Dispossessed Lives
Book description
In the eighteenth century, Bridgetown, Barbados, was heavily populated by both enslaved and free women. Marisa J. Fuentes creates a portrait of urban Caribbean slavery in this colonial town from the perspective of these women whose stories appear only briefly in historical records. Fuentes takes us through the streets of…
Why read it?
1 author picked Dispossessed Lives as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
When researching my book, I often had access to letters, diaries, and even houses of affluent women whose papers archives were preserved. But recreating their intimate home music-making proved difficult. This book contrasts starkly–it's about enslaved colonial Barbadian women. Yet Marisa Fuentes' masterful stitching of archival scraps accessing their lives is moving.
She inventively reads maps, architecture, and ephemera alongside traditional sources to glimpse past existences. Reading this helped me recognize my sources' abundance, but also that sources demand continual re-reading and re-understanding. You can't take their meaning for granted. As Fuentes portrays enslaved lives, I realized my…
From Glenda's list on hidden lives of women in early America.
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