Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas ed. by Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris (review)

Sexuality and Slavery: Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas, edited by Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris, offers a generative introduction to a crucial turn in the field of slavery studies. As Catherine Clinton’s foreword and the editors’ introduction note, the essays in Sexuality and Slavery are indebted to foundational scholarship in black women’s lives under slavery. While Sexuality and Slavery represents a new generation of scholars, its authors have already made their own interventions; several chapters have been published previously or are forthcoming in the authors’ monographs. While the collection is transnational, each essay focuses on a specific period and place. Furthermore, while the animating question is what happens when, as Berry and Harris write, scholars “place sexuality at the center of slavery studies in the Americas” (1), the approaches vary as much as the sites examined. Between these juxtapositions—the trans-national and the hyperlocal, and the precise opening question and authors’ wide-ranging approaches—emerges a collection that illuminates the disciplinary and ethical demands of centering the perspectives of the enslaved people who inhabited the treacherous geographies of American slavery.

Sexuality and Slavery opens with an essay by the late Stephanie M. H. Camp, “Early European Views of African Bodies: Beauty.” Camp disrupts understandings that Europeans uniformly viewed African women in negative terms. Here seventeenth- and eighteenth-century travelers’ narratives offer lush descriptions of African women’s beauty that demand to be read alongside more familiar dehumanizing depictions of these same women. Camp asserts beauty as an analytical category that illuminates the constrained possibilities of sexuality as a site of agency for free and enslaved African women. Teasing from the archive that which it reluctantly offers, theorizing how Africans experienced a sexualizing European gaze, and exploring the shifting, paradoxical, and hardening terms of slavery’s sexual and racial economies, Camp establishes crucial themes that reverberate through Sexuality and Slavery.

Taking up the question of the colonial gaze, Trevor Burnard’s “Toiling the Fields: Valuing Female Slaves in Jamaica, 1674–1788,” explores the question of “why Jamaican slave owners consistently discounted females when pricing slaves when they had few reasons to think of females slaves as less valuable than male slaves” (36). Reading planters’ inventories against contemporaneous narratives, Burnard examines how enslaved women were cast outside the protected category of womanhood when it came to the labor they performed, but also included in this same category when it possibly meant quelling black male resistance. Burnard concludes in part that because “white men were frightened of black men” (43), slaveholders routinely devalued the labor of enslaved women in order to uphold patriarchy within the enslaved community and thus placate black men (44). Burnard’s examination of enslaved women is thus less about black women and more about the question of black masculinity, a question taken up in chapters by Thomas Foster and David Doddington.

Thomas Foster’s chapter, “The Sexual Abuse of Black Men under American Slavery,” refuses pretentions to objectivity. Writing into a historiography that foregrounds the sexual abuse of enslaved women, and via a nuanced reading of slave narratives, court testimonies, newspaper accounts, and letters and journals, Foster asserts a “moral imperative . . . to recognize the climate of terror and the physical and mental sexual abuse that enslaved black men also endured” (126). Echoing considerations in Camp’s essay, Foster insists scholars reckon with how “Anglo-American culture” (127) saw enslaved men and women as “beastly, ugly, and unappealing,” at the same time they “saw erotic possibilities and beauty in black bodies” (127). Across these contradictions, Foster grapples with the implications of measuring and theorizing black masculinity, both within the context of slavery and as a question that haunts the historiography.

Following Foster’s essay, David Doddington’s “Manhood, Sex, and Power in Antebellum Communities” draws from nineteenth-century and WPA slave narratives to examine “how some enslaved men exerted or...