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Author:

Johnson, Jessica Marie, author.

Title:

Wicked flesh : black women, intimacy, and freedom in the Atlantic world / Jessica Marie Johnson.

Publisher:

University of Pennsylvania Press,

Copyright Date:

2020

Description:

316 pages : illustrations, maps (black and white) ; 24 cm.

Subject:

African American women--New Orleans--New Orleans--History--18th century.
African American women--New Orleans--New Orleans--Social conditions--18th century.
Women, Black--Atlantic Ocean Region--History--18th century.
Women, Black--Atlantic Ocean Region--Social conditions--18th century.
Slave trade--History--Atlantic Ocean Region--History--18th century.
African diaspora--History--18th century.
African Americans--History--History--18th century.
Atlantic Ocean Region--History--History--18th century.
Noires américaines--La Nouvelle-Orléans--La Nouvelle-Orléans--Histoire--18e siècle.
Noires américaines--La Nouvelle-Orléans--La Nouvelle-Orléans--Conditions sociales--18e siècle.
Femmes noires--Atlantique, Région de l'--Histoire--18e siècle.
Femmes noires--Atlantique, Région de l'--Conditions sociales--18e siècle.
Esclaves--Histoire--Aspect social--Atlantique, Région de l'--Histoire--18e siècle.
Africains--Pays étrangers--Histoire--18e siècle.
Noirs américains--Histoire--Histoire--18e siècle.
Atlantique, Région de l'--Histoire--Histoire--18e siècle.
African American women.
African American women--Social conditions.
African diaspora.
Race relations.
Slave trade--Social aspects.
Women, Black.
Women, Black--Social conditions.
Atlantic Ocean Region.
Louisiana--New Orleans.
1700-1799
History.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Contents:

Conclusion. List of archives and databases. 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 traversée : 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.

Summary:

"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"--Dust jacket.
"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.

Series:

Early American studies

ISBN:

0812252381
9780812252385

OCLC:

(OCoLC)1142931199

LCCN:

2020006553

Locations:

USUX851 -- Iowa State University - Parks Library (Ames)