Sexuality and Slavery

Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas

Edited by Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris

Foreword by Catherine Clinton

Title Details

Pages: 240

Illustrations: 5 b&w images

Trim size: 6.000in x 9.000in

Formats

Hardcover

Pub Date: 10/01/2018

ISBN: 9-780-8203-5403-3

List Price: $104.95

Paperback

Pub Date: 10/01/2018

ISBN: 9-780-8203-5404-0

List Price: $36.95

eBook

Pub Date: 10/01/2018

ISBN: 9-780-8203-5402-6

List Price: $104.95

Subsidies and Partnerships

Published with the generous support of Sarah Mills Hodge Fund

Sexuality and Slavery

Reclaiming Intimate Histories in the Americas

Edited by Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris

Foreword by Catherine Clinton

An examination of the many facets of sexuality within slave communities

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  • Description
  • Reviews
  • Awards
  • Contributors
In this groundbreaking collection, editors Daina Ramey Berry and Leslie M. Harris place sexuality at the center of slavery studies in the Americas (the United States, the Caribbean, and South America). While scholars have marginalized or simply overlooked the importance of sexual practices in most mainstream studies of slavery, Berry and Harris argue here that sexual intimacy constituted a core terrain of struggle between slaveholders and the enslaved. These essays explore consensual sexual intimacy and expression within slave communities, as well as sexual relationships across lines of race, status, and power. Contributors explore sexuality as a tool of control, exploitation, and repression and as an expression of autonomy, resistance, and defiance.
Sexuality and Slavery . . . is a provocative book that contains groundbreaking research. Examining new paradigms for understanding sexuality and intimate relationships in the colonial Americas, the authors challenge existing assumptions and confront the shortcomings of typical approaches used in historical scholarship.

—Katie Knowles, Black Perspectives

These essays complicate simple binaries about agency, gender, and victimization, producing a fuller tapestry of the experiences of enslaved people.

—E.R. Crowther, Choice Connect

Winner

Best Black History Book of the Year, Black Perspectives

Trevor Burnard

Stephanie M. H. Camp

David Doddington

Jim Downs

Thomas A. Foster

Marisa Fuentes

Stephanie Jones-Rogers

Jessica Millward

Bianca Premo

Brenda Stevenson

About the Author/Editor

Daina Ramey Berry (Editor)
DAINA RAMEY BERRY is the Oliver H. Radkey Professor of History and African and African Diaspora Studies at the University of Texas at Austin. She is the author of The Price for their Pound of Flesh: The Value of the Enslaved, from Womb to Grave, in the Building of a Nation and Swing the Sickle for the Harvest Is Ripe: Gender and Slavery in Antebellum Georgia.

Leslie M. Harris (Editor)
LESLIE M. HARRIS is a professor of history at Northwestern University. She is the coeditor, with Ira Berlin, of Slavery in New York and the coeditor, with Daina Ramey Berry, of Slavery and Freedom in Savannah (Georgia).