On Imagined Innocence: Emerging Black Feminist Approaches to Slavery Studies

Abstract:Building on the scholarship of historians like Thavolia Glymph, who challenged depictions of chattel slavery as a (literally) paternalistic institution within which white planter women were reluctant participants, the three reviewed texts each continue this project of grappling with the nuances lost and the violences erased when slavery is regarded as the ultimate expression of patriarchal violence rather than a manifestation of white supremacy that traversed gender.Spanning the diaspora, with Fuentes rooting her work in urban Caribbean spaces, Jones-Rogers locating hers in the pre-Emancipation U.S. South, and Young looking to “the wake of the Black Atlantic and the sea tack toward the Indian Ocean” (12), these texts underscore that, across geographical contexts, the exploitation of Black women’s bodies and labor was not specifically the domain of white men; rather, such exploitation was often the means by which white slaveholding women sought to negotiate their own social and financial freedom. Collectively, these three works constitute a shift in the literature toward investigations of slavery’s histories that complicate presupposed notions of agency, power, solidarity, and innocence.