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Towards a More Intimate Understanding of Black Female Lives in Slavery

Review products

Stella Dadzie, A Kick in the Belly: Women, Slavery and Resistance (London: Verso, 2020), 209+xii pp. ISBN: 9781788738842, £14.99.
Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020), 316 pp. ISBN: 9780812252385, $34.95.
Sophie White, Voices of the Enslaved: Love, Labor, and Longing in French Louisiana (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2019), 286+xviii pp. ISBN: 9781469654041, $32.50.

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  28 October 2022

Tijl Vanneste Open the ORCID record for Tijl Vanneste [Opens in a new window]
Tijl Vanneste*
Affiliation:
Portuguese Institute of International Relations (IPRI), Universidade Nova de Lisboa, Lisbon, Portugal
*
Email: tvanneste@fcsh.unl.pt
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Abstract

Historians working on slavery always must perform a balancing act between narrating the atrocities of oppression and the possibilities of resistance to and escape from it. The three books under review all do a wonderful job in showing us a way out of this conundrum. Jessica Johnson and Sophie White do so by analysing the intimate lives of enslaved women in early modern New Orleans and West Africa (Johnson) and enslaved women and men in Louisiana (White), while Stella Dadzie looks at the means of resistance taken by the enslaved in the British Atlantic world. Their work allows us to better understand the historical reality of slavery as it applied to at least 15 million people, while stressing the notion that the historical actors whose voices were recovered, were first of all humans, all of them different, and all of them, in their own way, able to deal with the horrors imposed on them – by being intimate with their peers, by running away, or by fighting their oppressors.

Keywords

history of slaverygender studies
Type
Review Article
Information
Itinerario , Volume 46 , Special Issue 3: Gender, Intimate Networks, and Global Commerce in the Early Modern Period , December 2022 , pp. 450 - 459
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Copyright
Copyright © The Author(s), 2022. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Research Institute for History, Leiden University

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Footnotes

The original version of this article was published with some author information omitted. A notice detailing this has been published and the errors rectified in the online PDF and HTML version.

References

1 There have been important pioneers working in other languages; Frantz Fanon, Aimé Césaire, and Anton de Kom spring to mind, not to mention scholars working today in regions affected by slavery through other colonisers—particularly France, Portugal, Spain, and the Netherlands—but because of the limited scope of this review, the focus is on academic development in the Anglophone world.

2 Mustakeem, Sowande’, Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage (Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2016)CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Candido, Mariana P. and Jones, Adam, “Introduction,” in African Women in the Atlantic World: Property, Vulnerability and Mobility, 1660–1880, ed. Candido, Mariana P. and Jones, Adam, 1–15 (Woodbridge: Boydell & Brewer, 2019), 4CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Historians that immediately come to mind are John Thornton and Kwasi Konadu.

4 The ability to connect individuals with their names is crucial in solving this tension, which is why efforts such as the African Names Database are so important. See https://www.slavevoyages.org/resources/about#african-names-database/0/en/.

5 In this regard, see Amussen, Susan D. and Poska, Allyson M., “Restoring Miranda: Gender and the Limits of European Patriarchy in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” Journal of Global History 7 (2012), 342–63CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

6 A discussion on the notion of “African” as race, its construction, and its use by black Africans themselves as part of an identity that unifies falls outside the scope of this essay but would be most interesting.

7 The discussion of who exactly constitutes “we” is difficult, and one I have not much interest in getting into. For me, in this context, it suffices to say that “we” encompasses Western societies at large, which have benefitted immensely from slave labour, and which are still struggling to come to terms with that.

8 The role of time and trauma is discussed in literature, for instance in Octavia Butler's Kindred (1979) and Toni Morrison's Beloved (1987), but also in Haile Gerima's movie Sankofa (1993). Intergenerational trauma can be witnessed in the intergenerational transfer of nobody-was-safe stories. Research has shown that there is a correlation between present-day levels of mistrust and the intensity of the slave trade in regions of Africa that were hit the hardest. See Nunn, Nathan and Wantchekon, Leonard, “The Slave Trade and the Origins of Mistrust in Africa,” American Economic Review 101:7 (2011), 3221–52CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Saidiya Hartman has also done crucial work in this regard; see for instance “The Time of Slavery,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101:4 (2002), 757–77.

9 Both quotes come from an interrogation of Kenet on 10 June 1767, originally recorded in French.