Dispossessed Lives follows the stories of a handful of women in the eighteenth century through the lens of documents that only peripherally mention them: a runaway named Jane, a mulatto brothel, an enslaved woman who was executed for poisoning, and the debates over abolition. Fuentes’s book is, she explains, an attempt at “redress” (12). Until that narrative is disrupted, historians continue to partake in this original sin. Fuentes, in her provocative book Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (UPenn Press, 2016), argues that the traditional archive was constructed in such a way to inflict perpetual violence upon women. So why do they receive such little attention? Marisa J. There were more enslaved women in the colonial port town of Bridgetown, found on the western edge of Barbados, than any other demographic group. That is certainly the case with the book I’m gisting today. 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.Sometimes the best thing a book can do is make you feel guilty.

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.Ĭombining 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. 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