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Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, by Marisa J. Fuentes

2017; Oxford University Press; Volume: 133; Issue: 560 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1093/ehr/cex391

1477-4534

Natalie Zacek,

Anthropological Studies and Insights

If historical sources produced by enslaved people in the American South are scant, those for the British Caribbean are nearly non-existent. In this tightly focused study, Marisa J. Fuentes examines the lived experience of women of colour in eighteenth-century Bridgetown, Barbados, illuminating the little-studied and frequently misunderstood practice of urban slavery. As the town was home to a significant number of female slaveholders, who tended to own slaves of their gender, Fuentes’ aim is to expand ‘the extant scholarly focus on white men’s domination of black and brown women in slave societies’ (p. 1) to engage with relationships between women across lines of race and servitude. This is a laudable but challenging prospect, given that not only are the surviving sources entirely produced by white men, but their references to enslaved women are fleeting. Fuentes centres each of the book’s five chapters around an individual woman, each of whom makes a brief appearance within one or two documents. ‘Jane’ limns the possible experiences of a runaway whose body was marked by ritual scarification, branding and accidental or deliberate injury; ‘Joanna’ tells of a slave employed in a notorious brothel owned by a free woman of mixed race, and her attempts to gain freedom for herself and her son; the especially intriguing ‘Agatha’ foregrounds both the unfaithful white wife and the enslaved boy whom Agatha’s lover sent to her house, dressed in women’s clothing and armed with a sword with which he may have been charged to murder Agatha’s husband; ‘Molly’ depicts a ‘Negro Wench’ (p. 100) hanged for her alleged attempted poisoning of a white man; and ‘Venus’ focuses not on a single historical figure, but on the prototypical image, so often mobilised within abolitionist discourse, of female slaves undergoing horrific public punishments, including flogging, burning and mutilation.