Closer to Freedom

Content Warning: This section of the guide discusses—often in graphic detail—slavery, white supremacy, killing, sexual assault and rape, torture, surveillance, and other forms of violence. Source materials also include racist and sexist language.

Stephanie M. H. Camp (1968-2014) was a feminist historian of enslavement. She received her BA and PhD in history from the University of Pennsylvania and her MA from Yale University. She was a professor at both Rice University and the University of Washington, and she gave lectures at the Monroe State Prison in Washington.

Camp had a particular interest in the racialized and gendered geography of enslavement. Unlike many historians of slavery’s geography, Camp does not focus on the built world of the Plantation South space but instead on movement within that world, which exceeded the boundaries of the plantation complex. In her monograph, Closer to Freedom, she theorizes geographical systems of white containment of Black mobility and Black “rival” geographical systems of (limited) mobility. She argues that restrictions on enslaved people’s mobility are a hallmark of slavery and underscores the great efforts and risks that many enslaved people made to experience the most limited mobility.

Camp was part of the “new slavery studies” that emerged at the beginning of the 21st century and was co-editor, with Edward Baptist, of New Studies in the History of American Slavery (University of Georgia Press, 2006).