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Dispossessed Lives
Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive
Language:
English
Published/Copyright:
2016
About this book
In the eighteenth century, Bridgetown, Barbados, was heavily populated by both enslaved and free women. Marisa J. Fuentes creates a portrait of urban Caribbean slavery in this colonial town from the perspective of these women whose stories appear only briefly in historical records. Fuentes takes us through the streets of Bridgetown with an enslaved runaway; inside a brothel run by a freed woman of color; in the midst of a white urban household in sexual chaos; to the gallows where enslaved people were executed; and within violent scenes of enslaved women's punishments. In the process, Fuentes interrogates the archive and its historical production to expose the ongoing effects of white colonial power that constrain what can be known about these women.
Combining fragmentary sources with interdisciplinary methodologies that include black feminist theory and critical studies of history and slavery, Dispossessed Lives demonstrates how the construction of the archive marked enslaved women's bodies, in life and in death. By vividly recounting enslaved life through the experiences of individual women and illuminating their conditions of confinement through the legal, sexual, and representational power wielded by slave owners, colonial authorities, and the archive, Fuentes challenges the way we write histories of vulnerable and often invisible subjects.
Author / Editor information
Marisa J. Fuentes is Associate Professor of Women's and Gender Studies and History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick.
Reviews
"Dispossessed Lives is an important and complex work that demonstrates how historians can employ a range of interdisciplinary methodologies in order to tease out, in sensitive and thoughtful ways, the hidden corporeality of enslavement, or, put another way, the lives, deaths, and bodies of enslaved women that are buried in the archive."
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"Original in both content and structure, Dispossessed Lives offers a nuanced interpretation of race, gender, sexuality, and the power of the archive in the eighteenth-century urban British Atlantic. Marisa J. Fuentes is masterful with her use of extremely scarce primary source material, forcing us to rethink methodology and teaching us how to understand what is not present in the archives."
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"Dispossessed Lives exemplifies the best new historical scholarship on slavery and gender. Marisa Fuentes's compelling study of women's lives in and around Bridgetown leaves the reader with a clear sense of who these women were and how they navigated the terrain of a Caribbean slave society. At the same time, Fuentes's engagement with the problems of the archive testifies to the powerful entanglements that constitute the afterlife of slavery. This is an important study that fundamentally reshapes the questions we are compelled to ask about the histories of slavery in the Atlantic world."
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"Dispossessed Lives is an impassioned and meticulously researched call to rethink how history, as a discipline, can approach the absence of archival evidence concerning enslaved women's lives in the Americas . . . [Fuentes] makes a compelling argument about the practice of history as a discipline itself, in addition to mapping new archival territory."
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"Dispossessed Lives reflects the tremendous complexity embedded in projects that attempt to extricate the histories of enslaved women from an archive seemingly bent on their erasure. Through artful discussions of the bondwomen who comprise her chapters, reading into silence as well as sound, Fuentes encourages historians to assess the limits of enslaved agency, highlighting the real, violent strictures that shaped the lives and afterlives of enslaved women residing in eighteenth-century Bridgetown. In doing so, Fuentes demonstrates what is possible when we approach familiar evidence with fresh eyes and innovative strategies."
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"[A]n astonishing and discipline-changing piece of scholarship. Interested in black feminist theory, gender, sexuality, slavery, and the urban Caribbean, [Fuentes'] interdisciplinary deep dive into the archives collides with so-called conventional understandings of historical methodology, historiography, knowledge production, and especially historical archival research . . . scholars can no longer rationalize the absence of marginalized figures like the women in this book because the archival documents do not explicitly reveal them. Moreover, one will be hard pressed to tread heavily ever again over those documents--or their already fragment-rendered subjects--after reading this incredibly important work."
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Frontmatter
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Contents
vii -
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Maps
viii -
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Introduction
1 -
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Chapter 1. Jane: Fugitivity, Space, and Structures of Control in Bridgetown
13 -
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Chapter 2. Rachael and Joanna: Power, Historical Figuring, and Troubling Freedom
46 -
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Chapter 3. Agatha: White Women, Slave Owners, and the Dialectic of Racialized Gender
70 -
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Chapter 4. Molly: Enslaved Women, Condemnation, and Gendered Terror
100 -
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Chapter 5. “Venus”: Abolition Discourse, Gendered Violence, and the Archive
124 -
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Epilogue
144 -
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Notes
149 -
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Index
205 -
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Acknowledgments
213
Publishing information
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
eBook published on:
June 20, 2016
eBook ISBN:
9780812293005
Pages and Images/Illustrations in book
Main content:
232
eBook ISBN:
9780812293005
Keywords for this book
urban slavery; colonial era; black feminist theory; colonial archives; historical production; enslaved women; caribbean history; violence against women; 18th century slavery; Barbados; intersectionality; slavery studies; representations of enslaved women; caribbean slavery; colonial power; historical methodology; feminist history; colonialism; black feminism; historical archives; racial power dynamics; black women; gender history studies; british caribbean colonies; historiography; sex work; slave trade; slaveowner; abolition; biography
Audience(s) for this book
For universities and colleges of further and higher education
