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Over the past two decades, black feminist historians have fundamentally reshaped the study of slavery and freedom in the Atlantic world. By foregrounding black women's lives and labors, these scholars have transformed how we understand the emergence of racial slavery just as much as they have inspired new ways to write insurgent histories using colonial archives. Historian Jessica Marie Johnson builds on this paradigm-shifting work in Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World, recently made available in paperback. Johnson's book explores how African and African-descended women, both free and enslaved, developed their own strategies of freedom-seeking during the long eighteenth century. Tracing an oceanic path from Senegambia to the Caribbean and New Orleans, Johnson documents black women's efforts to build elaborate kinship networks, exert social influence, acquire property, and transmit wealth intergenerationally to achieve collective security and autonomy. These women, she argues, pursued freedom not solely as a matter of legal status, but "as a project of ecstatic black humanity in the face of abject subjection and against slavery as social death" (3). Though always marked by the threat of intimate violence, these efforts nevertheless allowed black women to construct diasporic belonging in the wake of the Atlantic slave trade.
The first two chapters of Wicked Flesh introduce readers to the comptoirs of Saint-Louis and Gorée, where free Senegambian women amassed wealth, social standing, and property (including slaves) as pillars of durable kinship forged from the intimate encounters of transatlantic commerce. Johnson dispenses with the objectifying and sensationalist characterizations...