Slavery and the Family

Abstract

From the earliest historical studies on Atlantic slavery to the present day, historians have been interested in the development of family ties among enslaved people. They have debated, denied, questioned, and celebrated the ability of enslaved people to forge meaningful family relationships and kinship networks in the face of the traumas and violence of slavery. Arguments over the legacies of slavery and the actions of enslavers and enslaved alike in the context of family life have extended beyond the academic world; histories of the slave family have been used and abused in political debates, addressed and expressed in popular culture, and connected to contemporary concerns relating to social structures, racial politics, and gender dynamics across the Americas. In broad terms, scholarship on the slave family has moved beyond a focus on rigid consanguineal links or a biologically based model, as well as challenged Eurocentric perceptions as to the normality of nuclear or patriarchal structures in family life. Instead, historians have revealed the diverse forms of kinship and family relations found across and within the Atlantic world, noting connections, adaptations, and retentions among the various actors present in the slaving zones of the Atlantic world. Historians have done tremendous work in connecting the destruction and reconstruction of familial units in slavery to wider themes relating to resistance, trauma, and survival in the face of oppression. Pioneering work on enslaved women, and attention to the reproductive and productive exploitation women faced, has likewise revealed the centrality of sex, gender, and the family to the strategies of domination employed by enslavers in the Americas. These scholars also revealed how family life could provide a measure of respite, act as a site of pleasure, and serve as the foundation of a culture of resistance for enslaved people. Debates on the slave family thus provide insight into the most personal and intimate areas of enslaved people’s lives and reveal the complex power dynamics, negotiations, contest, and resistance between enslavers and enslaved people in the Atlantic world. In the rest of this piece I outline key texts relating to the slave family, focusing on scholarly monographs and structured roughly by geography. Scholarly articles have not been referenced, outside of one or two significant pieces, but readers should make use of the specific journals cited to explore the topic of the slave family. Select online databases and banks of primary source material are also listed.