Centering Woman: Gender Discourses in Caribbean Slave Society (review)

At the end of a long and productive scholarly career, historians sometimes choose to publish a collected edition of their published articles in the areas of their research interests. Such a book is Centering Woman, in which the prominent historian of slave societies in Barbados attempts to unify his previously published articles under the rubric of gender studies utilizing post-modern language and feminist perspectives. Beckles's ambitious goal is to "highlight the centrality of women and gender in the construction and evolution of slave relations and society" (p. x). But he also admits that the essays were written "in a piece-meal fashion" over a decade (p. ix); obviously, he worked on them while publishing on slavery in Barbados and his major book on slave women, Natural Rebels: A Social History of Enslaved Black Women in Barbados (1989). Beckles packages his articles with an Introduction, "Historicising 'Woman' and Slavery," and a Summation, "Historicising Slavery in Caribbean Feminism." Then he divides the book into three broad sections: Subjections, Subscriptions, and Subversions. Part one places the slave woman under the tyranny of her master or mistress; part two actually focuses on elite white women; and part three surveys the role of slave women as subversive agents undermining slavery via flight, entrepreneurship, manumission, and anti-slavery politics.

Since many of his themes and theoretical approaches are familiar to North American scholars working on slave women and gender history, readers of The Americas will note little new in his more theoretical sections. His content chapters drawn from his articles do group his articles together in one convenient collection, but those short on funds may find it cheaper to read them in the appropriate journal or edited collection than to purchase this book. They may also find the original to be more accurate since Centering Woman is poorly copy-edited with numerous typos that should have been corrected in the final proofreading.

Who should buy or read this book? Obviously, anyone intending to work on slave women in the Americas must take a look at the scholarship of Hilary Beckles. His bibliography should be useful to those who are just beginning their research on the history of slave women in the British Caribbean. However, he ignores the experience of slave women in Luso and Hispanic America, although there are many remarkable similarities to slave women's lives and economic activities in Latin America. Students of comparative slavery will find his sources of interest and envy his documentary base of plantation registers, the 10,000 page diary of Thomas Thistlewood in which he detailed his relations with his slave women, and the diaries by elite women, including the governor's wife who preferred the company of women of color to that of local white women. Centering Woman basically calls attention to a wealth of documentation awaiting gender-sensitive historians--if they can move beyond post-modern political discourse and return to the original documents in which slave women were central and quite visible. As Centering Woman reveals, there is still much to do to write the histories of slave women or gender relations in the Caribbean. Beckles also challenges Latin Americanists to ask the comparative questions and find the documents to describe slave women's roles in the rest of the Americas.