Wicked Flesh

The story of freedom pivots on the choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures.The story of freedom and all of its ambiguities begins with intimate acts steeped in power. It is shaped by the peculiar oppressions faced by African women and women of African descent. And it pivots on the self-conscious choices black women made to retain control over their bodies and selves, their loved ones, and their futures. Slavery's rise in the Americas was institutional, carnal, and reproductive. The intimacy of bondage whet the appetites of slaveowners, traders, and colonial officials with fantasies of domination that trickled into every social relationship—husband and wife, sovereign and subject, master and laborer. Intimacy—corporeal, carnal, quotidian—tied slaves to slaveowners, women of African descent and their children to European and African men. In Wicked Flesh, Jessica Marie Johnson explores the nature of these complicated intimate and kinship ties and how they were used by black women to construct freedom in the Atlantic world.Johnson draws on archival documents scattered in institutions across three continents, written in multiple languages and largely from the perspective of colonial officials and slave-owning men, to recreate black women's experiences from coastal Senegal to French Saint-Domingue to Spanish Cuba to the swampy outposts of the Gulf Coast. Centering New Orleans as the quintessential site for investigating black women's practices of freedom in the Atlantic world, Wicked Flesh argues that African women and women of African descent endowed free status with meaning through active, aggressive, and sometimes unsuccessful intimate and kinship practices. Their stories, in both their successes and their failures, outline a practice of freedom that laid the groundwork for the emancipation struggles of the nineteenth century and reshaped the New World.

Wicked Flesh is a long overdue, marvelous account of the complexities of Black women’s lives in the Atlantic World. This compelling history shows the importance of Black femmes in the making and unmaking of the Atlantic World, creating changes that last until this day., Drawing on an impressive range of archival sources, there are many useful insights in this book, which transcends some of the geographic and chronological limits of historical subfields. One hopes other historians will adapt the arguments and ideas related to kinship and freedom developed by Johnson in future studies of slavery and freedom in the Atlantic world., Johnson pushes readers to expand their thinking surrounding the lived experiences of free women of African descent in the French Atlantic during the long eighteenth century...[A]n impressive work. Wicked Flesh is a welcome and much-needed addition to numerous fields of scholarship, including the French Atlantic, the African diaspora, Black women’s history,and comparative history. The study is as revelatory as it is impressive in its scope, analysis, and historical detective work., Wicked Flesh provides us with a complex, dynamic picture of enslaved women’s lives that moves beyond simple tropes of 'agency' in pursuit of an abstract, Western-defined 'freedom.' As Johnson’s analysis shows, Black women defined freedom in their own ways that went beyond formal manumission or 'free status.' Wicked Flesh is an important book that has already garnered well-deserved recognition and will be required reading for scholars of Black life for years to come., Through innovative and interdisciplinary methodologies, Johnson unearths and beautifully recounts a history of freedom that foregrounds the intimate lives of African women and women of African descent...Put simply, Wicked Flesh is essential reading for those interested in the intimate lives of enslaved and free Black women and invested in understanding these women’s theories and texts for living.

Jessica Marie Johnson is Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University.