Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage

A body-centered account of the Middle Passage arguing that the totalizing violence of slavery began before plantation labor, enacted through the work of transport itself: capture, warehousing, shipboard confinement, medical sorting, sexual violation, and delivery into American sale. Mustakeem frames the slave trade as a 'human manufacturing process' with phases rather than a voyage with incidents, making visible the people pushed to the edges of trade histories — the sick, the elderly, children, pregnant women, and those marked as refuse slaves — and showing how terror, disease, and sexual violence were central to the trade's functioning rather than collateral to it.