Confined Spaces: Enslaved Women, (Im)mobility and Architectures of Control in Eighteenth-Century Bridgetown, Barbados

Historicizing enslaved women in an eighteenth-century Caribbean town requires more than the archive provides.  Enslaved women in Bridgetown, Barbados made up the majority of the urban population but left few records describing the depth of their lives.  Therefore this paper draws on theories of space, sexuality and domination to answer the following questions:  How did enslaved, free(d) and fugitive women figure, move across and inhabit the landscape of urban slavery?  How do we “read” the impact of the (sometimes figurative) architectures of slavery on the bodies of enslaved women?  What does it mean to move beyond the narrative of the mobility inherent in studies of urban slavery to understand the ways in which enslaved women were confined by urban slave society?  How are gender, race and sexuality signified in colonial urban spaces?  Closely reading runaway advertisements and mapping the structures of punishment in Bridgetown, this paper plots female fugitivity and the spatial boundaries they negotiated and were marked by including the cage, the wharf, the gallows and the market place in order to nuance quotidian narratives of female urban enslavement.