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Jenny Sharpe. Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black Women's Lives. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003. xxvi + 187 pp. ISBN 08166-3722-9, $49.95 cloth; ISBN 0-8166-3723-7, $17.95 paper.
In Ghosts of Slavery, Jenny Sharpe examines, over four chapters, the lives of three women-the Maroon leader, Nanny; the enslaved Mulatto, Joanna; and Mary Prince, the narrator of the only English female "slave narrative"who experienced slavery in different geographical contexts in the Caribbean. We think we know these women because they are not as invisible as other enslaved women, as their names are among the most repeated in the history books; but how much do we really know, or can we know, given the sources available to us? Unlike women like Old Doll of Barbados, and men like Olaudah Equiano, these are not people who left "their own" written records; and so Sharpe has rightly described the process through which she found material, using Toni Morrison's characterization, as "literary archaeology." Her rationale for this approach has been beautifully expressed: "Slavery continues to haunt the present because its stories, particularly those of slave women, have been improperly buried. But an improper burial does not mean that they are irretrievably lost" (xi). Having established the rationale that underpins her present work, she then proceeds to explain her methodology as she embarked on this project of "resuscitating the lives of the dead by raising the painful memory of slavery" (xi). She uses a multidisciplinary approach "to piece together a range of subjectivities from the fragmentary appearance of slave women in the historical records" (xiv). She complicates the issue of "resistance": of equating agency with resistance. But as she correctly admits, this is not a new idea. Many other scholars have wrestled with the matter of resistance vs. "accommodation," of collective vs. individual acts, and questioned the assumption of antislavery intent in all of the "oppositional practices" of the enslaved.
But Sharpe creatively revisits these debates by using the three women's lives to demonstrate the complexities...