Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive by Marisa J. Fuentes

Abstract

Reviewed by: Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive by Marisa J. Fuentes Mariana L. R. Dantas Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. By Marisa J. Fuentes. Early American Studies. (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Pp. [x], 217. Paper, $24.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-2418-4; cloth, $49.95, ISBN 978-0-8122-4822-7.) Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive is an ambitious attempt to foreground enslaved women in the history of urban slavery in Barbados and the Americas more broadly. It does so by developing new [End Page 967] methods to reconstruct their experiences and voices from bits of archival evidence produced by and for the dominant forces and narratives of slavery. It cautions us against the danger of reproducing white colonizing power, and the commodification and brutalization of enslaved bodies and persons, through traditional readings of historical documents that are only layers deep. It calls instead for readings "along the bias grain" of historical evidence, which stretch out the fabric of the past to visualize underlying threads of meanings, intentions, and power dynamics that frame patterns of behavior, understanding, and practices (p. 7). In this manner, Marisa J. Fuentes argues, we can begin to reconstruct and critically examine the complexity of enslaved women's experiences. It also becomes possible to address agency through a careful contextualization of the actions and decisions of enslaved and slave-owning women in a constraining world that normalized gender, racial, and sexual violence. Fuentes's analysis builds on an extensive historiography (carefully acknowledged in her footnotes) that has expanded knowledge about the history of women in slavery, reframed questions, and revealed methodologies that counter the silence of the archives. She adds to that historiography by weaving together several analytical threads—borrowed from women and gender studies, black feminist theory, critical historiography, and cultural studies—into a rendering of the past that resists unexamined and complicit accounting of the degradation black women suffered. The book's five chapters are centered on fragments of enslaved women's stories that are barely visible in the historical record, which Fuentes unravels to reveal the strands of an exploitative and violent reality that (re)shaped black women's lives and bodies. Through Jane, who briefly appears in a runaway slave ad, Fuentes discusses how the built environment of Bridgetown manifested and enforced white colonial power. She imagines Jane's interactions with and knowledge of the town's sites, from wharves to jails, to consider how slaves who contemplated flight assessed the promises and dangers of the urban space. Rachael Pringle Polgreen, the well-known mulatto freedwoman and Bridgetown brothel owner, and Joanna, a former slave manumitted in Polgreen's will, help Fuentes explore black female sexuality and the question of agency in the context of sex work. The violence of slavery, including perceptions of enslaved women as sexually available, left them vulnerable to abuse, coercion, rape, and economic exploitation. Enslaved women in this environment were hardly sexual operators, Fuentes argues, but survivors of their sexualized status. Fuentes's analysis of an adultery case involving a white woman, and complicated by an attempted armed assault against her husband by her lover's cross-dressed male slave, further highlights the sexualization of black female bodies in Barbados. The white woman's claim to sexual propriety, and the black enslaved boy's ability to cross town unnoticed at night in women's clothes, relied on assumptions about black female promiscuity. Through Molly, a slave executed for an attempted poisoning, Fuentes explores slavery and its archive's relentless criminalization of enslaved men and particularly women. As Molly's case reveals, any nonconforming or suspicious action by the enslaved was used as justification for the punishment, brutalization, and destruction of life and body. The final chapter of Dispossessed Lives examines testimonies of the brutality of slavery collected by the Privy Council investigating slavery and the case for [End Page 968] abolition in the late eighteenth century. Guided by the faint cries of the women instead of the recorded words of the witnesses of their debasement, Fuentes demonstrates that these testimonies often ignored the perspective of enslaved black women and aimed to expiate the guilt of...