Author: Emily Owens, Department of History, Brown University

Contents:

	List of Illustrations (p. ix)
	Acknowledgments (p. xi)
	Preface (p. 1) On Lies (or, after Archival Failure)
	Introduction (p. 9) Eliza's Last Child
	Chapter One Ordinar Violence (p. 29)
	Chapter Two Any White Woman or Girl (p. 56)
	Chapter Threee Contracts (p. 85)
	Chapter Four Of Mistrsses and Concubines (p. 104) Ann Maria Barclay's Critique of Marriage
	Chapter Five Seeing New Orleans Again (p. 119)
	Afterword (p. 150) Believe Women
	Notes (p. 159)
	Bilbiography (p. 199)
	Index (p. 221)

Description: »In histories of enslavement and in Black women's history, coercion looms large in any discussion of sex and sexuality. At a time when sexual violence against Black women was virtually unregulated—even normalized—a vast economy developed specifically to sell the sexual labor of Black women. In this vividly rendered book, Emily A. Owens wrestles with the question of why white men paid notoriously high prices to gain sexual access to the bodies of enslaved women to whom they already had legal and social access.
Owens centers the survival strategies and intellectual labor of Black women enslaved in New Orleans to unravel the culture of violence they endured, in which slaveholders obscured "the presence of force" with arrangements that included gifts and money. Owens's storytelling highlights that the classic formulation of rape law that requires "the presence of force" and "the absence of consent" to denote a crime was in fact a key legal fixture that packaged predation as pleasure and produced, rather than prevented, violence against Black women. Owens dramatically reorients our understanding of enslaved women's lives as well as of the nature of violence in the entire venture of racial slavery in the U.S. South. Unsettling the idea that consent is necessarily incompatible with structural and interpersonal violence, this history shows that when sex is understood as a transaction, women are imagined as responsible for their own violation.« (Source: University of North Carolina Press)

Interview: Hooker, Juliet, int. Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women's Survival in Antebellum New Orleans. Providence 2023. - Bibliographic Entry: Info

Reviews:
- Livesey, Andrea. Journal of Social History (January 10, 2024). - Full Text: Oxford Academic (Restricted Access)

- Montalvo, Maria R. Journal of Southern History 90(1) (February 2024): 152-153. - Full Text: Project MUSE (Restricted Access)

- Pinto, Samantha. Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society 49(3) (Spring 2024). - Full Text: University of Chicago Press (Restricted Access)

- Posey, Brianne. Criminal Law and Criminal Justice Books (June 2023). - Full Text: Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey (Free Access)

- Rothera, Evan C. The Civil War Monitor (2023). - Full Text: The Civil War Monitor (Free Access)

- Shearer, Erin. Slavery & Abolition: A Journal of Slave and Post-Slave Studies 45(3) (2024): 701-702. - Full Text: Taylor & Francis (Restricted Access)

- Winters. Lisa Ze. Journal of American History 111(2) (September 2024): 350-351. - Full Text: Oxford Academic (Restricted Access)

Wikipedia: History of the Americas: History of the United States | Sex and the law: Rape / Rape in the United States