Wicked Flesh

Jessica Marie Johnson is Associate Professor of History at Johns Hopkins University.

• Introduction. The Women in the WaterChapter 1. Tastemakers: Intimacy, Slavery, and Power in SenegambiaChapter 2. Born of This Place: Kinship, Violence, and the Pinets' Overlapping DiasporasChapter 3. La TraversÉe: Gender, Commodification, and the Long Middle PassageChapter 4. Full Use of Her: Intimacy, Service, and Labor in New OrleansChapter 5. Black Femme Acts, Archives, and Archipelagos of FreedomChapter 6. Life After Death: Legacies of Freedom in Spanish New OrleansConclusion. Femmes de Couleur Libres and the Nineteenth CenturyList of Archives and DatabasesNotesIndexAcknowledgments

"Wicked Flesh is a long overdue, marvelous account of the complexities of Black women's lives in the Atlantic World. This compelling history shows the importance of Black femmes in the making and unmaking of the Atlantic World, creating changes that last until this day." (Connections) "Drawing on an impressive range of archival sources, there are many useful insights in this book, which transcends some of the geographic and chronological limits of historical subfields. One hopes other historians will adapt the arguments and ideas related to kinship and freedom developed by Johnson in future studies of slavery and freedom in the Atlantic world." (Histoire Sociale/Social History) "Johnson pushes readers to expand their thinking surrounding the lived experiences of free women of African descent in the French Atlantic during the long eighteenth century...[A]n impressive work. Wicked Flesh is a welcome and much-needed addition to numerous fields of scholarship, including the French Atlantic, the African diaspora, Black women's history,and comparative history. The study is as revelatory as it is impressive in its scope, analysis, and historical detective work. " (H-SAWH) "Wicked Flesh provides us with a complex, dynamic picture of enslaved women's lives that moves beyond simple tropes of 'agency' in pursuit of an abstract, Western-defined 'freedom.' As Johnson's analysis shows, Black women defined freedom in their own ways that went beyond formal manumission or 'free status.' Wicked Flesh is an important book that has already garnered well-deserved recognition and will be required reading for scholars of Black life for years to come." (Journal of Southern History) "Through innovative and interdisciplinary methodologies, Johnson unearths and beautifully recounts a history of freedom that foregrounds the intimate lives of African women and women of African descent...Put simply, Wicked Flesh is essential reading for those interested in the intimate lives of enslaved and free Black women and invested in understanding these women's theories and texts for living." (H-Early America) "A beautifully written history of Black Feminism...Although it is centered on Senegambia, Wicked Flesh inspires us to ask what a history of New Orleans—or Tampico or Galveston, for that matter—would look like if we were to follow the cultural threads of Black women's care practices to other parts of the Atlantic World. The book is itself 'a promiscuous accounting of blackness … as future possibility' and employs the same ethics of care and pleasure that its narrative brings to life." (New West Indian Guide) "Johnson's in-depth research, storytelling, and conceptualization show how Black women used their bodies, intimate connections, and kinship networks to protect their freedom, obtain manumission, and carve new spaces of freedom for themselves. Very accessible and readable...Johnson's book also contributes to the historiography of the French slave trade and Louisiana, of Black women's experience of empire and colonial society, but it also puts forth concepts such as null value and Black femme freedom that might inspire historians of marginalized and Black lives in other eras and geographies." (Early Modern Women) "Wicked Flesh is a long overdue, marvelous account of the complexities of Black women's lives in the Atlantic World. This compelling history shows the importance of Black femmes in the making and unmaking of the Atlantic World, creating changes that last until this day." (H-Soz-Kolt) "A careful and innovative scholar, Johnson remains attentive to her subjects' social, embodied, and spiritual worlds to dazzling effect. If the many merits of Wicked Flesh serve as any indication, the conjunction of race, gender, intimacy, and kinship in colonial contexts will continue to inspire innovative scholarship for some time to come." (Eighteenth-Century Studies) "Wicked Flesh is a powerful book that will set the standard for studies of gender and slavery to follow. It exemplifies the generative quality of a grounded engagement of the archives of slavery through contemporary theoretical work on race and the notion of Diaspora." (Jennifer Morgan, author of Laboring Women: Gender and Reproduction in the Making of New World Slavery) "Jessica Marie Johnson has an original, bold historical imagination, a gift for excavating and exploiting fragmentary archival material, and a beautiful, poetic writing style. Both her argument and her theoretical approach are important and timely." (Emily Clark, author of The Strange History of the American Quadroon: Free Women of Color in the Revolutionary Atlantic World) "With its deep archival research and compelling analysis, Wicked Flesh paints fascinating portraits of individual women and their efforts to practice freedom and firmly situates New Orleans within the larger French Atlantic world." (Jennifer Spear, author of Race, Sex, and Social Order in Early New Orleans)