Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive

Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive内容摘要：

Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, Marisa J. Fuentes. University of Pennsylvania Press, Philadelphia (2016). 217 pages US$45.00 hardcover. This is a powerful and thought-provoking book that raises important questions for anyone thinking, teaching or writing about the history of slavery. Directly confronting a history ‘in which white men and women battered, abused, and disfigured African and Caribbean women physically, discursively, and archivally’ (p. 137), Marisa J. Fuentes aims to put gender, violence and the writing of history at the heart of her analysis of slavery. The book takes off from the absence of enslaved women’s voices in the archive of slave societies. Where they are present – in newspaper advertisements for runaways, compensation claims, legal documents and pro- and antislavery political literature – they appear as fragments of dispossessed lives which have no beginnings or resolutions, no sense of these women’s experiences, and usually present them as commodities, hypersexualised bodies or as the subjects of violent abuse. Taking five such fragments from the archives of slavery in eighteenth-century Barbados, naming six women – Jane, Rachael and Joanna, Agatha, Molly and ‘Venus’ – Fuentes acknowledges the partiality of these archival traces and then embeds them in the structures of slavery’s racialised and capitalist patriarchy in order to both reveal the dependence of that system on the violent appropriation of women’s productive and reproductive labour, and its silencing of their voices in an archive produced by slave owners and the state in order to effect that appropriation. In doing so she demonstrates the structures of violent control embedded in the landscape of Bridgetown, as well as in the plantations; the basis on which the freedom of the few was made through the violent exploitation of the many; the dependence of white women’s identities on a dialectical relationship with enslaved ‘servants’; the power of a legal system based on silencing voices and destroying bodies; and the centrality of gendered violence to the movement for the abolition of the slave trade, which aimed to use women bodies to reproduce rather than to end slavery. This close interrogation of an absent archive for evidence of what it does not disclose requires some methodological work. There is some imaginative rewriting of sources which treat women as objects, owned or abused, to present them as experiencing subjects: what would Jane have experienced as she fled through Bridgetown’s streets? What would ‘Venus’ have felt and thought as she was brutally beaten in one of the city’s taverns? There is a careful use of aggregated evidence – of women’s slave ownership, of compensation records, of newspaper advertisements, and of the production of urban space – to provide the grounds for understanding more individual experiences and trajectories. Indeed, this is a history that is keenly attentive to slavery’s historical geography – the particularities of Barbados (with fewer spaces of potential freedom than Jamaica or St Vincent), the way slavery shaped urban space through the deployment of an architecture of terror – the cage, the gallows, the whipping post, the crane at the docks where slaves were flogged – and the gendering of public and private space. Most significantly, Fuentes develops a method of ‘reading along the bias grain’, a metaphor drawn from tailoring, where ‘fabric is cut at an angle to produce elasticity’. This, then, ‘stretches the archive to accentuate the presence of enslaved women when not explicitly mentioned in certain documents.’ (footnote 32 p. 156). It reminded me of how the new National Museum of African American History and Culture in Washington DC uses the lead ballast from a wrecked slave ship to materialize the bodies of the enslaved displaced on the Middle Passage. Thus, the expectations surrounding the presence of enslaved black women in public space shapes the movements of a young black man disguised as a woman – and armed with a sword and, perhaps, carrying his master’s murderous intent – as he was forced to mediate between the powers and identities of white slaveholders. Also, the freedom of those white men and women, and also free(d) people of colour, is shown to be based on the labour – productive, reproductive and sexual – of enslaved women. In this context, while it is very instructive that Fuentes demonstrates that Barbados, a