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E-book
Author Johnson, Jessica Marie, author.

Title Wicked flesh : black women, intimacy, and freedom in the Atlantic world / Jessica Marie Johnson
Published Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2020]
©2020

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Description 1 online resource (257 pages) : illustrations, maps (black and white)
Series Early American studies
Early American studies.
Contents Introduction: the women in the water -- Tastemakers: intimacy, slavery, and power in Senegambia -- Born of this place: kinship, violence, and the Pinets' overlapping diasporas -- La Traversée: gender, commodification, and the long middle passage -- Full use of her: intimacy, service, and labor in New Orleans -- Black femme: acts, archives, and archipelagos of freedom -- Life after death: legacies of freedom in Spanish New Orleans -- Conclusion: femmes de couleur libres and the nineteenth century
Summary "The story of freedom pivots on the choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures. The story of freedom and all of its ambiguities begins with intimate acts steeped in power. It is shaped by the peculiar oppressions faced by African women and women of African descent. And it pivots on the self-conscious choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures. Slavery's rise in the Americas was institutional, carnal, and reproductive. The intimacy of bondage whet the appetites of slaveowners, traders, and colonial officials with fantasies of domination that trickled into every social relationship--husband and wife, sovereign and subject, master and laborer. Intimacy--corporeal, carnal, quotidian--tied slaves to slaveowners, women of African descent and their children to European and African men. In Wicked Flesh, Jessica Marie Johnson explores the nature of these complicated intimate and kinship ties and how they were used by black women to construct freedom in the Atlantic world. Johnson draws on archival documents scattered in institutions across three continents, written in multiple languages and largely from the perspective of colonial officials and slave-owning men, to recreate black women's experiences from coastal Senegal to French Saint-Domingue to Spanish Cuba to the swampy outposts of the Gulf Coast. Centering New Orleans as the quintessential site for investigating black women's practices of freedom in the Atlantic world, Wicked Flesh argues that African women and women of African descent endowed free status with meaning through active, aggressive, and sometimes unsuccessful intimate and kinship practices. Their stories, in both their successes and their failures, outline a practice of freedom that laid the groundwork for the emancipation struggles of the nineteenth century and reshaped the New World."-- Provided by publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Wesley-Logan Prize, 2021
Lora Romero First Book Prize, 2021
Description based on print version record
Subject African American women -- Louisiana -- New Orleans -- History -- 18th century
African American women -- Louisiana -- New Orleans -- Social conditions -- 18th century
Women, Black -- Atlantic Ocean Region -- History -- 18th century
Women, Black -- Atlantic Ocean Region -- Social conditions -- 18th century
Slave trade -- Social aspects -- Atlantic Ocean Region -- History -- 18th century
African diaspora -- History -- 18th century
African Americans -- Kinship -- History -- 18th century
HISTORY / United States / Revolutionary Period (1775-1800).
African American women
African American women -- Social conditions
African diaspora
Race relations
Slave trade -- Social aspects
Women, Black
Women, Black -- Social conditions
SUBJECT Atlantic Ocean Region -- Race relations -- History -- 18th century
Subject Atlantic Ocean Region
Louisiana -- New Orleans
Genre/Form History
Form Electronic book
ISBN 9780812297249
0812297245