AHA Session 81
Friday, January 8, 2027: 10:30 AM-12:00 PM
Napoleon Ballroom C3 (Sheraton New Orleans, 3rd Floor)
Chair:
Erin McCullugh, Elgin High School
Papers:
Session Abstract
This panel centers on the challenge of thinking through the entanglement of slavery and sex, and in particular the consequences of this entanglement on the dynamics within and understandings of family and kinship. Taking inspiration from the rich recent work centering sex, sexual violence, and slavery in the antebellum American South, papers will bring these debates into a comparative frame, considering these themes within the diverse contexts of the French Antilles, late Mughal South Asia, the Dutch Cape Colony, and Qajar Iran. Papers will examine forms of violence, coercion, trauma, and alienation alongside bonds of kinship, community, and incorporation. This approach will highlight both the constraints and coercion exerted upon enslaved people as well as the limited but extant scope for possible negotiation. Particular attention will be paid both to understandings of sex and sexual violation, as well as to how sex with and sexual violation of enslaved people left complex archival traces, marked by varying forms and degrees of visibility and invisibility, of scarcity and abundance. In exploring these diverse traces through our distinct archives, we will consider how the shared vulnerability of enslaved people to sexual violation might have taken different forms and entailed different consequences in radically different historical contexts and become enmeshed in divergent historiographical debates.
Not only were the circumstances and experiences of sex within the context of slavery diverse, but also its consequences. These consequences could relate to reproduction, i.e. pregnancy and enslaved motherhood, but also non-reproductive relations. In either way, sex could entail the reconfiguration of a range of relationships and social dynamics within and beyond familial spaces. Different legal regimes, cultural norms, and household circumstances informed the wide-ranging impacts within families constituted by enslavers and/or enslaved people, and their larger communities. For instance, the practice of recognizing children born to enslaved mothers as legitimate and free-born and their mothers as possessing the particular status of umm walad within the Islamicate world contrasts with partus sequitur ventrem and the inheritance of enslaved status via the mother in the Atlantic world. In thinking through the specificity of distinct case studies, examining sources ranging from court case documentation and administrative records to slave memoirs and enslavers' diaries to satirical literature, and in focusing on enslaved people including domestic servants, concubines, eunuchs, and menial laborers, the panel will explore how sex under slavery is not only significant for understanding enslaved experience and processes of family formation, but also the fundamental formation of the social and sexual orders in which they were embedded. Sex with enslaved people could be the source of conflict and anxiety, and/or integral to their social worlds and their reproduction. Through taking a comparative approach, the panel hopes to not only think through sex under slavery as the location of extraction and/or disciplinary violence, but furthermore as key to understanding both the common and diverging experiences of enslaved people, as situated within diverse historical contexts. As such, the panel should be of interest to scholars of slavery, violence, sexuality, and the family.
Not only were the circumstances and experiences of sex within the context of slavery diverse, but also its consequences. These consequences could relate to reproduction, i.e. pregnancy and enslaved motherhood, but also non-reproductive relations. In either way, sex could entail the reconfiguration of a range of relationships and social dynamics within and beyond familial spaces. Different legal regimes, cultural norms, and household circumstances informed the wide-ranging impacts within families constituted by enslavers and/or enslaved people, and their larger communities. For instance, the practice of recognizing children born to enslaved mothers as legitimate and free-born and their mothers as possessing the particular status of umm walad within the Islamicate world contrasts with partus sequitur ventrem and the inheritance of enslaved status via the mother in the Atlantic world. In thinking through the specificity of distinct case studies, examining sources ranging from court case documentation and administrative records to slave memoirs and enslavers' diaries to satirical literature, and in focusing on enslaved people including domestic servants, concubines, eunuchs, and menial laborers, the panel will explore how sex under slavery is not only significant for understanding enslaved experience and processes of family formation, but also the fundamental formation of the social and sexual orders in which they were embedded. Sex with enslaved people could be the source of conflict and anxiety, and/or integral to their social worlds and their reproduction. Through taking a comparative approach, the panel hopes to not only think through sex under slavery as the location of extraction and/or disciplinary violence, but furthermore as key to understanding both the common and diverging experiences of enslaved people, as situated within diverse historical contexts. As such, the panel should be of interest to scholars of slavery, violence, sexuality, and the family.
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