Dispossessed Lives

An advertisement for a runaway female slave; the will of an infamous free(d) woman of color; the legal deposition of a white adulteress embroiled in a scheme involving an enslaved boy in gendered disguise; and a petition for compensation following the execution of Molly, an enslaved woman accused of attempted poisoning are some of the tantalizing archival fragments around which Marisa J. Fuentes has constructed a gripping narrative about the lives of enslaved women of African descent in eighteenth-century Barbados—and Bridgetown, particularly. Yet, as her subtitle makes plain, Fuentes's book is not simply a history of enslaved black women in the urban Caribbean, nor does it seek to bring to light never-before-seen evidence newly unearthed in a British Caribbean archive. Rather, Dispossessed Lives aims to reconstruct the experiences of enslaved women based on a patchwork of surviving archival documents while simultaneously interrogating both the traditional archive and the discipline of history. This is a book, Fuentes argues, concerned with “violence in its many configurations: physical, archival, and epistemic” (p. 6). She focuses on the “‘mutilated historicity’ of enslaved women (the violent condition in which enslaved women appear in the archive disfigured and violated)” and addresses new epistemologies available to historians “to recover what might never be recoverable and to allow for uncertainty, unresolvable narratives, and contradictions” (pp. 7, 12

Art · Dismemberment · Historicity (philosophy · Literature · Narrative · Political science · Sociology · White (mutation · Caribbean history, culture, and politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · Cuban History and Society · Gender Studies · History · Law

• Into the Hills

  Open Access•Anne Eller•Journal of Social History•2024

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