“Treacherous Rogues”: Locating Women in Resistance and Revolt

Enslaved women bore witness to the newly emergent discourses of race, commodity, and kin that shaped the early modern Atlantic world. Through the processes of capture, transport, and sale, they acquired critical perspectives on the new world they were situated in. That perspective became crucial as they navigated the terms of their enslavement and as they used the tools at their disposal to refuse those terms. The possibility of interrupting pregnancy or conception is framed as an intimate site of refusal. Women’s presence in Maroon communities and in plans for revolt is a more public one. Both are contrasted with the erasure of enslaved women from the colonial archive. The gendered landscape of colonial governance and slave ownership renders those women largely invisible in the narratives of slave rebellion. Chapter 6, “‘Treacherous Rogues’: Locating Women in Resistance and Revolt,” considers that archival problem and resituates women in the tradition of rebellion and refusal.