Dissertation Abstract

TL;DR: Parry's dissertation explores the cultural and sociopolitical dimensions of slave marriage in the Atlantic World, focusing on diasporic Africans, abolitionists, and proslavery apologists. It analyzes the interplay between legislation, cultural practice, and political discourse to reveal how matrimonial patterns from Atlantic Africa and Britain were re-imagined by enslaved individuals in various British territories.

Abstract: Tyler Parry's dissertation, " Love and Marriage: Domestic Relations and Matrimonial Strategies Among the Enslaved in the Atlantic World " argues that the cultural and sociopolitical dimensions of slave marriage were primary issues for diasporic Africans, abolitionists, and proslavery apologists whose lives were intertwined by the cultural and economic connections that framed the Atlantic World throughout the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. Through analyzing the interplay between legislation, cultural practice, and political discourse in the early periods of colonial slavery, Parry shows how matrimonial patterns from Atlantic Africa and Britain were re-imagined by diasporic Africans enslaved in Bermuda, the British West Indies, and colonial North America. Subsequent chapters then illuminate how matrimonial precedents established in these interconnected British territories influenced how both free and enslaved Americans approached the legislative restrictions that characterized slave marriage in the nineteenth-century American South. While past analyses have addressed the social, cultural, and legal dimensions of slave matrimony in specific regions, Parry contends that slave marriage was imbedded within transatlantic discourses that influenced the cultural and political maneuvers of blacks and whites throughout the British Atlantic. Five of his eight chapters specifically concentrate upon the internal dynamics of slave marital relations, and reveal how African-descended peoples reckoned with the circumstances of slavery by creatively re-imagining ancestral marital practices and appropriating foreign customs in Anglophone slave societies. Additionally, the concepts of gender, class, and sexuality are used as analytical paradigms to explore how the concepts of masculinity, femininity, domesticity,