on the empirical matter of the eighteenth-century Caribbean, we can only create historical narratives that reproduce these violent colonial discourses. The work of this book is to make plain how and why this knowledge was created and reproduced, and to employ new methodologies that disrupt this process in order to illuminate subjugated, “marginalized and fugitive knowledge [and perspectives] from,” enslaved women.11
In each chapter I contend with the historical paradox and methodological challenges produced by the near erasure of enslaved women’s own perspectives, in spite and because of the superabundance of words white Europeans wrote about them. By applying theoretical approaches to power, the production of text, and constructions of race and gender to the written archive, I question historical methods that search for archival veracity, statistical substantiation, and empiricism in sources wherein enslaved women are voiceless and objectified. The subjects in this study, the laborers, the enslaved women, men, and children, lived their “historical” lives as numbers on an estate inventory or a ship’s ledger and their afterlives often shaped by additional commodification. The very call to “find more sources” about people who left few if any of their own reproduces the same erasures and silences they experienced in the eighteenth-century Caribbean world by demanding the impossible. Paying attention to these archival imbalances illuminates systems of power and deconstructs the influences of colonial constructions of race, gender, and sexuality on the sources that inform our work. This enables a nuanced engagement with the layers of domination under which enslaved women and men endured, resisted, and died. This is a methodological project concerned with the ethical implications of historical practice and representations of enslaved life and death produced through different types of violence.
Violence pervades the histories of slavery and this book. The violence committed on enslaved bodies permeates the archive, and the methods of history heretofore have not adequately offered the vocabulary to reconstitute “the depth, density, and intricacies of the dialectic of subjection and subjectivity” in enslaved lives.12 A legible and linear narrative cannot sufficiently account for the palimpsest of material and meaning embedded in the lives of people shaped by the intimacies and ubiquity of violence. Therefore, this book dwells on violence in its many configurations: physical, archival, and epistemic. The most obvious instances are physical—the ways violence inflicted on enslaved bodies turned them into objects in slave societies. Chapter 5 features and reproduces the inordinate accounts of enslaved women’s beatings in the records of the slave trade abolition debates. This reproduction brings to the fore how the excessive nature of such images works to silence these violent experiences beneath the titillated gazes of white men, abolitionist sensationalism, and historiographical skepticism, as well as our unavoidable complicity in replicating these accounts in order to historicize them.
Violence, then, is the historical material that animates this book in its subtle and excessive modes—on the body of the archive, the body in the archive and the material body.13 Focusing on the “mutilated historicity” of enslaved women (the violent condition in which enslaved women appear in the archive disfigured and violated), this book shows how “the violence of slavery made actual bodies disappear.”14 For example, Chapter 4 assesses execution records of enslaved women and men to challenge our understanding of colonial laws. In a system that forbade the enslaved a legal voice, the arbitrary and capricious nature of enslaved “crime” and punishment comes to the fore and challenges our readings of enslaved resistance. It also explicates the reach of these laws, which in 1768 demanded that the bodies of executed slaves be weighted down and thrown into the sea to prevent the enslaved community from rituals of mourning. Colonial power subsequently made the archive complicit in obscuring the offenses committed against the enslaved through the language of criminality. My work resists the authority of the traditional archive that legitimates structures built on racial and gendered subjugation and spectacles of terror. This violence of slavery concealed enslaved bodies and voices from others in their own the time and we lose them in the archive due to those systems of power and violence. Each chapter contends with these circumstances and uses different methods to draw out the link between violence, archival disappearance, and historical representation in the fragmentary records in which enslaved women materialize. The nature of this archive demands this effort.
Dispossessed Lives uses archival sources at times “for contrary purposes.”15 I stretch archival fragments by reading along the bias grain to eke out extinguished and invisible but no less historically important lives.16 In Chapter 3, for example, I use the court case of sexual entanglement between two white men and a married white woman to discuss the ways the presence and expectations of enslaved women in Bridgetown gave white women particular forms of power. Beliefs about enslaved women also enabled a young enslaved boy, owned by one of the men in the case, to dress as a woman in order to access public spaces without being perceived as a threat. Here the absence of explicit representations of enslaved women does not mean they have no bearing on the subjectivities and possibilities for other people in this society. I purposely fill out their absence as one way to address the above methodological questions. Dispossessed Lives demonstrates what other knowledge can be produced from archival sources if we apply the theoretical concerns of both cultural studies and critical historiography to documents and sources. It is an argument that history can still be made, and we can gain an understanding of the past even as we consciously resist efforts to reproduce the lived inequities of our subjects and the discourses that served to distort them.
Within the scope of this book I make two interventions into the extant literature on slavery in the Atlantic world. First, I argue that close attention to the specificities of urban slavery challenges scholarly representations of plantation slavery as more violent and spatially confining than slavery in other locales.17 To do this, I map how urban slave owners constructed and used architectures of terror and control on this seemingly mobile enslaved population through imprisonment, public punishment, and legal restrictions. Second, much of the previous historical scholarship on slavery influenced by the crucial Civil Rights and Black Power activism of the 1960s and 1970s focuses on enslaved resistance, a vital (and decades long) effort to gain insight into the “agency” of enslaved people and to refute earlier depictions of the enslaved as passive and submissive.18 The agency of enslaved and free(d) people of color, however, was more complex than the “liberal humanist” framework allows.19 We need to examine the excruciating conditions faced by enslaved women in order to understand the significance of their behaviors within the confounding and violent world of the colonial Caribbean. Finally, the centrality of gender in this study illuminates how African and Afro-Caribbean women experienced constructions of sexuality and gender in relation to white women and, as important, how enslaved women’s subaltern positions in slave society shaped the ways they entered the archive and, consequently, history.
A significant amount of scholarship on Atlantic slavery necessarily highlights life in the sugar plantation complex.20 Certainly, the majority of enslaved Africans and Afro-Caribbean people lived and died producing sugar for mass exportation from the Caribbean. But a focus on the rural conditions of slavery leaves the urban context underexamined and too easily subject to generalizations. Scholarly distinctions between rural and urban slavery tend to create a rigid dichotomy between the violence of rural slavery and the mobility and less arduous conditions of urban life, ignoring systems of surveillance and control in urban architectures and spaces. In addition, the predominantly domestic labor performed by enslaved women in towns might be read as less dangerous than field labor. To be sure, the enslaved who worked in sugar production were more vulnerable to early deaths, lack of sustenance, and the terror of plantation punishments. However, this did not mean that domestic or urban labor was necessarily easier and less constraining or violent. Dispossessed Lives reconsiders these assertions by examining the continuities and distinctions of violence from the planation to the urban complex. I explore the mechanisms and technologies created and employed by colonial authorities to control an enslaved population outside the confines of a plantation or the surveillance
