A study of using the archives to illuminate the silences within them. Fuentes looks at enslaved women in Barbados as her case study.

"This study probe the construction of race, gender and sexuality, the machinations of archival power, and the complexities of "agency" in the lives of enslaved and free(d) women in colonial Bridgetown, Barbados."

Using different cases, to show a larger issue in the archives, whether it is the silence about women or how white women as shown as powerless victims in older historiographies or honour and sexuality, or how enslaved women were considered genderless in relation to motherhood, female vulnerability, and feminity or how the hypervisibility of certain WOC obscures their everyday life and creates caricatures of them.

This is a book that deserves multiple readings. It relates directly to my areas of interest in terms of enslaved people and the silences the archives produce. Reading against the grain and between the lines is exactly what Fuentes does in DL.

The methodology Fuentes uses can be helpful for those who only have fragments of people in archives. The way she builds the possibilities around enslaved runaway Jane in the first chapter had me in awe. Her writing can be heavily didactic and theoretical. Some parts are hard to read, especially if you are not used to historian jargon. DL is worth reading and highly useful for historians of marginalized and archively-silenced people.