Sasha Turner’s Contested Bodies focuses on Britain’s most valuable Caribbean colony — Jamaica — between 1780 and 1834. Turner draws on twelve archives in Jamaica, the United States, and Britain, focusing on a constellation of plantation papers, court records, guides to plantership, and abolitionist texts. These sources underwrite a study that questions how enslaved women, their enslavers, and antislavery advocates developed new ideas and policies concerning pregnancy and maternity during a period when slavery was simultaneously under attack and under pressure to become increasingly profitable. At its core, Contested Bodies argues that the bodies of women and children became critical sites of negotiation regarding the future of slavery and colonial reform.
Contested Bodies incorporates new archives, geographies, and historical moments into conversations surrounding gender and slavery. However, it unmistakably builds on a generation of scholarship that has detailed how the experiences of womanhood and slavery intersected to shape the lives...
