Historical Care and the (Re)Writing of Sexual Violence in the Colonial Americas

Abstract

Historical Care and the (Re)Writing of Sexual Violence in the Colonial Americas Marisa J. Fuentes (bio) HISTORIAN Sharon Block revisits, revises, and rethinks the lasting impacts of sexual violence experienced by a young white woman named Rachel Davis in late eighteenth-century Pennsylvania. Returning to her first published book with meticulous research and the benefits of new digital technologies, Block reconsiders the nature and legality of sexual violence in colonial America and the ethical enterprise of writing on vulnerable historical subjects. Equally important, Block centers "historical justice" in this rewriting of Rachel's life and what that might mean to people in our present. New archival evidence that she culls through traditional, digital, and genealogical research enables Block to offer a deeper and more contextualized long view of Rachel's life beyond the singular court case that sent her attacker to prison. Block places Rachel in the context of her community and settler colonial violence against Indigenous people and follows her archival traces through family relationships, marriage, and contemporary descendants. This new work enables Block to rewrite Rachel's narrative of sexual violence as one incident in a long life and raises important questions about historical production. In the essay, Block recognizes that the recovery of Rachel's archive and detailed life circumstances exemplified Rachel's subject position in this colonial past. Her mother's death and her father's destitution left her contract-laboring for relatives. Her age and employment made her vulnerable to the power of white men in this context. Still, Block offers a critical clarification that makes plain the different archival, narrative, and methodological possibilities for specific early modern women: "The archival traces left about Euro-colonial women such as [End Page 693] Rachel Davis are in no way comparable to the archival absences common to enslaved, Black, and Indigenous women."1 Here I want to think about how ethical and methodological stakes change depending on the historical subjects we research and engage. Block gestures toward this when briefly discussing the case of Phillis, an enslaved woman who "was pregnant with her enslaver's child." Block explains how "focusing on the production of history requires fuller and more just narratives that actively theorize the unrecoverable lived experiences of enslaved and Black women while attending to the violence too often inherent in the slim archival recordings of their existence."2 I am concerned about ethical historical writing and the troubling narrative practices that do not seriously contend with the methodological cautions Black feminist historians have made plain in their work on slavery. My essay cites work on both sides of the ethical divide to signal the epistemic consequences of writing without particular care for the historically subjugated. In this essay I will lean significantly on Saidiya Hartman's and my own work to clarify our arguments that may be misunderstood and/or misapplied. There is an archive of slavery that is fraught and violent. Though the voices of the enslaved are mitigated or silenced by colonial officiality, there is still much that can be said about the condition and context of enslavement and how the production of historical subjects affects or hampers narrative possibilities. Our work exemplifies different modes of historical narration and an ethical investment in the present.3 I will also ruminate on Block's concepts of "historical justice" and "doing justice" to clarify their meaning and discuss what it means to embark on a project of (historical) redress.4 Ultimately, Block frames critical historiographical and methodological questions pertinent to writing about the distant past and subjects who experienced intimate and other kinds of routine violence. [End Page 694] ________ In the past two decades, scholars of gender and slavery have written about the challenges of fully representing the intimate worlds of enslaved people, particularly women, in the traditional archive.5 The methodological work Sharon Block deploys in this essay deserves a close reading to distill her central intentions in revising her account of the life events of a young white indentured servant named Rachel Davis. In the reconsideration of her original essay, Block reflects on the layers of vulnerability and power in Rachel's life. Rachel was bound as a servant to...