Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas PDF
Preview Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas
Sexuality and Slavery This page intentionally left blank Series Editors Daina Ramey Berry, University of Texas at Austin Jennifer L. Morgan, New York University Advisory Board Edward E. Baptist, Cornell University Kristen Block, University of Tennessee, Knoxville Sherwin Bryant, Northwestern University Camilla Cowling, University of Warwick Aisha Finch, University of California, Los Angeles Marisa J. Fuentes, Rutgers University Leslie M. Harris, Northwestern University Tera Hunter, Princeton University Wilma King, University of Missouri Barbara Krauthamer, University of Massachusetts, Amherst Tiya Miles, University of Michigan Melanie Newton, University of Toronto Rachel O’Toole, University of California, Irvine Diana Paton, Newcastle University Adam Rothman, Georgetown University Brenda E. Stevenson, University of California, Los Angeles This page intentionally left blank Sexuality and Slavery Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas Edited by Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris The University of Georgia Press Athens A Sarah Mills Hodge Fund Publication This publication is made possible, in part, through a grant from the Hodge Foundation in memory of its founder, Sarah Mills Hodge, who devoted her life to the relief and education of African Americans in Savannah, Georgia. Chapter 7 was originally published, in somewhat different form, as the article “The Sexual Abuse of Black Men under American Slavery,” by Thomas A. Foster, in Journal of the History of Sexuality 20, no. 3 (2011): 445–64. Copyright © 2011 by the University of Texas Press. All rights reserved. Used by permission. Chapter 9 was originally published, in somewhat different form, as “What’s Love Got to Do with It? Concubinage and Enslaved Black Women and Girls in the Antebellum South,” by Brenda E. Stevenson, Journal of African American History 98, no. 1 (2013): 99–125. Used with the permission of the Association for the Study of African American Life and History, www .asalh .org. © 2018 by the University of Georgia Press Athens, Georgia 30602 www .ugapress .org All rights reserved Designed by Kaelin Chappell Broaddus Set in 10.5/13.5 Garamond Premier Pro by Graphic Composition, Inc. Bogart, Georgia Most University of Georgia Press titles are available from popular e- book vendors. Printed digitally Library of Congress Cataloging- in- Publication Data Names: Berry, Daina Ramey, editor. | Harris, Leslie M. (Leslie Maria), 1965– editor. Title: Sexuality and slavery : reclaiming intimate histories in the Americas / edited by Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris. Description: Athens, Georgia : University of Georgia Press, [2018] | Series: Gender and slavery | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: lccn 2018003955| isbn 9780820354033 (hardcover : alk. paper) | isbn 9780820354040 (pbk. : alk. paper) | isbn 9780820354026 (ebook) Subjects: lcsh: Slaves—Sexual behavior—History. | Slavery—America—History. | Women slaves—America—Social conditions. | Slaves—America—Social conditions. Classification: lcc ht1048 .s49 2018 | ddc 306.77086/25—dc23 lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018003955 Contents Foreword Catherine Clinton ix Acknowledgments xiii Introduction Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris 1 Chapter 1 Early European Views of African Bodies: Beauty Stephanie M. H. Camp 9 Chapter 2 Toiling in the Fields: Valuing Female Slaves in Jamaica, 1674–1788 Trevor Burnard 33 Chapter 3 Reading the Specter of Racialized Gender in Eighteenth- Century Bridgetown, Barbados Marisa J. Fuentes 49 Chapter 4 As if She Were My Own: Love and Law in the Slave Society of Eighteenth- Century Peru Bianca Premo 71 Chapter 5 Wombs of Liberation: Petitions, Law, and the Black Woman’s Body in Maryland, 1780–1858 Jessica Millward 88 Chapter 6 Rethinking Sexual Violence and the Marketplace of Slavery: White Women, the Slave Market, and Enslaved People’s Sexualized Bodies in the Nineteenth- Century South Stephanie Jones- Rogers 109 Chapter 7 The Sexual Abuse of Black Men under American Slavery Thomas A. Foster 124 Chapter 8 Manhood, Sex, and Power in Antebellum Slave Communities David Doddington 145 Chapter 9 What’s Love Got to Do with It? Concubinage and Enslaved Women and Girls in the Antebellum South Brenda E. Stevenson 159 Chapter 10 When the Present Is Past: Writing the History of Sexuality and Slavery Jim Downs 189 Contributors 205 Index 209 Foreword Catherine Clinton It was with great regret that I was unable to attend a conference organized by Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie Harris at the University of Texas in Austin in 2011. The audience of three hundred showed that a new generation of scholars and students is responding to clarion calls to highlight neglected aspects of the African American past. The following year, a selection of the conference pre- senters workshopped their papers at a closed meeting with invited critics at New York University, which I was pleased to attend. The stellar lineup of historians in both venues were working on sexuality and slavery, across a vast period of time and space, scattered across diverse cultures and geographies, and tackling founda- tional topics. I had always dreamed a book might address these key aspects, and I felt uplifted by the energy these articulate and dramatic researchers generated. Although those inspirational marathons of new research and spirited exchanges cannot be captured between two covers, the present volume joins essays from both meetings with additional essays solicited by the editors, gathering new mo- mentum for this topic. Forty years ago, when I undertook my first investigations of slavery, slavery studies seemed to catch fire within and outside the academy. People were glued to their television sets watching Alex Haley’s ancestors portrayed in the blockbuster miniseries Roots. Reviews of Time on the Cross appeared in Time magazine. The number of publications in the field nearly tripled from the 1960s to the 1970s. A handful of award- winning studies blazed onto the scene—from Stanley Elkins to Eugene Genovese, from John Blassingame to Herbert Gutman to Orlando Pat- terson. From economics to demography to the cultural turn, from community studies to microhistories to transnational works, these scholars were poised to investigate almost every aspect of slavery’s past. There seemed only one unifying factor for all of these diverse scholarly trends: the persistent neglect of gender. This glaring omission was an ongoing dilemma, but after the 1980s, sparks began to fly. In the wake of Jacqueline Jones’s Labor of Sorrow, Labor of Love: Black Women, Work, and the Family, from Slavery to the Present (1985) and Deborah Gray White’s Ar’n’t I a Woman? Female Slaves in the Plantation South (1985), a ix
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