First, she challenges the narrative that plantation slavery was more violent than other forms of bondage, and argues that urban slavery was just as brutal. Fuentes makes two interventions into the scholarship on slavery in the Atlantic world. This includes black women’s experiences in public executions and violent punishments, their involvement in the sex economy, and their efforts to escape slavery. Rather than placing our subjects within the categories of victims or victors, Fuentes encourages scholars to examine the “complex personhood” of everyday actions.ĭispossessed Lives provides a portrait of eighteenth-century urban slavery in Bridgetown, Barbados from the perspective of multiple black women. In doing so, her work investigates the sometimes hidden intentions and power dynamics that frame people’s decision-making. In other words, she pushes historians to stretch fragmented archival evidence in order to reflect a more nuanced, complex understanding of enslaved people’ lives. Instead, she calls for a reading “along the bias grain,” of historical records and against the politics of the historiography on a given topic. She cautions scholars to avoid traditional readings of archival evidence, which are produced by and for the dominant narratives of slavery. Fuentes’ work contributes to the historical knowledge of early America through her focus on violence and how it operated during slavery and continues today through archives.

Marisa fuentes dispossessed lives