Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World

A study that writes Black women back into Atlantic slavery as historical subjects with interiority, strategy, and relation — moving from Senegambia through the slave trade and into New Orleans, while keeping Saint-Domingue present as a transit zone, a legal world shaped by the Code Noir, and a revolutionary source of refugee movement. Johnson argues that intimacy, kinship, sexuality, and freedom must be read together rather than separated, and that Black femme freedom describes practices of survival, refusal, and pleasure that exceeded formal manumission and operated across the full geography of Atlantic slavery.