Skip to main content Skip to navigation

Department of History

Gender and Slavery from Africa to the Americas

PPT for sessionNotes on slavery and gender in Africa from Dr. Doreen Kembabazi

We'll be joined for part of this session by Warwick historian Dr. Doreen Kembabazi, a historian of colonial and post-colonial Africa, who will speak to us about her project "The Aftermath of Slavery in East Africa: Uganda, Kenya, Tanzania and Eastern Congo." As well as doing the reading, please jot down before class:

1: one thing you've found interesting on the course (I will ask you this as a quick introduction to the group);

2: one question you'd like to ask her (about her work or about any aspect of African history that you're curious to know more about).

Seminar Questions

  • What is gender history and how is it different from women's history?
  • How was slavery and slaving in Africa shaped by broader gendered power relations?
  • 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: please read the Robertson and Klein and then choose one other:

Further reading:

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.