51 pages • 1 hour read
Stephanie CampCloser to Freedom
Nonfiction | Book | Adult | Published in 2002A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Essay Topics
Stephanie M. H. Camp builds on Edward Said’s theorization of rival geography in the context of colonialism, revising this theory to theorize the rival geography occurring in the plantation South. How are the aspirations for mobility for enslaved people different than for colonized people? Why?
Why did California cover the walls of her cabin with abolitionist imagery when she could have kept this imagery within reach but hidden, especially when this display is punishable by death? What is the nature of this domestic “passion,” and why did she express it on her walls?
Camp shows that enslavers both authorized and restricted the mobility of enslaved people by way of passes when their labor required them to leave the plantation. If control over mobility was so important to enslavers, why not restrict that mobility completely and hire free people to conduct labor that required travel? What might the kind of innovative reading that Camp calls for reveal about the relation between enslavers and enslaved (men) in this context of this simultaneously authorized and restricted mobility?
Camp demonstrates that enslaved mobility is gendered. Does one gender’s mobility affect the other gender’s mobility? Could this relationship be used “resistantly” by enslaved people?
Why did enslaved people risk so much to hold and attend parties? What do these parties suggest about the acts that constitute “resistance”?
In Chapter 1, Camp reads the white desire for containment of enslaved people’s mobility in the pattern of laws that start to develop in the 1600s in the South. Do these laws only reveal enslavers’ desires? Is it possible to learn about enslaved people’s desires from laws created for and by enslavers?
Camp calls on historians (and her readers) to be “innovative” in their analyses and to use their imaginations. At the same time, many of the experiences she describes may seem incomprehensible. How can imagination facilitate more innovative readings when the experience of slavery may feel and be unimaginable?
How does Camp’s organization of her book—or “geographical” determination of the reader’s movement through her book—help her to develop her analyses and arguments of slavery’s geographies?
What is the relation between “everyday resistances” and momentous rebellions? Why does Camp choose to study the former? Are everyday resistances less dramatic and less radical versions of rebellion, or are they of a different nature altogether?
If mobility is, as Camp cites Leon Litwack, “the feel of freedom” (118), how might slavery studies intersect with disability studies? Are there other forms of mobility aside from the able-bodied movement through space that Camp discusses? How might slavery studies be informed by disability studies, and vice-versa?
