Examines changes in enslaved women's working lives as planters sought to increase birth rates to replenish declining laboring populations. Establishes that enslaved women in Jamaica experienced a considerable shift in their work responsibilities and their subjection to discipline as slaveholders sought to capitalize on their abilities to reproduce. Enslaved women's reproductive capabilities were pivotal for slavery and the plantation economy's survival once legal supplies from Africa were discontinued.
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
199 p, "At the center of Jamaican-born Michelle, Cliff's novels is the exploration of the interplay between memory and history. Noraida Agosto examines Cliff's representation of memory as the part of history that has been suppressed because of its revolutionary potential. Memories of slave rebellions, for instance, were erased through omission from official historical accounts to discourage resistance among slaves. Cliff's novels are an attempt to recover these erased memories, which could generate resistance to modern oppressions. This recovery of devalued memories also entails a validation of non-elite beliefs, languages, and art forms in order to debunk dominant practices." (Book jacket);
Gaspar,David Barry (Author) and Hine,Darlene Clark (Author)
Format:
Book, Whole
Publication Date:
1996
Published:
Bloomington: Indiana University Press
Location:
African American Research Center, Library, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Notes:
341 p, Includes Mary Karasch's "Slave women on the Brazilian frontier in the nineteenth century," Hilary Beckles' "Black female slaves and white households in Barbados," Robert W. Slenes' "Black homes, white homilies: perceptions of the slave family and of slave women in nineteenth-century Brazil," Barbara Bush's "Hard labor : women, childbirth, and resistance in British Caribbean slave societies," David Barry Gaspar's "From 'the sense of their slavery' : slave women and resistance in Antigua, 1632-1763," Bernard Moitt's "Slave women and resistance in the French Caribbean,"David P. Geggus' "Slave and free colored women in Saint Domingue," and Susan M. Socolow's "Economic roles of the free women of color of Cap Francais."
Argues that free African and African-descended women participated in Spain's colonization of the Caribbean to a degree that has not been fully recognized. Regularly described as vecinas (heads of household) and as spouses to Iberian men in key port cities, free women of color played active roles in the formation and maintenance of Spanish Caribbean society during the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, not as peripheral or marginalized figures, but as non-elite insiders who pursued their own best interests and those of their families and associates.
