Women’s History Month Program

 

Tuesday, March 7, 2025 @ 6:30pm

In the 18th century, Bridgetown, Barbados, was heavily populated by both enslaved and free women. Marisa J. Fuentes, in Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive, takes us through the streets of Bridgetown with a runaway; inside a brothel run by a freed woman of color; to the gallows where enslaved people were executed; and within violent scenes of women’s punishments. In the process, she interrogates the archive to expose the ongoing effects of white colonial power that constrain what can be known about these women.

 

Fuentes, Associate Professor of Women’s & Gender Studies and History at Rutgers University was in conversation with Jennifer L. Morgan, Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University.

 

 

 

Watch the video here

 

Marisa J. Fuentes is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies and History at Rutgers University-New Brunswick. She was a Scholar-in-Residence Fellow at the Schomburg Center.

 

 

 

Jennifer L. Morgan is Professor of Social and Cultural Analysis and History at New York University. She is the author of Laboring Women: Gender and Reconstruction in New World Slavery (University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004).

 

 

 

For more:

Marisa Fuentes talks about her book Dispossessed Lives

Hilary Beckles, Afro-Caribbean Women and Resistance to Slavery in Barbados (London: Karnak House, 1988)

Pedro L. V. Welch, Slave Society in the City : Bridgetown, Barbados, 1680-1834 (Oxford: J.Currey, 2003)

Pedro L. V. Welch & Richcard A. Goodridge, “Red” and Black Over White : Free Coloured Women in Pre-Emancipation Barbados (Bridgetown, Barbados : Carib Research & Publications Inc., 2000)

 

Women in Barbados