Chained in Silence: Black Women and Convict Labor in the New South

Abstract

There is much to be said about silence. Talitha L. LeFlouria's Chained in Silence speaks through archives that obscured but never fully erased the imprint of imprisoned black women's reproductive labor on the modernization of the New South. With a focus on the punitive order of sexual and reproductive violence, LeFlouria adds to scholarly accounts of the condition of black women during reconstruction, a literature that includes the work of Stephanie Camp, Tera Hunter, and Deborah Grey White. Her conceptual framework shifts theorizations of antiblack racism from Orlando Patterson's conception of “social death” to one of “social rape,” pulling from primary and secondary sources to define the undermining of African American women's right to healthy lives, motherhood, community, and kin. This structure of violence, like sexual violence, attacked the vitality of its targets, highlighted the victim's vulnerability to death, and shaped “the victim's physical, psychological, and social identity” (p. 89). Social rape was a punitive response to both black women's attempts to lay claim to the cult of true womanhood and their resistance to the exploitative conditions of their labor.