Wicked Flesh
Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World
Format:Paperback
Publisher:University of Pennsylvania Press
Published:8th Nov '22
Should be back in stock very soon
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.
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.
"Wicked Flesh is a long overdue, marvelous account of the complexities of Black women’s lives in the Atlantic World. This compelling history shows the importance of Black femmes in the making and unmaking of the Atlantic World, creating changes that last until this day." * Connections *
"Drawing on an impressive range of archival sources, there are many useful insights in this book, which transcends some of the geographic and chronological limits of historical subfields. One hopes other historians will adapt the arguments and ideas related to kinship and freedom developed by Johnson in future studies of slavery and freedom in the Atlantic world." * Histoire Sociale/Social History *
"Johnson pushes readers to expand their thinking surrounding the lived experiences of free women of African descent in the French Atlantic during the long eighteenth century...[A]n impressive work. Wicked Flesh is a welcome and much-needed addition to numerous fields of scholarship, including the French Atlantic, the African diaspora, Black women’s history,and comparative history. The study is as revelatory as it is impressive in its scope, analysis, and historical detective work. " * H-SAWH *
"Wicked Flesh provides us with a complex, dynamic picture of enslaved women’s lives that moves beyond simple tropes of 'agency' in pursuit of an abstract, Western-defined 'freedom.' As Johnson’s analysis shows, Black women defined freedom in their own ways that went beyond formal manumission or 'free status.' Wicked Flesh is an important book that has already garnered well-deserved recognition and will be required reading for scholars of Black life for years to come." * Journal of Southern History *
"Through innovative and interdisciplinary methodologies, Johnson unearths and beautifully recounts a history of freedom that foregrounds the intimate lives of African women and women of African descent...Put simply, Wicked Flesh is essential reading for those interested in the intimate lives of enslaved and free Black women and invested in understanding these women’s theories and texts for living." * H-Early America *
"A beautifully written history of Black Feminism...Although it is centered on Senegambia, Wicked Flesh inspires us to ask what a history of New Orleans—or Tampico or Galveston, for that matter—would look like if we were to follow the cultural threads of Black women’s care practices to other parts of the Atlantic World. The book is itself 'a promiscuous accounting of blackness … as future possibility' and employs the same ethics of care and pleasure that its narrative brings to life." * New West Indian Guide *
"Wicked Flesh is a long overdue, marvelous account of the complexities of Black women’s lives in the Atlantic World. This compelling history shows the importance of Black femmes in the making and unmaking of the Atlantic World, creating changes that last until this day." * H-Soz-Kolt *
"A careful and innovative scholar, Johnson remains attentive to her subjects’ social, embodied, and spiritual worlds to dazzling effect. If the many merits of Wicked Flesh serve as any indication, the conjunction of race, gender, intimacy, and kinship in colonial contexts will continue to inspire innovative scholarship for some time to come." * Eighteenth-Century Studies *
"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 *
"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 *
- Winner of Winner of the Wesley-Logan Prize in African diaspora history granted by the American Historical Association 2021 (United States)
- Winner of Winner of the Lora Romero First Book Prize, granted by the American Studies Association 2021 (United States)
- Winner of Winner of the Frank L. and Harriet C. Owsley prize for the best book in southern history, granted by the Southern Historical Association 2021 (United States)
- Winner of Chosen as Choice Outstanding Academic Title 2021 (United States)
- Winner of Winner of the 2020 Kemper and Leila Williams Prize for Louisiana History, granted by The Historic New Orleans Collection and the Louisiana Historical Association 2021
ISBN: 9781512823707
Dimensions: unknown
Weight: unknown
328 pages