Unearthing personal stories from the archive, Wicked Flesh shows how black women, from Senegambia in West Africa to the Caribbean to New Orleans, used intimacy and kinship to redefine freedom in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Their practices laid the groundwork for the emancipation struggles of the nineteenth century.

"With its deep archival research and compelling analysis, Wicked Flesh paints fascinating portraits of individual women and their efforts to practice freedom and firmly situates New Orleans within the larger French Atlantic world."—Jennifer Spear, author of Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans

"Wicked Flesh is a powerful book that will set the standard for studies of gender and slavery to follow. It exemplifies the generative quality of a grounded engagement of the archives of slavery through contemporary theoretical work on race and the notion of Diaspora."—Jennifer Morgan, author of Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in the Making of New World Slavery

"Jessica Marie Johnson has an original, bold historical imagination, a gift for excavating and exploiting fragmentary archival material, and a beautiful, poetic writing style. Both her argument and her theoretical approach are important and timely."—Emily Clark, author of The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World