancing act became increas - their marriages, the women gained access to ingly difficult. During the more pronounced the ‘mulatto chest’ at the fort, which sup - racial segregation of the colonial period, it ported the children of these marriages. In a was probably not possible to even consider number of cases, they also inherited property (Euro)African women as potential wives. from their husbands. The book could serve as a way of main - Another main point of the book is that streaming gender, or perhaps more accurately these (Euro)African women had more room women, in the teaching of the history of the for manoeuvre within their cassare marriages Danish Atlantic slave trade. That makes the than they would have had in marriages with book a most timely contribution – especially other African men, as the cassare wives often bearing in mind the recent film The Gold lived separately from their husbands with Coast (2015), where these relations are not their extended Ga families along with their described at all. Women in the movie are por - children. The women could therefore contin - trayed as voiceless slaves available for provid - ue being engaged in different trade activities ing different services for the male staff at the independently of their husbands. However, fort, with the sole exception of a female, the book also contains examples from a later Christian teacher. In light of these historical period where husbands and wives lived to - perspectives, the book reviewer wonders what gether in more ‘European’ style marriages. the present day relations look like between The strength of the institution of the cas - Danish men and Ghanaian women, or be - sare marriages – and thus also the importance tween Danish women and Ghanaian men? Or KKFc1-16.qxp_KKF a 3/03 08/08/16 13.19 Side 94

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how the micro-politics of intimate relations to learning and material intra-actions in spe - links to present day intersections of gender cific historical-cultural settings, and mostly and race? with an emphasis on the researcher’s perspec - tive. One of the key features of the book is Diana Højlund Madsen, Hasse’s ability to ask good questions in order PhD & Assistant Professor, FREIA to open up the black box of learning; the dif - – Centre for Gender Research, ficult questions of how it is at all possible to . make sense of new experiences, of our em - bodied presence as individuals in social, col - lective, material-discursive spaces, where our actions shape and are shaped by the numer - ous particularities of the space we occupy. MEETING BARAD HALFWAY – How do we actually learn when doing field - HASSE’S BOOK ON LEARNING IS work? How can we understand the processes NOT WITHOUT FRICTION of surprise, friction, and entanglement that happens over time when we encounter (or Cathrine Hasse: An Anthropology of Learning: place ourselves in) a – to us – new cultural On nested Frictions in Cultural Ecologies. setting? What is the role of material cultural Springer, 2015, 320 pages. Price:1119 DKK. markers, from the sound waves we make when we speak to chairs placed in particular et me begin this review by saying that spaces, when learning and doing fieldwork? Lthis is a great book. It is one of those How does meaning change over time with books you can’t read without stopping after new experiences, and what kinds of inclusions almost every paragraph thinking about the and exclusions happen in the practiced space? points just made and how it relates to your How can learning be thought of as an intra- own research and teaching experiences. How - active, material-discursive process creating ever, I also admit to becoming increasingly particular agential cuts – learning with instead dissatisfied with the book as I proceeded of from the context you find yourself in as a through its nine, densely written chapters, for researcher? reasons I will get back to later. The book is primarily written for an an - As a book about learning in which Hasse thropological audience, presumably as a text - tries to combine new materialism (drawing book, but it is also relevant to fieldworkers in particularly on Karen Barad and Tim Ingold), general. It addresses participant observation cultural theory (particularly Clifford Geertz), as a particular process in which learning hap - and cultural-historical psychology (Lev Vy - pens, draws on a range of literature and ana - gotsky and followers) the scope of the book is lytical concepts from or relevant to this field, already larger than ‘just’ the practices of an - and tells tales from a variety of fieldwork set - thropological/ethnographic fieldwork, from tings, spanning from the gendered spaces of which it draws most of its examples. This is the physics education, to a village on an Ital - about being-in-the-world as embodied sub - ian island, fieldwork in Cameroon, and more. jects, trying to figure out what is going on. The fieldwork examples, in particular, are in - Hasse deals with this topic through discus - teresting, and the insistence on aligning the sions about key issues in anthropology and more classical literature of Geertz and Vygot - cultural theory such as how to understand sky with a Baradian new materialist emphasis ‘culture’ (as an analytical construct), meaning on material entanglement and agentiality is (of words and materialities), embodied prac - undoubtedly a contribution to the field that tices, expectations, friction and surprise, activ - will create both fruitful and frustrating fric - ity and technologies. All this with attention tions with its readership. KKFc1-16.qxp_KKF a 3/03 08/08/16 13.19 Side 95

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My main critique of Hasse’s book is that it the particular cultural context for learning doesn’t quite do what it sets out to do. The becomes an illustration of the theoretical book aims to bring forth the material aspects point, rather than the starting point. It is the - of learning and culture, and to read diverse ory first, empirical examples second. literature within different analytical fields to - This is not just something Hasse is guilty gether in order to enhance both understand - of, but something that the whole field of new ing and theoretical depth. But at the same feminist materialist theorising needs to be at - time, the choice to make the materialist point tentive to (myself included). Hasse’s book – to argue for materials in learning and cul - has excellent fieldwork examples – they are ture – in theoretical and metaphorical lan - the best parts of the book! It would have guage, paradoxically makes it difficult to been great if these had formed the basis for reach these goals; the material becomes less her written engagement with culture and ma - tangible than it needed to be. terial learning processes, in which the vocab - For instance, the book is filled with claims ulary of e.g. Barad (2007) could then have (rather than arguments) that, “[w]e, our be - been reflectively tested, rather than added on. ing-in-the-world, evolve with our sensory In addition, I sometimes found Hasse’s pathways extending out and materialising use of – or lack of use of – Barad’s concepts meaningful materials...” (p. 19). And even problematic. Hasse’s interpretation, for in - great metaphors like ‘dust bunnies’ (see e.g. stance, of diffracted reading as a kind of ‘sup - p. 70) sometimes end up in piles of other plementary’ reading of otherwise contradic - metaphors, such as when she writes that: tory texts (p. 33) makes the literary engage - “zones [of proximal developments] can, as sedi - ments strangely uncritical – and thereby mented connections , hold dust bunnies togeth - somewhat superficial. Rather, the diffraction er by directing their development” (p. 258, metaphor comes from waves crashing into my italics). and overlapping each other, where the effect My point is that the abovementioned writ - creates depths in form of both ‘holes’ and ing style as well as the structure of the text synergies (see e.g. van der Tuin (2011) for a creates a distance to the material; it never re - good example). Furthermore, Hasse’s uncrit - ally gets into the meat of things. The argu - ical use of concepts like ‘social role’ (p. 101- ment of the book rests on an emphasis on 109) and Don Ihde’s concepts of ‘body I’ materiality as a prerequisite for learning, and and ‘body II’ (p. 110f) would have benefitted continually through the book (e.g. with from a critical Baradian approach, making Dewey on p. 167 and Bateson on p. 194) statements such as: “when our body I is ex - Hasse states that theory should be based in posed to the cultural body II” (p. 113) im - the empirical field in contrast to making the possible. What happened to intra-active en - empirical examples fit the theory. And yet, tanglements here? the structure of the text does exactly the op - What critique does is allow us to see the posite of what it argues for: it introduces a frictions more clearly and thereby also go a theoretical statement, and then (sometimes) step deeper into the argument. The issues shows how this theory holds by providing mentioned above result in making the book fieldwork examples (which often appear to be more like a think piece – a manifest for a new re-readings of older analyses through the in - approach/reconfiguration of learning within troduced theoretical lense). The paradox here anthropology – rather than a radical contri - is both that the language of new materialism bution to feminist/new materialist literature on the one hand becomes an abstraction (which it had potential to become). It makes from the messy, friction-full dust bunny of re - good claims, but lacks depth and feeling of ality that it is supposed to describe (or, when newness to those already convinced of the it is best, analyse), and that the materiality of feminist materialist approach. This critique is KKFc1-16.qxp_KKF a 3/03 08/08/16 13.19 Side 96

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serious, I think, but should probably be read Ph.D.- DISSERTATIONS against my initial positive expectation towards Marietta Radomska: Uncontainable Life: and, excitement about, Hasse’s project. And A Biophilosophy of Bioart the book does create enough interesting fric - tions that it is worth reading, and discussing, his dissertation investigates the ways in and criticising – in short, it is definitely worth Twhich thinking through the contempo - learning from one’s engagement with it. rary hybrid scientifico-artistic practices of bioart is a biophilosophical practice, one that Morten Hillgaard Bülow, post doc, contri-butes to a more nuanced understand - M.A. in History and Philosophy/ ing of life than we encounter in mainstream Science Studies, Medical Museion, academic discourse. When examined from a Deleuzian feminist perspective, bioartistic pro - jects reveal the inadequacy of asking about life’s essence. Instead of examining the defin - ing criteria of life, bioartistic practices explore LITERATURE and enact life as processual and always al - · Barad, Karen (2007): Meeting the Universe ready uncontainable, thus transcending pre - Halfway: Quantum Physics and the Entanglement conceived material and conceptual bound - of Matter and Meaning. Duke University Press. aries. In this way, this doctoral thesis concen - · van der Tuin, Iris (2011): A Different Starting Point, a Different Metaphysics: Reading Bergson trates on the ontology of life as it emerges and Barad Diffractively, in Hypatia 2011/26. through the selected bioartworks. The hope is that such an ontology can enable future con - ceptualisations of an ethico-politics that avoids the anthropocentric logic dominant in the hu - man ities and social sciences.

From: Tema Genus, Department of Thematic Studies, Linköping University The defence took place: 22 April 2016

Committee/opponents: Opponent: Prof. Patricia MacCormack (Anglia Ruskin University, UK) Committee: Prof. Jenny Sundén (Södertörn University, Sweden); Prof. Margrit Shildrick (Linköping University, Sweden); Prof. Jacob Wamberg (, )

Supervisors: Associate Prof. Jami Weinstein (Linköping University, Sweden); Prof. Nina Lykke (Lin - köping University, Sweden)

Contact information for how to obtain the work: [email protected]