Contested Bodies: Pregnancy, Childrearing, and Slavery in Jamaica (Early American Studies) - Softcover

Turner, Sasha

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0812224604 ISBN 13: 9780812224603

Verlag: UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR, 2019

Inhaltsangabe

It is often thought that slaveholders only began to show an interest in female slaves' reproductive health after the British government banned the importation of Africans into its West Indian colonies in 1807. However, as Sasha Turner shows in this illuminating study, for almost thirty years before the slave trade ended, Jamaican slaveholders and doctors adjusted slave women's labor, discipline, and health care to increase birth rates and ensure that infants lived to become adult workers. Although slaves' interests in healthy pregnancies and babies aligned with those of their masters, enslaved mothers, healers, family, and community members distrusted their owners' medicine and benevolence. Turner contends that the social bonds and cultural practices created around reproductive health care and childbirth challenged the economic purposes slaveholders gave to birthing and raising children.

Through powerful stories that place the reader on the ground in plantation-era Jamaica, Contested Bodies reveals enslaved women's contrasting ideas about maternity and raising children, which put them at odds not only with their owners but sometimes with abolitionists and enslaved men. Turner argues that, as the source of new labor, these women created rituals, customs, and relationships around pregnancy, childbirth, and childrearing that enabled them at times to dictate the nature and pace of their work as well as their value. Drawing on a wide range of sources—including plantation records, abolitionist treatises, legislative documents, slave narratives, runaway advertisements, proslavery literature, and planter correspondence—Contested Bodies yields a fresh account of how the end of the slave trade changed the bodily experiences of those still enslaved in Jamaica.

Über diesen Titel

Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Sasha Turner is Associate Professor of History at Quinnipiac University.

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF PENNSYLVANIA PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2019
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0812224604
• ISBN 13: 9780812224603
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 328
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar