Emily Owens and Marisa J. Fuentes in conversation at the African American Intellectual History Society blog:

“In this interview, guest blogger Emily A. Owens sits down with Marisa Fuentes to discuss her new book, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. The book, which uses archival fragments to bring into focus the lives of individual women in 18^th century Bridgetown, Barbados, offers a history from below, but takes it one step further. This is history without a trace, or, perhaps more accurately, with hardly a trace. In each chapter, Fuentes takes a deep dive into the slave society through the lifeworld of a woman on the island, asking, “How do we narrate the fleeting glimpses of enslaved subjects in the archives and meet the disciplinary demands of history…?” In other words, facing down an archive in which enslaved women appear “spectacularly violated, objectified, disposable, hypersexualized, and silenced,” Fuentes asks, how do we tell these stories?”

Read the rest: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive: An Interview with Marisa Fuentes