women in the archive. Instead of a social history of enslaved life in Bridgetown and Barbados, I examine archival fragments in order to understand how these documents shape the meaning produced about them in their own time and our current historical practices. In other words, this is a methodological and ethical project that seeks to examine the archive and historical production on multiple levels to destabilize the British colonial discourse invested in enslaved women as property. The impetus to “recover” knowledge about how enslaved women made meaning from their lives is an important aspect of the historiography of Caribbean slavery. A significant amount of historical scholarship now exists showing how these women enacted their personhood despite their experiences of dehumanization and commodification.5 This book builds on that scholarship; indeed, it has allowed me to ask a different set of questions concerning the body of the archive, the enslaved body in the archive, and the materiality of the enslaved body. This work seeks to understand the production of “personhood” in the context of Bridgetown and this British Caribbean archive, while troubling the political project of agency.6 It articulates the forces of power that bore down on enslaved women, who sometimes survived in ways not typically heroic, and who sometimes succumbed to the violence inflicted on them. Each chapter examines one woman in the context of eighteenth-century Bridgetown as she came into archival view. The chapters are titled after the women who are named in the fragments I explore when possible, in order to contest their fragmentation and to challenge the impetus of colonial authorities to objectify enslaved people in the records by generic namings such as “Negro” or “slave.”
Figure 1. Prospect of Bridgetown in Barbados, by Samuel Copen (London, 1695). Courtesy of the Barbados Museum and Historical Society.
Dispossessed Lives sets out to answer several questions pertaining to enslaved women in the urban Caribbean. How did these women negotiate physical and sexual violence, colonial power, and the demands of their female owners in the eighteenth century? In what ways did urban enslavement differ from the plantation complex? How was freedom defined in this slave society? How did architectures and symbols of terror—such as the Cage that held runaway slaves, and the execution gallows—shape how enslaved women were confined and controlled in an urban context? And finally, what do the archival fragments describing enslaved women alternately uncover and refuse to reveal about their racial, gendered, and sexual experiences as enslaved subjects?
In answering these questions this book thematically illustrates the connections between gender, urban space, and enslavement. Chapter 1 follows an enslaved runaway named Jane through the streets of Bridgetown revealing the precarity of fugitive bodies in urban areas and within colonial discourses in runaway advertisements. Chapters 2 and 3 concentrate on the production of enslaved female “sexuality” dialectically connected to white female identities and enslaved prostitution. These issues are addressed by revisiting the archives of a free(d) mulatto brothel owner and in chapter 3, closely reading an elite white adulteress’s deposition about her sexual affair. In Chapter 4, Molly, an enslaved woman executed for allegedly attempting to poison a white man, characterizes the construction of enslaved (female) criminality and the empty terms of “guilt” and “innocence” in the Barbados legal system governing slavery, which denied the enslaved the ability to testify in any courts. Executions of the enslaved map the functions of physical urban spaces in rituals of colonial punishments, and the power colonial authorities mobilized to invade enslaved afterlives. Finally, in Chapter 5, I bring attention to the “excessive” images of violence on enslaved female bodies that emerge in the debates to abolish the slave trade and contemplate the aurality of pain as a way to consider the rhetorical demands of otherwise anonymous historical subjects.
Over two decades of scholarship on the social histories of gender and slavery and theoretical work on the politics of the archive serve as the foundation for this book’s emphasis on historical production and the archives of enslaved women in Caribbean slavery. These social histories of enslaved women’s everyday lives allow me to focus specific attention on the questions of archival fragmentation and historicity without reproducing their labors on the historical, social, and economic circumstances of slavery in the Atlantic world.7 Driven by questions of historical production in the context of archives that are partial, incomplete, and structured by privileges of class, race, and gender, my work follows the path-breaking scholarship of Deborah Gray White, Jennifer Morgan, Camilla Townsend, and Natalie Zemon Davis, who found ingenious ways to use known biases within particular archives to ask seemingly impossible questions of subjects whose presence, when noted, is systematically distorted. Scholars in the fields of colonial slavery and women’s history more broadly understand and contend with scant sources from the enslaved perspective, and this is particularly true in the colonial British Caribbean.
This study also draws attention to the nature of the archives that inform historical works on slavery by employing a methodology that purposely subverts the overdetermining power of colonial discourses. By changing the perspective of a document’s author to that of an enslaved subject, questioning the archives’ veracity and filling out miniscule fragmentary mentions or the absence of evidence with spatial and historical context our historical interpretation shifts to the enslaved viewpoint in important ways. As previous scholarship has generated substantial knowledge about how enslaved women made meaning in their lives despite commodification and domination, my book does not simply seek to recover enslaved female subjects from historical obscurity. Instead, it makes plain the manner in which the violent systems and structures of white supremacy produced devastating images of enslaved female personhood, and how these pervade the archive and govern what can be known about them. Rather than leaving enslaved women “vulnerable to the readings and misreadings of whoever chooses to make assumptions about them,”8 my book probes the construction of enslaved women in the archival records, using methods that at once subvert and illuminate biases in these accounts in order to map a range of life conditions that profoundly challenge assumptions about the “slave experience” in Caribbean systems of domination.
What would a narrative of slavery look like when taking into account “power in the production of history?” That is, how do slaveholders’ interests affect how they document their world, and in turn, how do these very documents result in persistent historical silences?9 What would it mean to be critical of how our historical methodologies dependent on such sources often reproduce these silences? There is not a paucity of sources about slavery in the Caribbean from the words and perspectives of white authorities and slave owners. In fact, there are vital archival materials that describe the contours of enslaved women’s work and reproduction in the Caribbean. Using sources such as probate records, inventories of property, and descriptions of punishment and profit, scholars have mined the words and worlds of colonial authorities for clues to how the enslaved lived, worked, reproduced, and perished. Indeed, there are few if any new sources in this field; and Dispossessed Lives uses some of these same records but draws different conclusions by productively mining archival silences and pausing at the corruptive nature of this material.10 The objectification of the enslaved allowed authorities to reduce them to valued objects to be bought and sold, used to produce profit and to retain and bequeath wealth. It also made the enslaved disposable when they could no longer labor for profit. This same objectification led to the violence in and of the archive. Enslaved women appear as historical subjects through the form and content of archival documents in the manner in which they lived: spectacularly violated, objectified, disposable, hypersexualized, and silenced. The violence is transferred from the enslaved bodies to the documents that count, condemn, assess, and evoke them, and we receive them in this condition. Epistemic violence originates from the knowledge produced about enslaved women by white men and women in this society, and that knowledge
