天美传媒

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, 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]
• , 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:

Brazil/ Cuba:

• Cowling, Camillia. 鈥淕endered Geographies: Motherhood, Slavery, Law and Space in Nineteenth-Century Cuba.鈥� Women鈥檚 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. 鈥淭he Flight from the Fields Reconsidered: Gender Ideologies and Women鈥檚 Labour after Slavery in Jamaica.鈥� In Reclaiming the Political in Latin America: Essays from the North, ed. Gilbert M. Joseph, 175-204. Durham: Duke University Press, 2001. [on ]
• Mariana Candido and Adam Jones, eds., (Cambridge University Press, 2019) [on gender and slavery in Africa]
• Beckles, Hilary. 鈥淪ex and Gender in the Historiography of Caribbean Slavery,鈥� in eds. Shepherd, Verene, Bridget Brereton and Barbara Bailey, Engendering History: Caribbean Women in Historical Perspective. London: James Currey, 1995, 125-40. [on ]
• Wallach Scott, Joan. 鈥淕ender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.鈥� 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. . Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004. Chapter 3: 鈥溾�楾he Breedings shall Goe with their Mothers鈥�: Gender and Evolving Practices of Slave Ownership in the English American Colonies,鈥� pp. 69-106.[US and anglophone Caribbean]
• Jessica Marie Johnson, (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020)
• There are also lots of further readings on gender and slavery in Africa on the .