Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas

238 Pages·2018·2.773 MB·English

by  Daina Berry, Leslie Harris, Jennifer L. Morgan, Trevor Burnard, Stephanie Camp, David Doddington, Jim Downs, Thomas Foster, Marisa J. Fuentes, Stephanie Jones-Rogers, Jessica Millward, Bianca Premo, Brenda Stevenson, Catherine Clinton

Sexuality and Slavery
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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
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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