Description: Vividly recounting the lives of enslaved women in eighteenth-century Bridgetown, Barbados, and their conditions of confinement through urban, legal, sexual, and representational power wielded by slave owners, authorities, and the archive, Marisa J. Fuentes challenges how histories of vulnerable and invisible subjects are written.
Review Quotes: "[A]n astonishing and discipline-changing piece of scholarship. Interested in black feminist theory, gender, sexuality, slavery, and the urban Caribbean, [Fuentes'] interdisciplinary deep dive into the archives collides with so-called conventional understandings of historical methodology, historiography, knowledge production, and especially historical archival research . . . scholars can no longer rationalize the absence of marginalized figures like the women in this book because the archival documents do not explicitly reveal them. Moreover, one will be hard pressed to tread heavily ever again over those documents-or their already fragment-rendered subjects-after reading this incredibly important work."-- "Journal of Early American History"