From Enslavement to Emancipation: Naming Practices in the Danish West Indies

Abstract

In most contexts, personal names function as identifiers and as a locus for identity. Therefore, names can be used to trace patterns of kinship, ancestry, and belonging. The social power of naming, however, and its capacity to shape the life course of the person named, becomes most evident when it has the opposite intent: to sever connections and injure. Naming in slave society was primarily practical, an essential first step in commodifying human beings so they could be removed from their roots and social networks, bought, sold, mortgaged, and adjudicated. Such practices have long been integral to processes of colonization and enslavement. This paper discusses the implications of naming practices in the context of slavery, focusing on the names given to enslaved Africans and their descendants through baptism in the Lutheran and Moravian churches in the Danish West Indies. Drawing on historiographical accounts and a detailed analysis of plantation and parish records from the island of St. Croix, we outline and contextualize these patterns and practices of naming. We examine the extent to which the adoption of European and Christian names can be read as an effort toward resistance and self-determination on the part of the enslaved. Our account is illuminated by details from the lives of three former slaves from the Danish West Indies.

Three Generations of Free Colored Women in St. Croix. 1750–1850

“…That way the chances of the father to recognize and perhaps free the child were increased. 45 This practice also existed in the free colored community. Although an ordinance of 1776 stated that it was no longer allowed for free colored to give their children the patronym of their former owner or white father, the practice continued.…”

Making Sense of New Disease Categories: Naming, Spatialising, and Serialising in Genomic Medicine

“…According to Abel, Tyson, and Palsson (2019), renaming efforts can be both emancipating and subjugating, in that a new name holds both the potential to set the renamed free of their history and to weigh them down with new stigmas. In what might seem a contradiction in terms, patients and families experienced the new gene names as not only unsettled in meaning and easy to forget, but also as a means of empowerment.…”

Navigating Seas, Markets, and Sovereignties: Fishers and Occupational Slippage in the South China Sea

“…Names can generate trade or demands for cooperation. Occasionally, in the process, new identifications override old ones, which can be or must be forgotten (see Abel, Tyson, and Pálsson 2019).…”