Dispossessed Lives. Marisa J. Fuentes

      Introduction

      Dispossessed Lives constructs historical accounts of urban Caribbean slavery from the positions and perspectives of enslaved women within the traditional archive.¹ It does so by engaging archival sources with black feminist epistemologies, critical studies of archival power and form, and historiographical debates in slavery studies on agency and resistance. To trace the distortions of enslaved women’s lives inherent in the archive, this book raises questions about the nature of history and the difficulties in narrating ephemeral archival presences by dwelling on the fragmentary, disfigured bodies of enslaved women. How do we narrate the fleeting glimpses of enslaved subjects in the archives and meet the disciplinary demands of history that requires us to construct unbiased accounts from these very documents? How do we construct a coherent historical accounting out of that which defies coherence and representability? How do we critically confront or reproduce these accounts to open up possibilities for historicizing, mourning, remembering, and listening to the condition of enslaved women?

      This study probes the constructions of race, gender, and sexuality, the machinations of archival power, and the complexities of “agency” in the lives of enslaved and free(d) women in colonial Bridgetown, Barbados. A micro-history of urban Caribbean slavery, it explores the significance of an urban slave society that was numerically dominated by women, white and black. By the turn of the eighteenth century, Barbados sustained an enslaved female majority whose reproduction rates contributed to a natural increase in the slave population by 1800.² Similarly, white women made up a slight majority of the island’s white population and owned predominately female slaves who, in turn, allowed white women a measure of economic independence.³ This unusual demography and the underexplored, intra-gendered relationships between different groups of women mark an important shift from the extant scholarly focus on white men’s domination of black and brown women in slave societies.

      Despite its small size in relation to other Caribbean islands, an examination of Barbados, and in particular Bridgetown, enhances our understanding of how race, gender, and sexuality were formed in British Atlantic slave societies and how these constructions of identity directed and influenced the life experiences of urban enslaved women. Unlike similar works on enslaved women of the antebellum U.S. South that draw on the limited voices of the enslaved, this book does not feature sources written by enslaved people themselves.⁴ On the contrary, the very nature of slavery in the eighteenth-century Caribbean made enslaved life fleeting and rendered access to literacy nearly impossible. Yet the women who appear in the archival fragments on which this book draws offer a crucial glimpse into lives lived under the domination of slavery—lives that were just as important as those of more visible and literate people in this period, who most consistently left an abundance of documentary material. Throughout this work I interrogate the quotidian lives of enslaved women in Bridgetown and account for the conditions in which they emerge from the archives. This is done to bring attention to the challenges enslaved women faced and the continued effects of white colonial power that constrain and control what can be known about these women in the archive. Instead of a social history of enslaved life in Bridgetown and Barbados, I examine archival fragments in order to understand how these documents shape the meaning produced about them in their own time and our current historical practices. In other words, this is a methodological and ethical project that seeks to examine the archive and historical production on multiple levels to destabilize the British colonial discourse invested in enslaved women as property. The impetus to “recover” knowledge about how enslaved women made meaning from their lives is an important aspect of the historiography of Caribbean slavery. A significant amount of historical scholarship now exists showing how these women enacted their personhood despite their experiences of dehumanization and commodification.⁵ This book builds on that scholarship; indeed, it has allowed me to ask a different set