People as property: Representations of slaves in early American newspaper advertisements



: Susanna Mäkinen

Publisher: De Gruyter

: 2017

: Journal of Historical Sociolinguistics

: JHSL

: 3

: 2

: 263

: 284

: 22

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1515/jhsl-2017-0013

: https://research.utu.fi/converis/portal/detail/Publication/27314601


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.


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