Review of Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World by Jessica Marie Johnson
Deeply textured stories of women’s agency emerge when scholars take close and intimate relationships seriously – not just as a personal practice or academic subject but a political praxis – especially during periods of transformational change. Such is true with Jessica Johnson’s Wicked Flesh: Black Women, Intimacy, and Freedom in the Atlantic World, which is sure to be a significant contribution to Black Women’s History. Wicked Flesh joins a wide body of scholarship that focuses on Black women in the Atlantic world and during the Middle Passage, highlighting issues of enslavement, sexuality, gender, and resistance.[1] Wicked Flesh explores the ways Black women infused meaning, culture, identity, and self-defined notions of freedom into their kinship and other relationship ties, establishing connections and building networks that laid “the groundwork for … emancipation struggles (1).” The topic of Black women who construct their reality through their network connections spans space, time, and academic disciplines. Whether discussing efforts to self-liberate from enslavement,[2] the modern U. S. Civil Rights Movement,[3] or Brazil’s contemporary environmental and land rights justice movement,[4] Black women’s relationships and actions – both the deeply personal and the public – have wider implications for how we understand the significance of gender and sexuality within the context of collective challenges to systems that enslave, dispossess, exploit, and oppress.
Wicked Flesh unveils a complicated history of African women who were authors of their lives and made contributions to the modern era in a myriad of ways. Histories of the Atlantic slave trade and the West African littoral have not often centered the experiences of women, whether free or enslaved; Johnson’s work not only focuses on women but elevates them and their actions to the status of intentional drivers of history. Johnson does not shy away from presenting the complex dynamics of African women’s vastly different roles at the French comptoir administerial outposts of Saint-Louis and Gorée: some were enslaved and some were enslavers; others were wealthy, while most were of low economic status; some were diplomatic brokers and some skilled courtesans. They were mothers, daughters, wives, and sisters. Despite the differences in their social, economic, or familial roles, these women shared the primacy of intimate connections and relationships in their personal and economic lives as they navigated a changing society that was indelibly imprinted by processes of racialization and enslaving.
The boundaries of freedom were not clearly defined along racial lines in the eighteenth century, but African and African-descended women gave it meaning by actively forging freedom through intimate relationships. They engendered their freedom even outside of the realm of legal forms of emancipation, especially since enslavers, slave traders, and colonists often did not recognize distinctions between free and enslaved women. Meanings of freedom also varied between the enslaved, and free people who exploited slave labor to preserve their own safety and security. Free African women at Saint-Louis and Gorée distinguished themselves by providing hospitality to commercial agents, “cultivating a culture of taste and aesthetic pleasure that facilitated trade” (6). Johnson takes us in to the worlds of African women who shaped political and economic relations at Senegambia with their cultural insights. Women like Catti and Lucia accumulated capital through proficiency in “rituals of diplomacy” that “relied on pleasure and comfort economies created through African women’s labor”(21). Free African women’s cultural labor as well as their adornment practices using imported cloths “managed taste and defined standards of hospitality . . . through . . . performances of wealth, prestige, and decadence” (30). These practices of facilitating capitalist accumulation and consumption in some ways foreshadow contemporary campaigns #BlackGirlMagic and #BlackGirlsRock, which highlight black women as entrepreneurs, cultural producers, and trendsetters of style – clothing, hair, makeup, accessories, dances – who are often uncredited for their creativity. However, the luxurious lives of free Senegambian women at the comptoir administrative outpost belied their complicity in the commodification and violence that enslaved African women faced.