Gender and Slavery from Africa to the Americas

News! If you are interested in gender and history, Prof. Joan Scott (Princeton, emerita) is speaking to the History Research Seminar in week 3 of this term! Details here.

And if you are interested in the Liberated Africans in Brazil, Cuba, and the Americas more widely, note this upcoming talk in week 8 by Jake Subryan Richards on his new book, The Bonds of Freedom.

PPT for session

Notes on slavery and gender in Africa from Dr. Adyeeri Kembabazi

Seminar Questions

What is gender history and how is it different from women's history?
How did understandings of gender, and gendered relations of power, shape slavery and slaving in Africa?
In what ways was New World slavery a gendered phenomenon? What did this mean for women's resistance?
Why did Ball, Seijas, and Snyder feel the need to produce a separate timeline for women's emancipation?

Readings: choose at least 1; 2 if you can:

Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein, "Women's Importance in African Slave Systems," in Claire C. Robertson and Martin A. Klein (eds), Women and Slavery in Africa (Madison, 1983), ch 1, pp. 3-25. [you could also read the introduction to Mariana Candido and Adam Jones eds., African Women in the Atlantic World, see Further Reading below]
As If she were Free: A Collective Biography of Women and Emancipation in the Americas, eds. Erica Ball, Tatiana Seijas, Terri L Synder (CUP, 2020), Introduction.
Maria Helena Machado, "Between Two Beneditos: Enslaved Wet-Nurses amid Slavery's Decline in South-Eastern Brazil," Slavery & Abolition, 2017 (38:2): 320-336. [content warning: violence]

Further reading:

If you haven't read it for previous classes at Warwick, you might like to check this classic piece on gender and the politics of history: Joan Wallach Scott, "Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis," American Historical Review, 91:5, 1986.

Brazil/ Cuba:

Cowling, Camillia. “Gendered Geographies: Motherhood, Slavery, Law and Space in Nineteenth-Century Cuba.” Women’s History Review, June 2017.
Camillia Cowling, Maria Helena Machado, Diana Paton, and Emily West, Motherhood, Childlessness and the Care of Children in Atlantic Slave Societies (Routledge, 2020) [the articles in this collection were also published in the journals Slavery & Abolition, 38:2 (2017) and Women's History Review 27:6 (June 2017) and might be easier to find this way]
Teresa Prados Torreira, The Power of their Will: Slaveholding Women in Nineteenth-Century Cuba (University of Alabama Press, 2021)
Karen Morrison, Cuba's Racial Crucible: The Sexual Economy of Social Identities, 1750-2000 (University of Indiana Press, 2015
Africa, general diaspora, Anglophone Caribbean, US:
Paton, Diana. “The Flight from the Fields Reconsidered: Gender Ideologies and Women’s Labour after Slavery in Jamaica.” In Reclaiming the Political in Latin America: Essays from the North, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph, 175-204. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. [on course scans page]
Mariana Candido and Adam Jones, eds., African Women in the Atlantic World (Cambridge University Press, 2019) [on gender and slavery in Africa]
Beckles, Hilary. “Sex and Gender in the Historiography of Caribbean Slavery,” in eds. Shepherd, Verene, Bridget Brereton and Barbara Bailey, Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective. London: James Currey, 1995, 125-40. [on course scans page]
Wallach Scott, Joan. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” American Historical Review, 91 (1986), 1053-75.
Pamela Scully and Diana Paton, eds., Gender & Slave Emancipation in the Atlantic World (Durham: Duke, 2005) [e-book @ Library]
Marisa Fuentes Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence and the Archive (2016) [Barbados/ Anglophone Caribbean]
Morgan, Jennifer L. Labouring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Chapter 3: “‘The Breedings shall Goe with their Mothers’: Gender and Evolving Practices of Slave Ownership in the English American Colonies,” pp. 69-106.[US and anglophone Caribbean]
Jessica Marie Johnson, Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020)
There are also lots of further readings on gender and slavery in Africa on the Talis page for the first year History of Africa module, week 3.