Dispossessed Lives

"[A]n astonishing and discipline-changing piece of scholarship. Interested in black feminist theory, gender, sexuality, slavery, and the urban Caribbean, [Fuentes'] interdisciplinary deep dive into the archives collides with so-called conventional understandings of historical methodology, historiography, knowledge production, and especially historical archival research . . . scholars can no longer rationalize the absence of marginalized figures like the women in this book because the archival documents do not explicitly reveal them. Moreover, one will be hard pressed to tread heavily ever again over those documents--or their already fragment-rendered subjects--after reading this incredibly important work."—Journal of Early American History

"Dispossessed Lives reflects the tremendous complexity embedded in projects that attempt to extricate the histories of enslaved women from an archive seemingly bent on their erasure. Through artful discussions of the bondwomen who comprise her chapters, reading into silence as well as sound, Fuentes encourages historians to assess the limits of enslaved agency, highlighting the real, violent strictures that shaped the lives and afterlives of enslaved women residing in eighteenth-century Bridgetown. In doing so, Fuentes demonstrates what is possible when we approach familiar evidence with fresh eyes and innovative strategies."—Journal of African American History

"Dispossessed Lives is an impassioned and meticulously researched call to rethink how history, as a discipline, can approach the absence of archival evidence concerning enslaved women's lives in the Americas . . . [Fuentes] makes a compelling argument about the practice of history as a discipline itself, in addition to mapping new archival territory."—Textual Cultures