Fuentes argues, we can begin to reconstruct and critically examine the complexity of enslaved women's experiences. 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. 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power, and the commodification and brutalization of enslaved bodies and persons, through traditional readings of historical documents that are only layers deep.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 does so by developing new methods to reconstruct their experiences and voices from bits of archival evidence produced by and for the dominant forces and narratives of slavery. By vividly recounting enslaved life through the experiences of individual women and illuminating their conditions of confinement through the legal, sexual, and representational power wielded by slave owners, colonial authorities, and the archive, Fuentes challenges the way we write histories of vulnerable and often invisible subjects.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.

Combining fragmentary sources with interdisciplinary methodologies that include black feminist theory and critical studies of history and slavery, Dispossessed Lives demonstrates how the construction of the archive marked enslaved women’s bodies, in life and in death.

In the process, Fuentes interrogates the archive and its historical production to expose the ongoing effects of white colonial power that constrain what can be known about these women.

Fuentes takes us through the streets of Bridgetown with an enslaved runaway inside a brothel run by a freed woman of color in the midst of a white urban household in sexual chaos to the gallows where enslaved people were executed and within violent scenes of enslaved women’s punishments. Fuentes creates a portrait of urban Caribbean slavery in this colonial town from the perspective of these women whose stories appear only briefly in historical records. In the eighteenth century, Bridgetown, Barbados, was heavily populated by both enslaved and free women.

Fuentes dispossessed lives