Books in the Race in the Atlantic World, 1700-1900 Series series

Shows how literary and visual depictions of black women helped to shape France's post-revolutionary national identity, particularly in response to the trauma of the French defeat in the Haitian Revolution. The stories of these women reveal a blind spot about race in French national identity that persists in the postcolonial present.

Uses theories of the body to detail the ways colonial states and their agents appropriated physicality to debase the black body, assert the inviolability of the white body, and demarcate the social boundaries between them.

Representations of the free mulatta concubine repeatedly depict the women as defined by their sexual attachment to white men, and offer evidence of the means to their freedom within Atlantic slave societies. Lisa Ze Winters contends that these representations conceal the figure's centrality to the practices and production of diaspora.

These recovered histories of entrepreneurial women of color from the colonial Caribbean illustrate an environment in which upward social mobility for freedpeople was possible. Through determination and extensive commercial and kinship connections, these women penetrated British life and created success for themselves and future generations.

In his examination of life, commerce, and social activity in the Great Dismal Swamp, Marcus Nevius engages the historiographies of slave resistance and abolitionism in the early American republic.