Reconceptualizing Freedom: Analyzing Enslaved Women's Resistance in 18th-century Santo Domingo

• In Event: Rethinking Theories of Gender, Race, and Sexuality from Anti-, De-, and Postcolonial Perspectives

Abstract

The dichotomy of unfree/free that frames resistance theories prevents us from understanding how enslaved women demonstrated complex agency under slavery. This logic frames enslavement as the oppressive power structure that is opposite to freedom, and freedom is then defined as manumission, a release from slavery or maroon communities; a separation from slave societies; or abolition, the dismantling of the institution of slavery. The simplification of the relationship between enslavement, power, resistance, and freedom limits our ability to recognize and understand how some expressions of enslaved women’s agency could challenge the institution of slavery, without inherently seeking to dismantle or disconnect from it. To push against this limitation, I engage with marronage, everyday resistance, and fugitivity – conceptual frameworks from Black Studies and Sociology that independently highlight either the actions, routes, or liminal status of subordinated people. I assembled these theories to operate as a framework that allows us to see enslaved women’s agency as a negotiating process; see how they navigate slavery and develop their conceptualizations of freedom, ultimately disrupting that dichotomy. To show this empirically, I use archival data and negative case methods to analyze the story of Elena, an enslaved mulata woman, who was the subject of an 18th-century redhibition court case in the Dominican Republic.

Author

• Eliana M. Mercedes, University of Massachusetts-Amherst