Wicked flesh : black women, intimacy, and freedom in the Atlantic world
Author(s)
Bibliographic Information
Wicked flesh : black women, intimacy, and freedom in the Atlantic world
(Early American studies)
University of Pennsylvania Press, c2020
Available at 2 libraries
  Aomori
  Iwate
  Miyagi
  Akita
  Yamagata
  Fukushima
  Ibaraki
  Tochigi
  Gunma
  Saitama
  Chiba
  Tokyo
  Kanagawa
  Niigata
  Toyama
  Ishikawa
  Fukui
  Yamanashi
  Nagano
  Gifu
  Shizuoka
  Aichi
  Mie
  Shiga
  Kyoto
  Osaka
  Hyogo
  Nara
  Wakayama
  Tottori
  Shimane
  Okayama
  Hiroshima
  Yamaguchi
  Tokushima
  Kagawa
  Ehime
  Kochi
  Fukuoka
  Saga
  Nagasaki
  Kumamoto
  Oita
  Miyazaki
  Kagoshima
  Okinawa
  Korea
  China
  Thailand
  United Kingdom
  Germany
  Switzerland
  France
  Belgium
  Netherlands
  Sweden
  Norway
  United States of America
Note
Summary: "This book follows African women and women of African descent in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries as they move from Africa to the Caribbean to Louisiana. The book looks at how these women used subtle ways to achieve freedom: through marriage, baptism (thereby gaining the support of the church), property ownership, and writing wills to leave their assets to their descendants. These women were feminists ahead of their time"--Provided by publisher
Includes index
Description and Table of Contents
Description
The story of freedom pivots on the choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures.
The story of freedom and all of its ambiguities begins with intimate acts steeped in power. It is shaped by the peculiar oppressions faced by African women and women of African descent. And it pivots on the self-conscious choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures. Slavery's rise in the Americas was institutional, carnal, and reproductive. The intimacy of bondage whet the appetites of slaveowners, traders, and colonial officials with fantasies of domination that trickled into every social relationship-husband and wife, sovereign and subject, master and laborer. Intimacy-corporeal, carnal, quotidian-tied slaves to slaveowners, women of African descent and their children to European and African men. In Wicked Flesh, Jessica Marie Johnson explores the nature of these complicated intimate and kinship ties and how they were used by black women to construct freedom in the Atlantic world.
Johnson draws on archival documents scattered in institutions across three continents, written in multiple languages and largely from the perspective of colonial officials and slave-owning men, to recreate black women's experiences from coastal Senegal to French Saint-Domingue to Spanish Cuba to the swampy outposts of the Gulf Coast. Centering New Orleans as the quintessential site for investigating black women's practices of freedom in the Atlantic world, Wicked Flesh argues that African women and women of African descent endowed free status with meaning through active, aggressive, and sometimes unsuccessful intimate and kinship practices. Their stories, in both their successes and their failures, outline a practice of freedom that laid the groundwork for the emancipation struggles of the nineteenth century and reshaped the New World.
Table of Contents
Introduction. The Women in the Water
Chapter 1. Tastemakers: Intimacy, Slavery, and Power in Senegambia
Chapter 2. Born of This Place: Kinship, Violence, and the Pinets' Overlapping Diasporas
Chapter 3. La Traversee: Gender, Commodification, and the Long Middle Passage
Chapter 4. Full Use of Her: Intimacy, Service, and Labor in New Orleans
Chapter 5. Black Femme Acts, Archives, and Archipelagos of Freedom
Chapter 6. Life After Death: Legacies of Freedom in Spanish New Orleans
Conclusion. Femmes de Couleur Libres and the Nineteenth Century
List of Archives and Databases
Notes
Index
Acknowledgments
by "Nielsen BookData"