bahareads's reviews
1065 reviews

Randy Browne says his "focusing on survival thus not only reminds us how difficult life was in Atlantic slave societies, but also enhances our understanding of the complex social worlds in which enslaved people and their enslavers confronted each other."

Surviving Slavery in the British Caribbean places the struggle to survive at the center of enslaved people's experiences. It focuses on the British colony of Berbice as it transitions from being Dutch to British.

Browne says the focus on freedom in slave studies is a western abstraction that holds little resonance among the enslaved. But by focusing on the challenge of staying alive readers learn more about how it shaped the range of social relationships, cultural practices, and political strategies for slave societies.

The bulk of the source material Brown uses comes from first person testimonies and complaints all lodged by enslaved people. It is the largest single archive of first person testimonies from and about enslaved people in the Americas. It is an intimate study of enslaved people's daily lives and voices. Thanks to the Dutch legal system, enslaved people's testimonies were taken and recorded in full. They offer powerful insights in the perspective enslaved people and reveal painful details about the world of African descendents.

I enjoyed reading Browne's book. It did make me think about the way scholars approach slave studies and what it means for the field and the historical subjects.

I've read Brit Bennett's books in reverse order, and you can tell her growth as an author from The Mothers to The Vanishing Half. Her writing style has remained the same. The Mothers is very character driven, and kind of plotless. The characters are airy (that's the best way I can express it). The plot points for The Mothers are very deep, but those are the focus of the story. I hated all the characters. They did not warm themselves to me. The omniessence of the narrators was fascinating. I like that Bennett chose to come at it from a Church POV. It was fascinating, and its showed the hypocrisy of church life. I couldn't stop reading it but I'll be quite honest the book overall was very forgetable to me. It was good writing but forgetable

This was good. I enjoyed this a lot. It quick and informative. It makes you want to know more about these women.

This is not (only) a book review. This is a dissection of the book, Island Queen, and where I think Vanessa Riley gets it wrong. While this is a historical fiction book, Vanessa Riley has a bibliography of texts she is pulling from. I’m going to be using two of those texts (Dispossessed Lives by Marisa Fuentes and Enterprising Women by Kit Candlin and Cassandra Pybus), along with Wicked Flesh by Jessica Marie Johnson to show why the book could have been better, while still maintaining the same impact that Riley desired when telling Dorothy Kirwan Thomas’ story. I believe Riley desires to tell a story of a strong Black female historical character and of women empowerment.

Island Queen is a great book for those who have never heard of free Black people in history. It is educating the public that there were Black people who owned property, and significant amounts of money during the period of slavery. However Island Queen harmfully reproduces certain narratives such as White Saviourism and the demonization of sex work.

Marisa Fuentes says, “these [‘these’ being Free Black women owning slaves, and other property] possibilities existed because it was created and sustained by the system of slavery in place. Rather than being ‘radically liberatory,’ these situations allowed enslaved and free(d) women of colour a mode of survival that kept structures of inequality and denigration in place.”

We do not have to romanticise people. Dorothy Kirwan Thomas has great story that needs to be told to show the nuance of history. We can also show the humanity of the historical actor. Riley could have kept Dorothy more nuanced the same way she psychologically analysed all the freaken’ romances.

We’ll begin by diving in with the writing style and narrative choice. The POV voice of Dorothy does not change from 5 years old to 50 years old. Her thoughts at 5 years old could have been her thoughts at 50 years old. I wish Riley had kept the childhood out of it. There are very little strong female relationships; readers only see Dorothy’s mom and Kitty, and later her daughters. Dorothy has no female relationship on par with good friendships. All of her female relationships have power imbalances were Dorothy is generally the stronger power. All the strong secondary characters are men. All the good ‘friendships’ are male.

Vanessa Riley is a romance author. She uses romance as the driving vehicle for the story. There is a hyper emphasis on it. It is annoying. All arcs of Dorothy and the problems of Dorothy are centred on romance and the romantic relationships. This narrative choice creates an intentional centring of White men. Not the right direction, if we are looking for the women in Black women empowerment.
I’m not a non-romantic but let’s explore all the options of why Dorothy was with these men. Women of Colour used White men for safety and for upward social mobility, among other things. Also, if we ga centre romance, cheepus she did put all the baby daddies and kids in at one time ay. Foden was not just a friend, he was one of her baby daddies. Let’s put it very bluntly, Dorothy was able to acquire property and power by using her body. Riley unintendedly (or maybe intentionally) demonizes the sex work that Dorothy and the enslaved women she owned engaged in. Instead of wrapping these relationships in romance, Riley could have pulled directly from Candlin and Pybus and shown that Dorothy enlisted serval White men (throughout her life and through various means) to free her family from slavery and gain power.

Cells is the literal embodiment of a White Savior trope. I do not see Cells helping Dorothy run away from home (which did not actually happen). Running away and assisting in running away contained serious consequences. It was big crime! It also brings up the issue of colonial borders. Colonial borders were very permeable. The same runaway advertisements were published in different newspapers in different regions in different imperial empires. If Dorothy’s family had wanted her back, they would have gotten her back. She was their property.

Let’s consider Cells again. A grown White [yes, I know he’s ambiguous in the novel but he’s a White man legally] man would not be her friend at the age of 11(or 13?); it is a weird narrative choice when we know a sexual relationship is going to happen. The familiarly that Dorothy conducts herself with, with every man is insane. There’s no social propriety. She speaks to them as if they were equals or have a close camaraderie which historically makes no sense. There is an existing social and racial hierarchy in every colony she lives in that would have been abided by.

I understand the emphasis on a ‘strong Black woman.’ However some of Dorothy’s thoughts and actions felt very presentist. Riley is trying to impose a 2024-girl-boss-view on Dorothy. I do not think a 18th-19th century woman would have had some of the thoughts Dorothy had.
Riley does get pieces of it right. Most manumitted women purchased their freedom themselves or through a third party. I did enjoy the portrayal of postpartum depression, or “birthing sadness,” that occurs in the book. I have been thinking a lot about mental health and slavery; in particular with slavery and motherhood through my own studies.

I am nitpicking a few events in the book, that show a larger thread at work throughout. (1) When Dorothy is gaining her freedom, she would have known that manumit = freedom. It is the same thing legally. Different scholars have shown than Black persons knew how to use the law and local legal customs for their advantage. (2) Charlotte’s reaction to White Grenadians being mean to her would not have happened. Charlotte was still a woman of colour. It would not have mattered if she lived a life of luxury or how white presenting she was. Colour was legally written into the law, legality mattered. (3) Dolly being shocked that Charlotte had to keep her freedom papers on her is weird. In most colonies you had to keep that THANG on you, or wear something to show you were a free Black person. How else is the ‘establishment’ going to know you are not enslaved and masquerading as a free person. All free people of colour would have known what they needed to do to stay free. (4) Obeah is mentioned as an indigenous Carib thing. I’m not well versed in Obeah history but as far as I’m aware it is a cobbling together of medical and spiritual practices that stem from West African traditions so how could that relate to only the Caribs?

A dissection of a series of sentences that seriously rubbed me the wrong way.

“Men with Black wives or concubines don’t gain power.”
• With wives, probably not. With concubines though, girl be for real. There were plenty of powerful White men who had Black concubines. Whether the concubines were willing or not is unknown. There is a constant trying frame all sexual relationships in love and longing. Sex was also used as a tool to gain material things.

“Black doesn’t gain power, it’s a target.”
• I’m not sure what to make of this. Riley is trying to show how Dorothy beat the odds? But there are free people of colour in the region. They were slave owners. They populate different empires. There was powerful, as well as they could be, Black persons. It unwitty feeds the narrative that Dorothy had to whiten her family up to win. It also ties in to that belief today.

“It’s a target. That’s why rebellions fail.”
• What is the definition of a successful rebellion? Was the Haitian Revolution the only successful slave rebellion? The answer is no. Another interesting point is that the closer you get to the end of British slavery. The number of rebellions remain the same or increases. The amelioration period and abolition does not slow it down. Keep that in mind.

Instead of showing Dorothy in the larger context of Black femme freedom, as Jessica Marie Johnson has created, Riley tries to ‘other’ Dorothy from the other Black women. Other property owning powerful free Black women, like Dorothy existed at this time. Dorothy’s enslaved workers were house keepers, hucksters, sex workers, and a host of other things. I think it’s wrong to not highlight that these women were forced or persuaded into sex work by Dorothy and others.

In the author’s note, Riley says “One of the hardest parts of Dorothy’s story to wrap my arms around was her decision to own slaves. She hated enslavement. She worked tirelessly to get all her family freed…. Therefore, I’m confident in her attitude about the topic in general…” I think that is a bold statement to make. I’m not saying Dorothy did or did not hate slavery. But I would not rest it on the fact that HER family was free. It is not the right framing for the book. Slavery was a fact of life; there were other ways to fight against the system, besides saying ‘slavery bad.’

Yet we can see that it is probable Dorothy did not totally hate enslavement. It made her wealthy. It made her powerful. Dorothy never manumitted any of her enslaved people who weren’t family. Candlin and Pybus show that she put out runaway advertisements for her property [enslaved people] who ran away. They also relate an encounter of her in England, which shows me she did not care for people beneath her.

Overall, I wanted less centring of romance and more realism. I understand in historical fiction, you must take liberties. However, in trying to write a history of a fascinating powerful Black woman in the 18th and 19th century, Riley unwittingly perpetrates the backward White narrative she wished to write out

Sherwin Bryant says that "Slavery in Quito reveals the centrality of slavery to colonial development and the emergence of race as a modality of early modern colonial governance." He is seeing to address the political history of slavery in the Andes and the ways in which slavery, and race for that matter continues to evade the grasp of postcolonial theoretical innovations concerning and coming out of Latin America.

Byrant moves away from the dichotomies of slave and non slave society by moving away from the lens of labor and economic capital. He turns to slavery within the Mediterranean household and Roman law to see labourers as conscripted colonial subjects. He suggests seeing slaves, slaveholders, magistrates, and colonial actors ad conditioning the development of an absolutist state and personal patronage. The book sheds light on the way colonial participants engaged in dialogues about good governance.

Rivers of Gold, Lives of Bondage reveals slavery as a fundamental feature of colonial practice, political economy and social life within early modernity RATHER than a replacement of a labor system used for the declining indigenous population. He also insists that slavery and race governance were quintessential to Spanish rule in the Andes.

Bryant says "Whatever justice there was for a slave, slave subjection was understood through and marked severely upon the body of the enslaved. Brands, baptism, and bonds (fetters, lashings, castration, amputations etc.) were all modes of subjection meant to govern slaves' comportment within Christian discipline. This was colonial race governance." Slave bodies were cites to inscribe and endow meaning, making it both text and repository for master and slave. Which really sticks to me with my own work.

Bryant's book has narrated precisely this struggle and dialogues it produced. It is, therefore, a history of a slave society, an insistent one that hopes to force us to see the enslaved as they would have been seen in society, to look at the slave in our attempts to define and describe the life cycle of colonial Quito

Intercolonial trafficking is the book subject; the scale, reasons, trader strategies, importance to imperial rivalries, connections to broader commerce and final passages for African slaves. O'Malley says he's concerned with "the regular and visible exchange of enslaved people as property in the markets of early America offered one important site where colonists learned to see African men and women as economic units with their humanity obscured." I enjoyed this book a lot. It's a macro-view book, which normally is not my favorite but the topic was fascinating. There were footnotes throughout which is always a historians favorite thing!

O'Malley has a five prong argument: (1) the intercolonial slave trade was robust in scale, (2) the extensive scale of intercolonial slave trading powerfully shaped enslaved people's experiences, (3) the intercolonial trade was not incidental but vital to the growth British Atlantic slave trade and the growth of American slavery, (4) the economic significance of this commerce extended beyond the profits of selling persons for a higher price, and (5) intercolonial slave influenced imperial policy, pushing the big empires away from mercantilism and towards freer trade.

Even though O'Malley takes a macro-view of the British intercolonial slave trade, he manages to fit poignant stories into each of his chapters that bring his arguments to life. He concludes with what separates the slave trade from other trades.

I’m too old for this genre now. 

A Kind of Madness by Uche Okonkwo is a collection of short stories. Okonkwo is an Nigerian author. The length of the short stories varies; one of them was only 4-5 pages long. 

The 10 stories are asking what happens when the ones closest to us drive us mad; or at least that’s what it is supposed to be asking. 

A problem that this book (and what I find with a lot of short story collections) is that all the different POVs read the same. There’s not enough distinction between each character to make each story distinct. They all started to blend together. 

The storylines were good, and the writing was okay. It was a quick read.

Thanks to @tin_house books for the copy.

A quick story that is great on audiobook. Yang covers heavy topics, such as grooming and rape. Both of the characters have unique lives. They were great main characters. I think this is a great book for those who are the 'ya age.'

Campisi wrote a book on the oral history of the experiences of Cubans in the camp at Guantanamo Bay, that have not been documented. Campisi was an observer to the Raft Crisis. She weaves her interviews in with historical facts, and allows them to rest as fact. She focuses on the balseros who resettled in Miami. By using the balseros' stories in their own words, she seeks to sensitive people to the trauma in such operations (like the Cuban Rafter Crisis).

Campisi is concerned with the relationship of Cuban culture and trauma with the way the culture of campus unfolded. She explores trauma theory for why creative expression was plentiful at the camp. It makes me think about The Bahamas, we have a large volume of high quality artists, and I wonder how trauma (present-day or historical) have helped to create and develop that side of our society.

Campisi seeks to increase the public's understanding of the Cuban rafter crisis and reduce the possibility that decision makers will use extraterritorial detention for people escaping crazy conditions in their countries. She highlights the balseros resilience was to highlight the human costs of the tensions between the US and Cuba, and using the case as a immigration center.