Here are 100 books that Contested Bodies fans have personally recommended if you like
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I’m a legal historian with a particular interest in eighteenth-century Britain and the United States. My research has investigated the history of arbitration, historical connections between law and politics, and changing attitudes to the rule of law. Since 2018, I’ve been a professor at Notre Dame Law School, where I teach courses in legal history, civil procedure, conflict of laws, and the rule of law.
The Seven Years’ War was a pivotal event in the formation of the British Empire, but histories of the conflict often omit a crucial battleground: Jamaica.
Starting in 1760, enslaved West Africans in Jamaica organized to throw off their captivity. Tacky’s Revolt, as the uprising became known, was the greatest slave rebellion the Atlantic world had yet seen. It was also linked to other, global struggles, both in Africa and between European empires.
In Tacky’s Revolt, Vincent Brown links these hyper-local and imperial stories. I found it particularly useful for understanding the complexities of race and ethnicity in the eighteenth-century British Caribbean.
Winner of the Anisfield-Wolf Book Award Winner of the Frederick Douglass Book Prize Winner of the Elsa Goveia Book Prize Winner of the James A. Rawley Prize in the History of Race Relations Winner of the P. Sterling Stuckey Book Prize Winner of the Harriet Tubman Prize Winner of the Phillis Wheatley Book Award Finalist for the Cundill Prize
A gripping account of the largest slave revolt in the eighteenth-century British Atlantic world, an uprising that laid bare the interconnectedness of Europe, Africa, and America, shook the foundations of empire, and reshaped ideas of race and popular belonging.
Trevor Burnard is Wilberforce Professor of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull and author of four books and many articles on eighteenth-century Jamaica. He has recently reviewed 34 books just published on Jamaica in “`Wi Lickle but Wi Tallawah’: Writing Jamaica into the Atlantic World, 1655-1834Reviews in American History 49 (2021), 168-86.
We tend to think of social relationships in societies like early eighteenth-century Jamaica in male terms – masters and enslaved men. Jamaica was a very masculine place with a distinct masculine culture based around sexual access to women and a vibrant economy. But white women were also there and tended to flourish – working with the slave system rather than against it. This book is testimony to gender history and to the diversity of experiences in colonial Jamaica.
Jamaica Ladies is the first systematic study of the free and freed women of European, Euro-African, and African descent who perpetuated chattel slavery and reaped its profits in the British Empire. Their actions helped transform Jamaica into the wealthiest slaveholding colony in the Anglo-Atlantic world. Starting in the 1670s, a surprisingly large and diverse group of women helped secure English control of Jamaica and, crucially, aided its developing and expanding slave labor regime by acquiring enslaved men, women, and children to protect their own tenuous claims to status and independence.
Female colonists employed slaveholding as a means of advancing themselves…
Trevor Burnard is Wilberforce Professor of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull and author of four books and many articles on eighteenth-century Jamaica. He has recently reviewed 34 books just published on Jamaica in “`Wi Lickle but Wi Tallawah’: Writing Jamaica into the Atlantic World, 1655-1834Reviews in American History 49 (2021), 168-86.
Beautifully illustrated and persuasively argued, this survey of a variety of architectural forms in the eighteenth century, from merchant houses to enslaved yards to great houses shows how studying the built environment of early Jamaica gives insight into a society both rich and highly conflicted.
Through Creole houses and merchant stores to sugar fields and boiling houses, Jamaica played a leading role in the formation of both the early modern Atlantic world and the British Empire. Architecture and Empire in Jamaica offers the first scholarly analysis of Jamaican architecture in the long 18th century, spanning roughly from the Port Royal earthquake of 1692 to Emancipation in 1838. In this richly illustrated study, which includes hundreds of the author's own photographs and drawings, Louis P. Nelson examines surviving buildings and archival records to write a social history of architecture.
Trevor Burnard is Wilberforce Professor of Slavery and Emancipation at the University of Hull and author of four books and many articles on eighteenth-century Jamaica. He has recently reviewed 34 books just published on Jamaica in “`Wi Lickle but Wi Tallawah’: Writing Jamaica into the Atlantic World, 1655-1834Reviews in American History 49 (2021), 168-86.
In this lavishly illustrated book, primarily about art in Jamaica but with nods to New South Wales and Britain, Sarah Thomas connects the plantation and urban world of Jamaica to the discipline of art history, giving careful analyses of painters like James Hakewill who painted scenes of plantation life designed to normalise and make more Arcadian a landscape that in fact was marked more by violence than by contentment. It speaks vividly to the silences that surround slavery on the island.
A timely and original look at the role of the eyewitness account in the representation of slavery in British and European art
Gathering together over 160 paintings, watercolors, drawings, and prints, this book offers an unprecedented examination of the shifting iconography of slavery in British and European art between 1760 and 1840. In addition to considering how the work of artists such as Agostino Brunias, James Hakewill, and Augustus Earle responded to abolitionist politics, Sarah Thomas examines the importance of the eyewitness account in endowing visual representations of transatlantic slavery with veracity. "Being there," indeed, became significant not only because…
Motherhood blindsided me. I was 37 and living my childhood career dream as a foreign correspondent when I serendipitously smelled the head of a friend’s newborn. Next thing I knew, I was up all night singing old Beatles' songs to a baby who needed to eat every half hour. Amazed by the power of rudimentary biology to reshape my conscious experience, I couldn’t help but start writing about it, first in essays and then in two shameless motherhood books of my own: The Mommy Brain: How Motherhood Makes You Smarter (heavily inspired by SarahHrdy) and Buzz: A Year of Paying Attention (about sharing an ADHD diagnosis with my son).
Beginning in 1970, with “Up the Sandbox,” Roiphe was part of the first wave of shameless motherly truth-tellers. There are few more truer sentences than her acknowledgment that “feminism, despite its vast accomplishments, has not cured me of motherhood” in this poignant and prescient book about the impossible expectations that continue to bedevil working mothers.
The author of the best-selling novel Up the Sandbox offers a critical account of the feminist stance on marriage and motherhood, arguing for renewed support for the needs of working women trying to bring up children. 40,000 first printing. Tour.
I am passionate about this topic because patriarchy has generally told us that raising babies and kids is a mundane, even vilified, topic that’s hardly worthy of artistic attention, which is ridiculous. It is the richest of topics, underlines the mysteries of being alive, and so many wonderful books that explore it are either overlooked, unwritten, or admired for how they address something else. I have a hard time saying “Best” of anything, but these are great books that contribute to the respect and reverence that the experience deserves.
I’m recommending this book because it is a beautifully written book that centers a universally human event that is overlooked in literature: childbirth.
This book frankly and unflinchingly depicts a harrowing experience of a woman giving birth in a hospital. This book also tells the stories of two very different women—the woman in labor and the labor nurse. The book covers only hours of a life but touches on themes and motifs that concern all human beings: loneliness, care, medical care and how it’s given, relationships, childhood, coming of age, city life, mortality, and love.
Eleven Hours is a visceral, vital, microcosmic illumination of the most pivotal moment of any woman's life: giving birth. With taut, sensitive prose, Erens explores the lives of two women in New York - one in labour, the other her Haitian midwife - to gracefully reveal the seminal moments that have led them to meet here, now, during childbirth.
With this riveting, insightful and sometimes harrowing novel, Erens cements herself as one of modern fiction's most diverse and discerning authors.
I've been writing and providing pastor care for more than thirty years now. Since turning sixty, I have noticed that aging well is not a given. Many people seem to grow increasingly bitter, resentful, and hard. If we want to become more empathetic, grateful, and loving, we have to keep growing and do our spiritual and relational work. We also need trustworthy guides to help us find our way. I hope to be a wise, compassionate guide for my readers.
Kenison wrote this book when she was in her forties, after
she nudged her husband to sell their long-time family house and move to rural
New Hampshire with their two teenage sons. The book gives voice to being
uprooted, letting go of the familiar, and the profound transitions of mid-life.
Kenison writes beautifully of the stirrings and longings that prompt us to see
our lives from a new vantage point, ultimately allowing us to move on with
grace and grit.
The Gift of an Ordinary Day is an intimate memoir of a family in transition-boys becoming teenagers, careers ending and new ones opening up, an attempt to find a deeper sense of place and a slower pace, in a small New England town. It is a story of mid-life longings and discoveries, of lessons learned in the search for home and a new sense of purpose, and the bittersweet intensity of life with teenagers - holding on, letting go. Poised on the threshold between family life as she's always known it and her older son's departure for college, Kenison is…
I had a very distinct vision of what kind of mother I would be: patient, kind, and creative. And I can be all of these things, but so too can I be frustrated, furious, and exhausted beyond belief. This contradictory experience of motherhood was what I wanted to explore in Spilt Milk and is the motherhood exposed in these five books which, while very different in form, share a willingness to acknowledge the darker and less curated aspects of a relationship that can be as stifling as it is wonderful.
As Spilt Milk’s protagonist Bea Straw is a mum-blogger, I was keen to read experiences of real-life “mummy influencers”. Braithwaite’s book – part memoir, part manifesto – was of particular interest because she is Black, somewhat of a rarity in the picture of motherhood painted by social media that tends to be both very white and very middle class.
Documenting the difficult birth of her daughter and the subsequent mishandled complications, Braithwaite exposes the many and varied ways in which women of colour are disadvantaged and endangered by racial bias.
While light in tone, there’s a power and vulnerability in Braithwaite’s writing, and I learnt so much from this brilliant book.
Anna Malaika Tubbs is the author of the critically acclaimed book The Three Mothers: How the Mothers of MLK Jr., Malcolm X, and James Baldwin Shaped a Nation. She is also a Cambridge Ph.D. candidate in Sociology and a Bill and Melinda Gates Cambridge Scholar. After graduating Phi Beta Kappa from Stanford University with a BA in Anthropology, Anna received a Master’s from the University of Cambridge in Multidisciplinary Gender Studies. Outside of the academy, she is an educator and DEI consultant. She lives with her husband, Michael Tubbs, and their son Michael Malakai.
This book powerfully expands our definition of mothers and the role of mothering and presents it as a path to transformation. You will leave this book with a radical new perspective of what mothering does for everyone in our society. It is anti-imperialist, inclusive, and as the title suggests - revolutionary. If everyone read this, we would all live in a better world!
An anthology that gives access to the voices of mothers of color and marginalized mothers
Revolutionary Mothering: Love on the Frontlines is an anthology that centers mothers of color and marginalized mothers’ voices—women who are in a world of necessary transformation. The challenges faced by movements working for antiviolence, anti-imperialist, and queer liberation, as well as racial, economic, reproductive, gender, and food justice are the same challenges that marginalized mothers face every day. Motivated to create spaces for this discourse because of the authors’ passionate belief in the power of a radical conversation about mothering, they have become the go-to…
Parenting books bore me. I don’t like reading instruction manuals, and don’t have time to weigh others’ opinions about how to raise my kids. But when I read books about motherhood forged in self-reflection and told with literary elegance, I become a more self-reflective parent and have the eyes to see beauty in my ordinary maternal experiences. Books like this are few and far between. It’s hard for mothers to make art; when our resources are spread thin in parenthood, why do work that may not pay? How to find time for creative rumination? But here’s a list of books written by mothers who persisted in their creative work to show us motherhood in all of its mundanity, mania, and magic.
I found it almost impossible to find time for self-reflection in early parenthood. I was consumed at all times by the urgent needs of the infant and toddler in my care. But when I read Motherhood: A Confession, I became self-reflective by proxy.
Using Saint Augustine’s Confessions as a literary companion, Natalie Carnes asks, What if one of the greatest texts about human nature were written not by a man but by a woman and a mother? Using the self-awareness that is a hallmark of Augustine’s memoir, Carnes shows us maternal love and its shadow side, inviting us to see, from the eyes of women, both the dark and luminous shades of the human condition.
A meditation on the conversions, betrayals, and divine revelations of motherhood.
What if Augustine's Confessions had been written not by a man, but by a mother? How might her tales of desire, temptation, and transformation differ from his? In this memoir, Natalie Carnes describes giving birth to a daughter and beginning a story of conversion strikingly unlike Augustine's-even as his journey becomes a surprising companion to her own.
The challenges Carnes recounts will be familiar to many parents. She wonders what and how much she should ask her daughter to suffer in resisting racism, patriarchy, and injustice. She wrestles with…
