Marisa J. Fuentes is a writer, historian, and academic from the United States. She is an Associate Professor of Women & Gender Studies and History and the Presidential Term Chair in African American History at Rutgers University, where she has taught since 2009. [1]
Fuentes is a historian of the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Atlantic world; her work focuses more specifically on slavery, race, gender, and sexuality in the early modern Caribbean. Her book Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (2016), which developed new historical methodologies for understanding and thinking about the difficult-to-access experiences of enslaved women in eighteenth-century Bridgetown, Barbados, [2] won the 2016 Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prize, [3] the 2017 Caribbean Studies Association Barbara Christian Prize, [4] and the 2017 Association of Black Women Historians Letitia Woods Brown Memorial Book Award. [5]
Fuentes is also the co-editor of the volume Scarlet and Black: Slavery and Dispossession in Rutgers History (2016) [6] [7] and the co-editor of a 2016 special issue of History of the Present on the ethical and historiographical challenges faced by scholars writing about slavery. [8] Currently she is Consulting Editor of the Journal of the History of Ideas.
Books
Journals and Articles
The institution of slavery in the European colonies in North America, which eventually became part of the United States of America, developed due to a combination of factors. Primarily, the labor demands for establishing and maintaining European colonies resulted in the Atlantic slave trade. Slavery existed in every European colony in the Americas during the early modern period, and both Africans and indigenous peoples were targets of enslavement by Europeans during the era.
Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, also known as James Albert, was an enslaved African man who is considered the first published African in Britain. Gronniosaw is known for his 1772 narrative autobiography A Narrative of the Most Remarkable Particulars in the Life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African Prince, as Related by Himself, which was the first slave narrative published in England. His autobiography recounted his early life in present-day Nigeria, his enslavement, and his eventual emancipation.
Slavery in the Spanish American viceroyalties included indigenous peoples, enslaved people from Africa, and enslaved people from Asia. The economic and social institution of slavery existed throughout the Spanish Empire including Spain itself. Enslaved Africans were brought over to the continent for their labour, indigenous people were enslaved until the 1543 laws that prohibited it.
Mary Prince was the first black woman to publish an autobiography of her experience as a slave, born in the colony of Bermuda to an enslaved family of African descent. After being sold a number of times and being moved around the Caribbean, she was brought to England as a servant in 1828, and later left her enslaver.
Slavery in New Jersey began in the early 17th century, when the Dutch trafficked African slaves for labor to develop the colony of New Netherland. After England took control of the colony in 1664, Britain continued the importation of slaves from Africa. They also imported "seasoned" slaves from their colonies in the West Indies and enslaved Native Americans from the Carolinas.
Rutgers University is an institution of higher learning with campuses across the State of New Jersey its main flagship campus in New Brunswick and Piscataway, and two other campuses in the cities of Newark and Camden, New Jersey.
Living in a wide range of circumstances and possessing the intersecting identity of both black and female, enslaved women of African descent had nuanced experiences of slavery. Historian Deborah Gray White explains that "the uniqueness of the African-American female's situation is that she stands at the crossroads of two of the most well-developed ideologies in America, that regarding women and that regarding the Negro." Beginning as early on in enslavement as the voyage on the Middle Passage, enslaved women received different treatment due to their gender. In regard to physical labor and hardship, enslaved women received similar treatment to their male counterparts, but they also frequently experienced sexual abuse at the hand of their enslavers who used stereotypes of black women's hypersexuality as justification.
Slavery in Latin America was an economic and social institution that existed in Latin America before the colonial era until its legal abolition in the newly independent states during the 19th century. However, it continued illegally in some regions into the 20th century. Slavery in Latin America began in the pre-colonial period when indigenous civilizations, including the Maya and Aztec, enslaved captives taken in war. After the conquest of Latin America by the Spanish and Portuguese, of the nearly 12 million slaves that were shipped across the Atlantic, over 4 million enslaved Africans were brought to Latin America. Roughly 3.5 million of those slaves were brought to Brazil.
Slavery in Cuba was a portion of the larger Atlantic slave trade that primarily supported Spanish plantation owners engaged in the sugarcane trade. It was practiced on the island of Cuba from the 16th century until it was abolished by Spanish royal decree on October 7, 1886.
Deborah Gray White is the Board of Governors Professor of History and Professor of Women's and Gender Studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, New Jersey. In addition to teaching at Rutgers, she also directed, "The Black Atlantic: Race, Nation and Gender", a project at The Rutgers Center for Historical Analysis from 1997 to 1999. Throughout 2000-2003 she was the chair of the history department at Rutgers. White has been awarded the John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship, the Woodrow Wilson International Center Fellowship, the Carter G. Woodson Medallion for excellence in African American history, and has also received an Honorary Doctorate from her undergraduate alma mater, Binghamton University. She currently heads the Scarlet and Black Project which investigates Native Americans and African Americans in the history of Rutgers University.
The Berkshire Conference of Women Historians Book Prizes are awarded each year by the Berkshire Conference of Women Historians. Nominees must be women normally resident in North America who have published a book in the previous year. One prize recognizes an author's first book that "deals substantially with the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality", and the other prize recognizes "a first book in any field of history that does not focus on the history of women, gender, and/or sexuality."
Susannah Ostrehan was a Barbadian businesswoman who owned a number of properties in Bridgetown. She was a freed slave, and acquired a number of slaves herself, many of which were friends or family she purchased in order to expedite their manumission.
Rachael Pringle Polgreen was an Afro-Barbadian hotelier and brothel owner. Born into slavery, her freedom was purchased, and she became the owner of the Royal Naval Hotel, a brothel that catered to the itinerant military personnel on the island of Barbados.
The role of slavery at American colleges and universities has been a recent focus of historical investigation and controversy. Enslaved Africans labored to build institutions of higher learning in the United States, and the slave economy was involved in funding many universities. Enslaved persons were used to build academic buildings and residential halls. Though slavery has often been seen as a uniquely Southern institution, colleges and universities in Northern states benefited from the labor of slaves. The economics of slavery brought some slave owners great wealth, enabling them to become major donors to fledgling colleges. Until the Civil War (1861–1865), slavery as an institution was legal and many colleges and universities utilized enslaved people and benefited from the slavocracy. In some cases, enslaved persons were sold by university administrators to generate capital, notably Georgetown University, a Catholic institution. In some parts of the nation it was also not uncommon for wealthy students to bring an enslaved person with them to college. Ending almost 250 years of slavocracy did not end white supremacy, structural racism, or other forms of oppression at American colleges and the legacy of slavery still persists in many establishments.
Stephanie E. Jones-Rogers is an American historian. She is an associate professor of history at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of They Were Her Property: White Women as Slave Owners in the American South. She is an expert in African-American history, the history of American slavery, and women's and gender history.
Jane from Bridge Town,, was an urban slave in Barbados under the ownership of John Wright. Jane's life illustrates a bigger picture regarding slavery and violence in the early eighteenth century. Jane was captured in West Africa and brought over through the Middle Passage to Barbados. She was described by her markings in her runaway ad which made Jane’s body seem vulnerable.
Nancy Clarke was a Barbadian hotelier and free woman of colour who was known for the continued success of the Royal Naval Hotel. According to Professor Pedro Welch of the University of the West Indies, Clarke's history is indicative of the ingenuity Barbadian women of colour used in the 19th century to secure emancipation from slavery for themselves and others.
Sasha Deborah Turner is a Jamaican-American historian who is an associate professor of history of at the Johns Hopkins University Department of the History of Medicine. Her research considers the history of the Caribbean, with a particular focus on enslavement and colonialism. She is co-president of the Coordinating Council for Women in History.
Jennifer Lyle Morgan is an American historian of United States history, focusing on 16th and 17th century African-American history and the development of slavery in the United States through the lens of gender. She is a professor in the Department of Social and Cultural Analysis at New York University. She is a 2024 MacArthur Fellow.