as other Caribbean towns, Bridgetown sustained a significant population of urban slaves who labored under the duress of strict laws limiting their movement and architectures—both the structures of policy and the built environment—that ensured their confinement and punishment. Moreover, the surplus enslaved and female population of this town allowed slaveowners to turn enslaved women into sexual objects for incoming soldiers and sailors, a lucrative informal economy for their owners. Examining the degree to which colonial authorities utilized public punishments and structures of confinement complicates discussions of the possibilities of freedom and mobility in urban enslavement.
Since the late 1990s, scholars from a range of fields, including history, have challenged and refined the concept of agency as it applies to enslaved people. In her now definitive book, Saidiya Hartman argues that agency connotes the idea of “will” and “intent,” both of which were foreclosed by the legal condition of chattel slavery.21 Walter Johnson contends that agency as a trope originated from noble origins in the Civil Rights era but should be carefully interrogated for the conflation of its meaning with resistance and humanity in slavery scholarship.22 These scholars argue that the issue of “redress” is inescapable in writing histories of black life as the legacies of racism, racialized sexism, and poverty continue to haunt our present. In this effort, Hartman’s concerns shed light on the contradictions, exclusions, and demands of black people in post-emancipation liberal humanist discourses of rights and duties.23 She asks us to consider to what extent our work on the past is in service of redress and therefore what is the historian’s relationship to her subjects? To what end do we write these narratives?24
At stake here are the ways in which scholars, working within the paradigm of traditional African American historiography, insist that agency—akin to resistance—is still the most appropriate lens through which to examine slave life.25 Stephanie Camp contends that “slave resistance in its many forms is a necessary point of historical inquiry, and it continues to demand research.”26 Camp recognizes that studies of resistance have changed but, she argues, we “need not [abandon] the category altogether.”27 The present study troubles similar tropes of agency in Chapters 2 and 3 by examining the lives of white and free(d) women of color whose social and economic power relied on patriarchy and slave ownership.28 In Chapter 2 I address this issue in relationship to Rachael Pringle Polgreen, a mixed-race slave-owning woman in Barbados.29 Using the scholarship of Michel-Rolph Trouillot and Saba Mahmood, I question the application of sexual agency to enslaved and free(d) women’s sexual relations with white men in the context of this slave society where many enslaved and free women were subjected to unequal power relations and violence. Focusing specifically on women also deconstructs “resistance” as armed, militaristic, physical, and triumphant—a vision of resistance particularly resonant in the Caribbean with its histories of large-scale uprisings.
In counterpoint to definitions of agency, the concept of “social death” addresses how the enslaved were constrained by law, commodification, and subjection. In recent years, scholars have expanded on Orlando Patterson’s pivotal text Slavery and Social Death (1982), detailing the process by which Africans were made into property and how the condition of slavery in the past adversely affects how they can be accounted for historically. Still, prominent scholars reassert the imperative of resistance studies. In Vincent Brown’s important analysis of social death, he urges us away “from seeing slavery as a condition to viewing enslavement as a predicament, in which enslaved Africans and their descendants never ceased to pursue a politics of belonging, mourning, accounting, and regeneration.”30 Chapter 4, however, reminds us of the extent of power wielded by authorities and how the enslaved were subjected to arbitrary executions at the caprice of their owners and colonial officials, therefore limiting their strategies of mourning and shaping the perceptions of enslaved humanity and resistance.
Arguably, as many have noted, concepts of agency, resistance, and social death, perhaps even more than in other historical fields, continue to influence the ways we write and think about the enslaved and about systems of slavery and domination. Dispossessed Lives maintains that these historiographical debates are as important as illuminating the actions of the enslaved, because they have implications for what we have come to know and the limits of what we can know about the history of slavery. While the majority of studies of slavery have focused on the antebellum U.S. South, the British Caribbean offers a different tale, one in which slavery depended on a factory of violence in sugar production unsurpassed in North America. Life spans for most of the enslaved were brief and the physical distance from imperial control allowed particular types of atrocities on their bodies. On an island like Barbados, where sustained or permanent flight was nearly impossible, “rival geographies”—spaces created by the enslaved in defiance of the restrictions of plantation life—were threatened by surveillance, dangerous waterways, and deplorable material conditions.31 This study does not suppress the historical efforts of enslaved people to resist their circumstances. Rather, it presents the agonizing decisions they made in the face of violent retribution from colonial authorities. Dwelling on these uncomfortable junctures in history highlights the messy and contradictory behaviors of enslaved people. This book’s theoretical underpinnings at once read along the bias grain of the archive32 and against the politics of the historiography to gain nuanced understandings of what Avery Gordon calls “complex personhood” and the minute details of fragmentary lives that are challenging for historians to access.33
The fields of women’s and gender studies and black feminist theory give significant attention to knowledge production and the intersectional experiences of women; and these fields frame the questions with which I approach this history and these enslaved female subjects. This study argues that there was something particular about being enslaved and female in slave societies even as it resists more traditional concepts of gender; it dwells purposely on feminist epistemological questions concerning how (historical) knowledge is produced about enslaved female subjects through the archive. I draw on a range of interdisciplinary black feminist scholars, including historians, cultural studies scholars, and novelists who interrogate how black women have been represented historically and contemporarily; their sexual violations; and their hypersexualized images.34 Moreover, these scholars use analyses of race and gender to destabilize the power of dominant knowledge and representations of women of the African diaspora. My focus on the centrality of enslaved women to the project of slavery follows in the wake of such work and elucidates the manner in which their specific sexualized identities and social constructions placed them in particular roles and positions in Caribbean and Barbadian slave societies. It also demonstrates how gender and sexuality were shaped and produced in a society where white and Afro-Barbadian women outnumbered men. Building on Jennifer Morgan’s scholarship, which illustrates how reproduction signified a central experience for enslaved women, I consider the ways in which sexuality was inhabited, performed and consequential for urban female slaves.
Finally, this book examines our own desires as historical scholars to recover what might never be recoverable and to allow for uncertainty, unresolvable narratives, and contradictions. It begins from the premise that history is a production as much as an accounting of the past, and that our ability to recount has much to do with the conditions under which our subjects lived. This is project concerned with an ethics of history and the consequences of reproducing indifference to violence against and the silencing of black lives. Our responsibility to these vulnerable historical subjects is to acknowledge and actively resist the perpetuation of their subjugation and commodification in our own discourse and historical practices. It is a gesture toward redress.
CHAPTER 1
Jane: Fugitivity,
