ABSTRACT
Enslaved people possessed multiple social bodies. Inhabitants of a premodern society, they were made to suffer domination largely through the body in the form of exploitation, physical punishment, and captivity. Students of American slavery will find much with which to agree in Frantz Fanon’s analysis of black bodily experience. Historians of enslaved women have revealed the falseness of the dichotomy between the material/political and personal, in large measure by showing how the body, so deeply personal, is also a political arena. Colonial and antebellum slaveholders believed that strict control of the black body, in particular its movement in space and time, was key to their enslavement of black people. Enslaved women experienced the limits of the plantation’s geography of containment in especially intense ways. Alcohol proved an important lubricant for production at plantation affairs. Black women’s and men’s absentee nightly pleasures, such as sneaking off to parties to stay up late dancing and drinking, compromised slaveholding authority and plantation productivity.
