Contested Bodies

By opening with a powerful vignette and image of an unnamed naked enslaved woman suspended by her ankles, Sasha Turner takes readers of Contested Bodies right to the heart of her study. Enslaved women's bodies, the primary subject of this book, represented sites of contestation that abolitionists, slave traders, physicians, seamen, and enslavers sought to control. Although we know very little about the young woman who was tortured for three days before she died, we know a great deal about how abolitionists and the ship's crew treated her body. “The reproductive bodies of female slaves,” Turner explains, “were the vessels through which abolitionists articulated the pathway to freedom” (p. 2). Through court testimony, we hear Capt. John Kimber's views of this woman and learn that his thoughts about enslaved people differed from those of abolitionists. Turner's fresh analysis is presented in seven chapters that take readers back and forth between Jamaica and England introducing abolitionists such as William Wilberforce and James Ramsay as well as enslaved people whose stories are sometimes limited to quick reference in historical documents. Her evidence is impressive as she draws upon plantation records, planters' correspondence and diaries, abolitionist literature, slave narratives, court cases, legislative records, and runaway advertisements. The opening chapters offer a rich analysis of how enslaved mothers and their children served as catalysts for abolitionist rhetoric, but this study is more than an analysis of antislavery efforts. It is also the story of enslaved women and children. It documents the lives of women such as Hetty, who delivered a stillborn infant after being severely beaten prior to giving birth. Within “a few days” the mother joined her child on the other side when Hetty “died of her injuries” (p. 68

Art · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Rhetoric · Sociology · Subject (documents · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Cuban History and Society · Gender Studies · History · Law