Black Women beyond Scandal

Abstract

Published in 1814 in Haiti, Baron de Vastey's essay Le Système colonial dévoilé (The Colonial System Unveiled) provides a detailed account of colonialism's violence and anti-Blackness. As he "unveils" the atrocities of slavery, Vastey demonstrates how subjugation and racialization are the result of not only spectacular violence and killings but also laws and policies that work to produce race itself through more quotidian forms of violence. The author consistently returns to the experience of enslaved Black women and to the role and subject position white women occupied in enslaving societies. In this article, I examine the contested homosocial space that Black and white women shared in Saint-Domingue, a space fraught with multifarious articulations of scandal. As I track the colonists' uses of scandal, I explore how the construction of gender through whiteness renders Black women's autonomous sexuality and reproductive capacities as always already scandalous and therefore disruptive, threatening, and destabilizing to the colonial order.