Not Killing Me Softly: African American Women, Slave Revolts, and Historical Constructions of Racialized Gender

Abstract

A Trans-Atlantic social and legal history of African American women in slave revolts that provides an intervention into the dominant current U.S. historiography which maintains that enslaved women did not participate in violent slave revolt. Focusing on the Middle Passage and colonial New York City, this article reclaims and restores slave women’s participation in and leadership of slave revolts, while revealing both the current and the contemporaneous investments in masking this agency.

The author develops a concrete historical methodology which allows the recovery of this previously elided agency in order to reclaim a crucial form of resistance that has not only been overlooked, but disavowed. Broadening the discussion of African American feminist theory, it links this disavowal directly with current issues of racialized gender and the legacy of slavery.

Keywords: African American, Women, Slavery, Slave Revolt, Middle Passage, Eighteenth Century New York, Racialized Gender