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Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive
Journal of Historical Geography xxx (2017) 1e2
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Historical Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg
Review
Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, Marisa J. Fuentes. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia (2016). 217 pages US$45.00 hardcover. This is a powerful and thought-provoking book that raises important questions for anyone thinking, teaching, or writing about the history of slavery. Directly confronting a history ‘in which white men and women battered, abused, and disfigured African and Caribbean women physically, discursively, and archivally’ (p. 137), Marisa J. Fuentes aims to put gender, violence, and the writing of history at the heart of her analysis of slavery. The book takes off from the absence of enslaved women's voices in the archive of slave societies. Where they are present e in newspaper advertisements for runaways, compensation claims, legal documents, and proand anti-slavery political literature e they appear as fragments of dispossessed lives which have no beginnings or resolutions, no sense of these women's experiences, and usually present them as commodities, hypersexualised bodies, or as the subjects of violent abuse. Taking five such fragments from the archives of slavery in eighteenth-century Barbados, naming six women e Jane, Rachael and Joanna, Agatha, Molly and ‘Venus’ e Fuentes acknowledges the partiality of these archival traces and then embeds them in the structures of slavery's racialized and capitalist patriarchy in order to both reveal the dependence of that system on the violent appropriation of women's productive and reproductive labour, and its silencing of their voices in an archive produced by slave owners and the state in order to effect that appropriation. In doing so she demonstrates the structures of violent control embedded in the landscape of Bridgetown, as well as on the plantations; the basis on which the freedom of the few was made through the violent exploitation of the many; the dependence of white women's identities on a dialectical relationship with enslaved ‘servants’; the power of a legal system based on silencing voices and destroying bodies; and the centrality of gendered violence to the movement for the abolition of the slave trade, which aimed to use women's bodies to reproduce rather than to end slavery. This close interrogation of an absent archive for evidence of what it does not disclose requires some methodological work. There is some imaginative rewriting of sources which treat women as objects, owned or abused, to present them as experiencing subjects: what would Jane have experienced as she fled through Bridgetown's streets? What would ‘Venus’ have felt and thought as she was brutally beaten in one of the city's taverns? There is a careful use of aggregated evidence e of women's slave ownership, of compensation records, of newspaper advertisements, and of the production of urban space e to provide the grounds for understanding more individual experiences and trajectories. Indeed, this is a history that is keenly attentive to slavery's historical geography e the particularities of Barbados (with fewer spaces of http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2017.05.005 0305-7488
potential freedom than Jamaica or St Vincent), the way slavery shaped urban space through the deployment of an architecture of terror e the cage, the gallows, the whipping post, the crane at the docks where slaves were flogged e and the gendering of public and private space. Most significantly, Fuentes develops a method of ‘reading along the bias grain’, a metaphor drawn from tailoring, where ‘fabric is cut at an angle to produce elasticity’. This, then, ‘stretches the archive to accentuate the presence of enslaved women when not explicitly mentioned in certain documents’ (footnote 32 p. 156). It reminded me of how the new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC uses the lead ballast from a wrecked slave ship to materialize the bodies of the enslaved displaced on the Middle Passage. Thus, the expectations surrounding the presence of enslaved black women in public space shapes the movements of a young black man disguised as a woman e and armed with a sword and, perhaps, carrying his master's murderous intent e as he was forced to mediate between the powers and identities of white slaveholders. Also, the freedom of those white men and women, and also free(d) people of colour, is shown to be based on the labour e productive, reproductive, and sexual e of enslaved women. In this context, while it is very instructive that Fuentes demonstrates that Barbados, and particularly Bridgetown, had majorities of both enslaved women and white women slaveholders, she does not make much of the fact that most of the hardest plantation labour on these islands was also done by women. The unflinching focus on violence, abuse, silence, death, and absence is, as Fuentes acknowledges, a political and ethical choice that comes at some cost. ‘It begins’, she concludes, ‘to mark the way that the archive and history have erased black bodies and how the legacies of slavery e the racialized sexism and the legal, socioeconomic, and physical violence against people of African descent e manifest in the violence we continue to confront. It is a gesture towards the reckoning of our own time. It is a history of our present.’ (p. 148) A present in which there is a struggle to make black lives matter. She is well aware of the ‘political risk’ of ‘presenting “too much death” and violence’ (p. 146), and of one of the central arguments of the book which is that a history of slavery written in the agent-based language of power and resistance which grew out of earlier civil rights struggles simply will not do in the face of radical precarity. There is too much death and too much violence for that. This means knowing that there are other histories that are not being recounted so that this one can be: of the continuation and transformation of black Atlantic forms of knowledge and community; of organized violent revolt against slavery; and of the fears and contradictions that lay at the heart of the violence of the ‘system’ of Atlantic slavery. It is right to insist on the weight of pain and death rather than be soothed by the knowledge that there were healers and healing. It is right to question what counterviolence achieved (although it would have been fascinating to
2
Review / Journal of Historical Geography xxx (2017) 1e2
have had Fuentes's account of the 1816 slave revolt on Barbados where the rebels were reported to have rallied beneath a flag with ‘a rude drawing [which] served to Inflame the Passions, by representing the Union of a Black Man with a White Female’ as well as more decorous images of black and white masculinity, femininity, and loyalty). And it is right to emphasize that it was the enslaved that suffered for the fears and anxieties of white slaveholders. However, as well as insisting on the centrality of gender and violence e both physical and epistemic e to the history of
slavery, perhaps the most important question this book poses is how, and with what archives and methods, death and life, as well as both silence and the ‘shrieks and cries’ (p. 143) of the enslaved, can figure together in histories of slavery which go beyond the terms of ‘power’ and ‘resistance.’ Miles Ogborn Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom
Contents lists available at ScienceDirect
Journal of Historical Geography journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/jhg
Review
Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, Marisa J. Fuentes. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia (2016). 217 pages US$45.00 hardcover. This is a powerful and thought-provoking book that raises important questions for anyone thinking, teaching, or writing about the history of slavery. Directly confronting a history ‘in which white men and women battered, abused, and disfigured African and Caribbean women physically, discursively, and archivally’ (p. 137), Marisa J. Fuentes aims to put gender, violence, and the writing of history at the heart of her analysis of slavery. The book takes off from the absence of enslaved women's voices in the archive of slave societies. Where they are present e in newspaper advertisements for runaways, compensation claims, legal documents, and proand anti-slavery political literature e they appear as fragments of dispossessed lives which have no beginnings or resolutions, no sense of these women's experiences, and usually present them as commodities, hypersexualised bodies, or as the subjects of violent abuse. Taking five such fragments from the archives of slavery in eighteenth-century Barbados, naming six women e Jane, Rachael and Joanna, Agatha, Molly and ‘Venus’ e Fuentes acknowledges the partiality of these archival traces and then embeds them in the structures of slavery's racialized and capitalist patriarchy in order to both reveal the dependence of that system on the violent appropriation of women's productive and reproductive labour, and its silencing of their voices in an archive produced by slave owners and the state in order to effect that appropriation. In doing so she demonstrates the structures of violent control embedded in the landscape of Bridgetown, as well as on the plantations; the basis on which the freedom of the few was made through the violent exploitation of the many; the dependence of white women's identities on a dialectical relationship with enslaved ‘servants’; the power of a legal system based on silencing voices and destroying bodies; and the centrality of gendered violence to the movement for the abolition of the slave trade, which aimed to use women's bodies to reproduce rather than to end slavery. This close interrogation of an absent archive for evidence of what it does not disclose requires some methodological work. There is some imaginative rewriting of sources which treat women as objects, owned or abused, to present them as experiencing subjects: what would Jane have experienced as she fled through Bridgetown's streets? What would ‘Venus’ have felt and thought as she was brutally beaten in one of the city's taverns? There is a careful use of aggregated evidence e of women's slave ownership, of compensation records, of newspaper advertisements, and of the production of urban space e to provide the grounds for understanding more individual experiences and trajectories. Indeed, this is a history that is keenly attentive to slavery's historical geography e the particularities of Barbados (with fewer spaces of http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jhg.2017.05.005 0305-7488
potential freedom than Jamaica or St Vincent), the way slavery shaped urban space through the deployment of an architecture of terror e the cage, the gallows, the whipping post, the crane at the docks where slaves were flogged e and the gendering of public and private space. Most significantly, Fuentes develops a method of ‘reading along the bias grain’, a metaphor drawn from tailoring, where ‘fabric is cut at an angle to produce elasticity’. This, then, ‘stretches the archive to accentuate the presence of enslaved women when not explicitly mentioned in certain documents’ (footnote 32 p. 156). It reminded me of how the new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC uses the lead ballast from a wrecked slave ship to materialize the bodies of the enslaved displaced on the Middle Passage. Thus, the expectations surrounding the presence of enslaved black women in public space shapes the movements of a young black man disguised as a woman e and armed with a sword and, perhaps, carrying his master's murderous intent e as he was forced to mediate between the powers and identities of white slaveholders. Also, the freedom of those white men and women, and also free(d) people of colour, is shown to be based on the labour e productive, reproductive, and sexual e of enslaved women. In this context, while it is very instructive that Fuentes demonstrates that Barbados, and particularly Bridgetown, had majorities of both enslaved women and white women slaveholders, she does not make much of the fact that most of the hardest plantation labour on these islands was also done by women. The unflinching focus on violence, abuse, silence, death, and absence is, as Fuentes acknowledges, a political and ethical choice that comes at some cost. ‘It begins’, she concludes, ‘to mark the way that the archive and history have erased black bodies and how the legacies of slavery e the racialized sexism and the legal, socioeconomic, and physical violence against people of African descent e manifest in the violence we continue to confront. It is a gesture towards the reckoning of our own time. It is a history of our present.’ (p. 148) A present in which there is a struggle to make black lives matter. She is well aware of the ‘political risk’ of ‘presenting “too much death” and violence’ (p. 146), and of one of the central arguments of the book which is that a history of slavery written in the agent-based language of power and resistance which grew out of earlier civil rights struggles simply will not do in the face of radical precarity. There is too much death and too much violence for that. This means knowing that there are other histories that are not being recounted so that this one can be: of the continuation and transformation of black Atlantic forms of knowledge and community; of organized violent revolt against slavery; and of the fears and contradictions that lay at the heart of the violence of the ‘system’ of Atlantic slavery. It is right to insist on the weight of pain and death rather than be soothed by the knowledge that there were healers and healing. It is right to question what counterviolence achieved (although it would have been fascinating to
2
Review / Journal of Historical Geography xxx (2017) 1e2
have had Fuentes's account of the 1816 slave revolt on Barbados where the rebels were reported to have rallied beneath a flag with ‘a rude drawing [which] served to Inflame the Passions, by representing the Union of a Black Man with a White Female’ as well as more decorous images of black and white masculinity, femininity, and loyalty). And it is right to emphasize that it was the enslaved that suffered for the fears and anxieties of white slaveholders. However, as well as insisting on the centrality of gender and violence e both physical and epistemic e to the history of
slavery, perhaps the most important question this book poses is how, and with what archives and methods, death and life, as well as both silence and the ‘shrieks and cries’ (p. 143) of the enslaved, can figure together in histories of slavery which go beyond the terms of ‘power’ and ‘resistance.’ Miles Ogborn Queen Mary University of London, United Kingdom