Gender, language, violence and slavery: Insult in Jamaica, 1800-1838

Abstract

This article examines the context of violence in a society undergoing the transition from slavery to a post-slave society, by investigating the insulting words employed by plantation managers in Jamaica, and the means by which enslaved people responded to them. It suggests that such words, in themselves and through their relationship to violent acts, played a central role in asserting and attempting to perpetuate the dominance of slaveowners and plantation managers over enslaved people. Jamaican evidence suggests that enslaved women confronted a day-to-day violent hostility to their bodies. Planters frequently 'cursed' and 'damned' their female slaves, often in overtly sexualised or bodily language. Enslaved women were likely to confront such a language of insult whenever they came into conflict with plantation managers; there does not appear to have been an equivalent language of bodily insult directed against enslaved men. The routine rape and sexual abuse of enslaved women was thus the most extreme form of a wider culture of sexualised domination in which the black female body was an object of disgust. Enslaved women did not accept the male planter designation of their bodies as vile. Fragments of evidence demonstrate their attempts to redefine and reclaim their bodies, and to elaborate their own forms of bodily practices of modesty and protection. In particular, enslaved women repeatedly claimed the right to define their own state of health, and thus when they were and were not fit to work. In such claims, enslaved and apprenticed women attempted to counteract a hostile discourse that disaggregated their bodies into a collection of parts, instead presenting their bodies as whole. © Blackwell Publishing Ltd. 2006.