Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World

Jessica Marie Johnson

Published by University of Pennsylvania Press 2020

Wicked Flesh

Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World

Jessica Marie Johnson

In the series Early American Studies

https://doi.org/10.9783/9780812297249

Overview
Contents

About this book

Unearthing personal stories from the archive, Wicked Flesh shows how black women, from Senegambia in West Africa to the Caribbean to New Orleans, used intimacy and kinship to redefine freedom in the eighteenth-century Atlantic world. Their practices laid the groundwork for the emancipation struggles of the nineteenth century.

Author / Editor information

Jessica Marie Johnson is Assistant Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University.

Reviews

"With its deep archival research and compelling analysis, Wicked Flesh paints fascinating portraits of individual women and their efforts to practice freedom and firmly situates New Orleans within the larger French Atlantic world."—Jennifer Spear, author of Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans

"Wicked Flesh is a powerful book that will set the standard for studies of gender and slavery to follow. It exemplifies the generative quality of a grounded engagement of the archives of slavery through contemporary theoretical work on race and the notion of Diaspora."—Jennifer Morgan, author of Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in the Making of New World Slavery

"Jessica Marie Johnson has an original, bold historical imagination, a gift for excavating and exploiting fragmentary archival material, and a beautiful, poetic writing style. Both her argument and her theoretical approach are important and timely."—Emily Clark, author of The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
Introduction. The Women in the Water Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
Chapter 1. Tastemakers: Intimacy, Slavery, and Power in Senegambia Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	16
Chapter 2. Born of This Place: Kinship, Violence, and the Pinets’ Overlapping Diasporas Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	51
Chapter 3. La Traversée: Gender, Commodification, and the Long Middle Passage Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	77
Chapter 4. Full Use of Her: Intimacy, Service, and Labor in New Orleans Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	121
Chapter 5. Black Femme: Acts, Archives, and Archipelagos of Freedom Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	153
Chapter 6. Life After Death: Legacies of Freedom in Spanish New Orleans Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	187
Conclusion. Femmes de Couleur Libres and the Nineteenth Century Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	219
Archives and Databases Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	233
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	235
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	299
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	313

Language: English
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
Audience: College/higher education;
Pages
- Main content: 360
Illustrations
- Other: 15 illus.
Keywords: American History; African-American Studies; African Studies; American Studies

eBook

Published: December 7, 2020
ISBN: 9780812297249