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

Dispossessed Lives is an impassioned and meticulously researched call to rethink how history, as a discipline, can approach the absence of archival evidence concerning enslaved women's lives in the Americas. Fuentes goes beyond theorizing "silence" and uses geographic, demographic, literary, and legal methods to flesh out a historiography of women's lives in eighteenthcentury Barbados. She does not attempt to recover the wholeness of these lives in the archive but instead points to the violence the archive does to enslaved women by enforcing their historical silence, leaving virtually no trace of enslaved voices and emphasizing either their status as commodified objects through the chattel slave trade or their status as criminalized and then brutalized bodies through logs of their punishments. "Violence", Fuentes argues, "is the historical material that animates this book in its subtle and excessive modes—on the body of the archive, the body in the archive and the material body" (7). In Dispossessed Lives, then, she makes a compelling argument about the practice of history as a discipline itself, in addition to mapping new archival territory.

In addition to challenging the mythic status of silence and recovery in black feminist archival methods, Fuentes also debunks historical conventional wisdom on urban enslavement as compared to plantation systems of slavery. Even as she documents the seeming mobility of enslaved women in the heavily populated port of Bridgetown, she uncovers the very public means by which the urban enslaved were placed in check. Such methods included laws regarding the marketplaces where they did business and also public spaces of torture and punishment, including "The Cage", a carceral apparatus that was part of the architecture both of the town itself (in the center square) and of intentional terror in its publicness. In this way, Fuentes argues, "[t]he control wielded by slave owners, overseers, and drivers on plantations was shared with constables, magistrates, jumpers, and executioners in urban areas" (37). She explores how the colonial state stepped in to enact violence on enslaved women found culpable of numerous "offenses" that included running away or poisoning a white resident, while it maintained laws that prohibited enslaved persons in court itself—offering them no ability to testify, and no compensation for harm besides the sum paid to their owners for lost property.

Joining scholars such as Saidiya Hartman, Jenny Sharpe, Emily Owens, and Walter Johnson, among others, Fuentes documents the undocumentability of black women's experiences under slavery in Barbados. Dispossessed Lives claims the impossibility of agency under the conditions of enslavement—and, in fact, argues that the very terms of agency and resistance are misplaced in their application to scholarship on slavery. In addition to calling out the hunt for resistance in the archive as the remnant of a masculinist methodology, Fuentes is most concerned with a trend she sees in feminist scholarship to valorize the sexual agency of some enslaved women. By reading the archives to show the deep vulnerability of urban enslaved women hired out by their owners for sexual labor, Fuentes complicates readings of redress through sexuality that she sees in emerging historical work on black women in the Caribbean of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries (though, of course, many of the articulations of agency through sexuality in enslaved women's history are not purely celebratory or uncomplicated themselves).

Fuentes works heavily from the paradigm shifting scholarship of Hartman—and, more occasionally, Hortense Spillers, though I think following her claim of "ungendering" does not serve the book's powerful and particular re-mapping of black women's enslaved bodies and sexualities onto urban eighteenth-century space as well as Hartman's Scenes of Subjection (1997). Fuentes' work is indeed a challenge to historians of the Caribbean, and of slavery. Here, she joins her fellow historians Jennifer Morgan, Daina Berry, Deborah Gray White, Stephanie Camp, and others, as well as a host of cultural studies scholars like Hartman and Sharpe...