Johnson, Jessica Marie
Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World
Penn (Philadelphia)
2020
OUR SYNOPSIS: Jessica Marie Johnson illuminates how “African women and women of African descent used intimacy and kinship to construct and enact freedom in the Atlantic world” from the late seventeenth through the eighteenth century. (1) Exploring stories from the coast of Africa to New Orleans, she emphasizes how these women crossed social boundaries of race and gender in exercising freedom. She shares their individual stories of self-assertion and resistance to amplify how their lived experiences radically defied intersectional oppression amidst Atlantic slavery.
BIG QUESTIONS:
How does Johnson’s transnational Atlantic world approach impact your thinking about African American history and histories of slavery?
How did women on the African coast navigate power relations with European traders?
FEATURE QUOTES:
“Over the course of the eighteenth century, women of African descent who were not enslaved acquired property and social status in Africa and the Americas. In a unique position to claim their own labor, free African women and women of African descent negotiated, challenged, and appropriated categories of difference. They engaged in and were forced to engage in intimate relations across gender and race, with individuals enslaved and free. They established families beyond biological kin, and across race and status. They accumulated property and distributed legacies across generations. Intimacy and kinship became key strategies in their bids for freedom and were central to what freedom looked like on a quotidian basis.” (1)
“This book is neither a biography nor a microhistory. It is a history practicing the same murky, contingent, and fluid freedom the women under study experienced in their everyday lives in an effort to circumvent an archive of disappearing bodies, limited detail, and excessive violence.” (4)
PRIMARY SOURCES:
BALTIMORE CONNECTIONS:
Jessica Marie Johnson is a professor at JHU.
