Jessica Marie Johnson's innovative and impassioned work places Black women—both those born in Africa and their descendants—at the center of an Atlantic history that seeks to understand how these women understood and practiced freedom in an eighteenth-century world that was increasingly defined by slavery. Focusing on lived experiences and quotidian actions, Johnson follows the stories of individual Black women through the problematic archive to better understand how these women experienced major transformations on the ground—like the rise of Atlantic slavery and French colonization. She reveals how they made sense of these transformations through carefully planned actions, particularly the creation of intimate relationships and kinship networks.
Johnson argues that African women and women of African descent “used intimacy and kinship to construct and enact freedom in the Atlantic world” and that these women created new iterations of these practices of freedom depending on the context in which they found themselves, including...
