Dispossessed Lives

By Marisa J. Fuentes,

Book cover of Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive

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…

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Why read it?

2 authors picked Dispossessed Lives as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?

This book astonishes me every time I open its pages, and I return to these stories again and again. Taking the 18th-century urban city of Bridgetown, Barbados, as its canvas, Fuentes uncovers, often using fragmentary sources, the lives of Black enslaved and free women of color, narrating their violent stories of survival in ways that broke my heart.

Equally important, the power of Fuentes’ writing forces me to interrogate how histories of vulnerable women are produced while they are alive and how to reckon with how archives produce and reinscribe violence on their disfigured bodies after death. It is impossible…

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 starklyit'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…

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