Enslaved African Women Research Articles

Juana Gelofa Pelona: An Enslaved but Insubordinate Witness in Santo Domingo (1549-1555)

In 1549, Juana Gelofa Pelona, an enslaved African woman, was a witness in a legal case in the city of Santo Domingo, on the island of Hispaniola. The defendant, Francisco Bravo, was accused of killing his wife, Catalina de Tinoco, and presented Juana as his witness to testify on his behalf. Both Francisco and Catalina had been Juana’s enslavers; and, Catalina's family, in whose possession Juana had lived for multiple generations, warned her not to testify in favor of Francisco. Nonetheless, she testified with conviction, despite being threatened and punished severely by her new enslavers who resolved to sell her to another enslaver in a different city to avoid her continuous defiance of Catalina’s family in court. This article proposes that Juana orchestrated her own sale to rid herself of her new owners who wanted to convince her at all cost not to say what she knew. The article also documents aspects of everyday life in sixteenth-century Santo Domingo by highlighting details shared by the witnesses,

‘It Was Necessary to Do Something With Those Women’: Colonial Governance and the ‘Disposal’ of Women and Girls in Early Nineteenth‐Century Sierra Leone

ABSTRACTThe colonial archive offers comparatively few glimpses of the individual lives of enslaved African women and girls brought to Sierra Leone in the nineteenth century and ‘liberated’ under the terms of the British Abolition Act of 1807. This article sets out to do four things: first, to consider what colonial sources reveal about how women and girls experienced and responded to becoming ‘liberated Africans’, and to the ‘disposal’ practices of the Liberated African Department – including schooling, indenture and arranged marriages. Second, it considers what factors might have shaped those experiences. Third, it seeks to make a contribution to the literature on marriage in early colonial Africa by considering whether, and to what extent, British colonial policy towards liberated African women in Sierra Leone meets a modern definition of government‐led coerced or forced marriage. Finally, it evaluates the usefulness and limits of official archives, missionary records, court records and the accounts of self‐styled British Sierra Leone experts for studying the experiences of women and girls, and indicates potential avenues for further research.

Recent Articles

Recent Articles

Giving Voice to a Portrait: The Intersection of Gender, Race, and Law in Belle

The 2013 feature film Belle presents an account of the life of Dido Elizabeth Belle (1761-1804). Belle was the daughter of Sir John Lindsay, a British naval officer, and Maria Belle, an enslaved African woman, and she was raised in the home of her great uncle Lord Mansfield during his tenure as Chief Justice of England. The record of Belle’s life is thin, and her story might have been altogether forgotten had it not been for a 1779 portrait of her in which she was painted alongside her white cousin Lady Elizabeth Murray. The film was inspired by the portrait. The paucity of available facts left the filmmakers much latitude for fictionalizing, but even so the film makes significant departures from the historical record, for example, in its representations of Belle’s eventual husband, and in its insertion of Belle into the unfolding of the Zong case, a case involving slavery that was decided by Lord Mansfield in 1783. In this paper, I consider the effectiveness and the ethical implications of the filmmakers’ use of law to give voice to this historical figure.

Ziba Khanum of Yazd: an enslaved African woman in nineteenth-century Iran

ABSTRACT Ziba Khanum (d. 1932) was, an African woman, a slave in the city of Yazd in the second half of the nineteenth century. She bore her master a son who, in accordance with Islamic law, should have inherited part of his father’s wealth but did not. Although she is subaltern, information about her life and the life of her son, Ghulam ‘Ali Siyah, can be recovered from family oral histories. The son, an Afro-Iranian merchant, converted to the Baha’i religion, traveled to Palestine and to India, and became a wealthy and notable person in Yazd. Ziba Khanum lived in her son’s household, with his children and grandchildren until the end of her life. Some of her descendants now live in the United States. This paper will discuss issues of race, gender, slavery, assimilation, sexuality. and religion as experienced by an Afro-Iranian family in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

Genetic Consequences of the Transatlantic Slave Trade in the Americas

According to historical records of transatlantic slavery, traders forcibly deported an estimated 12.5 million people from ports along the Atlantic coastline of Africa between the 16th and 19th centuries, with global impacts reaching to the present day, more than a century and a half after slavery’s abolition. Such records have fueled a broad understanding of the forced migration from Africa to the Americas yet remain underexplored in concert with genetic data. Here, we analyzed genotype array data from 50,281 research participants, which—combined with historical shipping documents—illustrate that the current genetic landscape of the Americas is largely concordant with expectations derived from documentation of slave voyages. For instance, genetic connections between people in slave trading regions of Africa and disembarkation regions of the Americas generally mirror the proportion of individuals forcibly moved between those regions. While some discordances can be explained by additional records of deportations within the Americas, other discordances yield insights into variable survival rates and timing of arrival of enslaved people from specific regions of Africa. Furthermore, the greater contribution of African women to the gene pool compared to African men varies across the Americas, consistent with literature documenting regional differences in slavery practices. This investigation of the transatlantic slave trade, which is broad in scope in terms of both datasets and analyses, establishes genetic links between individuals in the Americas and populations across Atlantic Africa, yielding a more comprehensive understanding of the African roots of peoples of the Americas.

Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America by Sharon Block

Reviewed by: Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America by Sharon Block Antonio T. Bly Sharon Block. Colonial Complexions: Race and Bodies in Eighteenth-Century America. Philadelphia: U of Pennsylvania P, 2018. 232 pp. $45.00. On April 29, 1768, “Two English Convict Servant Men” ran away from their master’s place in Loudoun County, Virginia. Almost a week passed before William Carr Lane employed the services of Anne and William Green’s Maryland Gazette for help in securing his property. Both fugitives, the Chesapeake resident reported, were blacksmiths. John Benham had a “slender” build and “stoops in his Shoulders.” John Miller, by contrast, had a “short well-set” frame. The two men, as their master told it, robbed him not only of their labor, but also of several additional articles of clothing along with two horses. Perhaps the most striking part of their effort toward freedom had been their plan to steal away. In order to conceal their true identities, their master explained, the two men “black’d themselves . . . [with] some Coal and Tallow found in a Kettle of theirs.” It is in this vein that Sharon Block, in Colonial Complexions, explores the complex history of race in eighteenth-century America. Drawing on “more than four thousand newspaper advertisements for runaway servants, slaves, and other missing persons issued between 1750 and 1775” (3), Block makes a compelling case about race as a social construction in early America. Race, as Block quotes historian Barbara Fields, “is not an idea but an ideology” (2). Over the course of the colonial era, notices for fugitives categorized groups into races. “[R]epresentations of bodily coloration,” Block explains, “homogenize[d] people of African descent while individualizing those of European descent. Categorical terms such as ‘Negro,’ ‘Mulatto,’ and ‘Indian’ were purposefully applied (or erased) to mark boundaries of slavery and freedom through descriptions of physical bodies” (7–8). Before the appearance of this codified racial language, notices reflected European ideas about humoral medicine, in which skin color signified physical health, emotional well-being, and personality traits. The darker one’s hue, many owners believed, the more imbalanced the runaway seemed to be with respect to their humors. These beliefs, however, changed with the advent of racial slavery in the New World. As Block writes, “Anglo-Americans’ focus on red and white as a sign of health” became “less prominent as Native Americans became red.” While property-owning whites “retained the label of whiteness,” African Americans “became increasingly categorized as black” (18). Despite the popularity of geo-humoralism and theories of monogenesis, colonial Americans developed racist views about Native Americans and African Americans to buttress their economic objectives. Over time, these views would color the very language of runaway advertisements. Encoded in the physical descriptions about a fugitive’s age, height, or body [End Page 254] type was a subtext that went far beyond the words appearing in print. For many indentured servants, their height came to represent “a proxy for strength, health, and the effect of life history on bodies” (37). For enslaved African Americans and some Native Americans, however, those same characteristics came to speak to those individuals’ productivity and thus their monetary value. These racialized expectations may explain why female bondservants of European descent were “never” referenced as being “well-made,” while enslaved African women who absconded were routinely described in such potentially hypersexualized terms. Viewed through the prism of color, words like “straight,” as in “straight-bodied” or “straight-limbed,” “lusty,” and “likely,” and even “pale,” were loaded racial terms that complicated a person’s intrinsic worth. Descriptions of fugitives’ hair, eye color, names, and speech also came to conflate race with status. In her deft analysis of these and other words and phrases used in advertisements printed for indentured servants, Native Americans, and African American slaves, Block demonstrates effectively how race mattered. But Colonial Complexions is not without its flaws. Block does not consider, for example, the various ways in which runaways challenged the authority of their owners, thus confusing the context in which notices were composed. Nowhere does she fully address the rich oral traditions that underpinned the production, dissemination, and publication of runaway advertisements (145). To...

TRACING BACK TRAUMA

Although there are many, mostly male, contemporary writers in Brazil whose narratives of urban violence and social inequality implicitly reflect the impact and legacy of slavery on contemporary society, it is interesting that this shameful period, and shockingly brutal events which seem to prove wrong the myths of gentle colonization and harmonious racial democracy, should be chosen as subject matter by four women writers. While very different novels, Adriana Lisboa’s Os Fios da Memória [The Threads of Memory] (1999), Conceição Evaristo's Ponciá Vicêncio (2003), Ana Maria Gonçalves's Um Defeito de Cor [A Defect in Colour] (2006) and Tatiana Salem Levy's Paraíso [Paradise] (2014) all deal frankly with the horrors of slavery and its aftermaths from the point of view of the most vulnerable member of colonial society: the enslaved African woman. This article analyses the ways in which these writers claim justice for their characters and remind readers that those excluded from official histories had names, faces and voices.

To Secure her Freedom: “Dorcas ye blackmore,” Race, Redemption, and the Dorchester First Church

This essay considers the intersection of race and religion in seventeenth-century puritan New England by reconstructing the life of a young enslaved African woman identified in church records as “Dorcas ye blackmore” and by examining the efforts of the brethren of the Dorchester First Church to secure her legal freedom.

Forced Crossing

In bringing African slaves to the Brazilian colony, the Portuguese transported not only a workforce but also individuals with cultural mores all their own. An area of Afro-Brazilian slave research that has attracted very little attention is that of dress, specifically that of women.¹ This research explores dress of enslaved African women in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil in the mid nineteenth century, defining the attributes of that dress, identifying elements of cultural continuation and acculturation through identification of European, African and cross-cultural dress aspects, and forming a basis from which broader-based regional comparisons of slave dress may be conducted. The forced emigration of African women to Brazil resulted in a unique amalgamation of dress that shows the literal crossing of borders of people, culture, and aesthetics.

BLACK OR WHITE?: RACIAL IDENTITY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AFRICAN-AMERICAN ART

Previous articleNext article No AccessBLACK OR WHITE?: RACIAL IDENTITY IN NINETEENTH-CENTURY AFRICAN-AMERICAN ARTLisa E. FarringtonLisa E. Farrington Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUS Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmail SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by Source Volume 31, Number 3Spring 2012SPECIAL ISSUE: CROSS-CULTURAL ISSUES IN ART FROM THE NINETEENTH CENTURY TO THE PRESENT Sponsored by the Bard Graduate Center, New York Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/sou.31.3.23208589 Views: 237Total views on this site © 2012 Ars Brevis Foundation Inc.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

African Conceptions of Gender and the Slave Traffic

HE gender and age structure of the transatlantic slave trade is critical to T understanding the development of societies of the Atlantic rim. From the broad perspective of contact between the Old World and the New, two salient characteristics of that structure have emerged from the recent literature. First, as is now well known, males predominated in the Atlantic slave trade, though compared to other branches of pre-nineteenth-century migration, both coerced and free, females and children were well represented. Second, the proportion of African women and children carried across the Atlantic was far from constant or uniform; sex and age ratios varied strongly by region and over time.1 Attempts to explain these broad patterns have generally focused on the economic functions of slaves on both sides of the Atlantic, but especially the requirements of the plantation complexes of the Americas, without which a transatlantic slave trade would not have existed. Even though New World planters demanded men, they quickly discovered that enslaved African women had a high work rate.2 Planters forced black men and women alike to labor in the fields, and the price differential between males and females was generally much lower in the Americas than in Africa.3

The Disappearing African Woman: Imoinda in Oroonoko after Behn

The Disappearing African Woman: Imoinda in Oroonoko After Behn Joyce Green MacDonald At the climax of a mid-eighteenth-century heroic tragedy, the black hero, discovered in a private chamber with the dead body of his white wife, urges the white men who come upon the sight to “Put up your Swords, and let not civil Broils” involve them in his own desperate fate.1 The play in question is not a version of Othello, as the remark about (bright?) swords and civil broils might at first suggest, but rather John Hawkesworth’s 1759 Oroonoko. Clearly, as Hawkesworth refashions Thomas Southerne’s 1696 dramatization of Aphra Behn’s 1688 novella so as most readily and rightfully to fix “Attention . . . upon the two principal Characters, Oroonoko and Imoinda, who are so connected as to make but one Object, in which all the Passions of the Audience, moved by the most tender and exquisite Distress, are concentrated” (H, A2v), he has Othello—a dignified, pathetic, mid-eighteenth-century kind of Othello—in mind. The kind of transaction he conducts with the Shakespearean tragedy, however, ranges beyond establishing similarities of tone. What this revision of Southerne (and beyond him, of Behn) also appropriates is a ready theatrical language for regularizing both Shakespeare’s wild passions and the radical racial and sexual ill-ease occasioned by Oroonoko. Audiences, it would seem, had a ready-made sentimental frame of reference for a miscegenous Oroonoko, but not for one whose enslaved lovers were of the same race. Hawkesworth’s play is only one part of a remarkable constellation of texts originating from Behn’s novella as it entered its eighteenth-century afterlife. In Behn, Imoinda is black like Oroonoko. In Hawkesworth and every other text following Behn, she is white. Only recently has this racial transformation become a subject for extended discussion in the work of postcolonial and feminist critics, primarily in relation to Southerne’s play, where it first occurs. 2 Yet there are several other white Imoindas after Behn, and I would like to direct my own inquiries into some of them, rather than solely into Southerne, whose play seems to me so radical a revision and literalizing of the sexual and economic implications of Behn as to require a separate discussion of its own. [End Page 71] Behn’s Oroonoko, of course, poses the most obvious exception to Lynda Boose’s assertion of the “unrepresentability” of African women in early modern texts. 3 Following Janet Adelman’s psychological analysis of masculine fear of women’s reproductive power in Shakespeare, Boose argues that the reason for the virtual absence of black female characters from this discourse is the white and masculine fear that the blackness of black female characters visibly marks them as the location of that dark place through which men must pass in order to be born as men: “The mother’s part in him threatens the fantasy of perfect self-replication that would preserve the father in the son.”4 I follow Boose, but consider the possibility that a denial of representation to African women has other rationales than the psychic; or rather, that the psychic is supplemented and articulated by the material practices of racism. The racial revisions eighteenth-century authors make in Behn—revisions which extend beyond the color of the heroine’s skin to include Behn’s constructions of character and gender identity—are worth examining for what they reveal about the relationships the period established between the social and sexual values and meanings implied by white and black skins, and by white and black sexual bodies. Historians of Atlantic slavery have only begun recovering the experiences of enslaved African women, detailing how their experiences in bondage differed from and overlapped with those of male slaves. 5 In the interest of extracting as much agricultural work from as many physically able slaves as possible, slave owners in the American colonies and the Caribbean made no distinction between male and female, putting women to work at the most difficult jobs alongside men: harnessing mules or oxen to steer crude wooden plows, cutting logs, hoeing and picking cotton, or chopping and milling sugar cane. Female slaves mined coal, dug canals...