Sexuality and Slavery - (Gender and Slavery) by Daina Ramey Berry & Leslie M Harris (Paperback)

About the Book

"Editors Harris and Berry first conceived of this discussion -- one of the history and relationship between slavery and sexuality -- at a conference at the University of Texas at Austin in October 2011. The meeting encouraged a series of healthy dialogues with the general public, seasoned scholars, and those just beginning to learn about and research these topics of slavery and sexual intimacy. A select group of scholars met again in the fall of 2012 in New York to continue the conversation. This volume is a result of these ongoing conversations, with additional scholarly voices added as the project evolved. The volume places sexuality at the center of slavery studies in the Americas (the United States, Carribbean, and South America). In many mainstream histories of slavery, the editors argue that scholars have marginalized or simply overlooked the importance of sexual practices. But sexual intimacy comprised a core terrain of struggle between slaveholders and the enslaved. The essays explore consensual sexual intimacy and expression within slave communities, as well as sexual relationships across lines of race, status, and power. Contributors explore sexuality as a tool of control, exploitation and repression, and also as an expression of autonomy, resistance, and defiance. Essayists include Jim Downs, Sowande' Mustakeem, Bianca Premo, Marisa J. Guentes, Trevor Burnard, Jessica Millward, Leslie Harris, Thomas Foster, David Doddington, and Stephanie Jones-Rogers. All essays except those by Foster and Camp are new and were expressly written for this volume"--

Book Synopsis

In this groundbreaking collection, editors Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris place sexuality at the center of slavery studies in the Americas (the United States, the Caribbean, and South America). While scholars have marginalized or simply overlooked the importance of sexual practices in most mainstream studies of slavery, Berry and Harris argue here that sexual intimacy constituted a core terrain of struggle between slaveholders and the enslaved. These essays explore consensual sexual intimacy and expression within slave communities, as well as sexual relationships across lines of race, status, and power. Contributors explore sexuality as a tool of control, exploitation, and repression and as an expression of autonomy, resistance, and defiance.

Review Quotes

Sexuality and Slavery . . . is a provocative book that contains groundbreaking research. Examining new paradigms for understanding sexuality and intimate relationships in the colonial Americas, the authors challenge existing assumptions and confront the shortcomings of typical approaches used in historical scholarship.--Katie Knowles "Black Perspectives"

These essays complicate simple binaries about agency, gender, and victimization, producing a fuller tapestry of the experiences of enslaved people.--E.R. Crowther "Choice Connect"

About the Author

Daina Ramey Berry (Editor)
DAINA RAMEY BERRY is the Oliver H. Radkey Professor of History and African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of The Price for their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation and Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia.

Leslie M. Harris (Editor)
LESLIE M. HARRIS is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia).