ABSTRACT
In her field-shaping work Closer to Freedom: Enslaved Women and Everyday Resistance in the Plantation South, Stephanie M. H. Camp definitively argues that in order to reconceptualize women’s resistance to slave societies and dispossession, we must rethink the spaces in which enslaved women and women of color operate. Spaces matter. In January 1803, after being deported from Martinique to Britain, Félicité-Adelaïde Kina secured permission to travel during the late stages of pregnancy from Britain to France to reunite her Haitian-Martinican family after the imprisonment of her husband Jean Kina and stepson Zamor. Haitian and Francophone Caribbean scholars of women's history in the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries note that traditional frames of history writing privilege the battlefield as the sole site of resistance, relegating women's narratives to the realm of sexual defilement and abjection. This chapter will demonstrate not only how Félicité Kina's journey stands to contest the spatial boundaries – the home, the market, domestic versus international spaces – imposed on non-white women, but also how her story helps to reframe what constitutes an act of resistance in the wider world of the Haitian Revolution – legal complaints, visa acquisition, debt negotiation, and bartering.
