Black Women and Insurgent Ecology: Woods, Water, and Gendered Rebellion in the Great Dismal Swamp

• In Event: The Afterlives of Waterways: Changing Sites of Violence, Resistance, and Histories across the African Diaspora

Description for Program

This paper locates Black women in forests, swamps, and in documentary records – where they have previously evaded our detection and attention. Through their noncompliant, reciprocal, and emancipatory relationships with land, water, woods, and swamps, enslaved women mapped insurgency across Virginia’s Great Dismal Swamp as fugitives, maroons, and rebels. Their deep study of the forested swamp’s ecological offerings provided alternative lifeways and opportunity to nurture Black social life – inherent insurgencies within the contexts of chattel slavery and social death. Black women moving through and operating in the vicinity of the great swamp calculated action against forced productive labor, reproductive violence, sexual assault, and desecrated motherhoods as keepers of secret and subversive knowledge; participants in violent combat; providers of community morale; and as maroons who dared to repossess their bodies in absolute defiance of the very economic workings of slavery, dependent as it was on the labor of their captive wombs.

Author

• Kathryn Benjamin Golden, University of Delaware