Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive by Marisa Fuentes (review)

Marisa Fuentes describes her methodology in this project as "reading along the bias grain" in order to render black women visible and audible in the archives. Pushing back against archival silences has been the stuff of many scholarly works about the African diaspora. Fuentes' approach, however, stands out for its skill at stretching like a piece of fabric—by the author's own description—archival fragments in order to tell the stories and reconstruct the humanity of enslaved women in Barbados in the eighteenth century. Dispossessed Lives is not a book about slaves, a term that Fuentes carefully avoids, because it does not take for granted the dehumanization of enslaved women in Bridgetown. Rather, it is a book about black women and the forces that shape, represent, and control their lives in the eighteenth century, and their afterlives in the archive.