Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive

Working from Bridgetown, Barbados, this book asks not only what happened to enslaved women but how they become visible at all in records shaped by slaveholders, courts, punishment, and spectacle — arguing that archives are not neutral storage but part of slavery's ongoing violence. Fuentes introduces the concepts of archival violence and mutilated historicity to describe the damaged, fragmentary, or spectacular conditions under which enslaved women appear in the historical record, providing a methodological framework for reading around distortion rather than filling silence with false confidence.