Violence, Resistance and Remembrance: Women in Jamaican Plantation and Maroon Societies, 1655-1838
The Research Project
Violence, Resistance and Remembrance: Women in Jamaican Plantation and Maroon Societies, 1655-1838 The Research Project My doctoral project investigates women’s resistance to slavery in Jamaica between 1655 and 1838, focusing on both plantation slavery and Maroon communities. Jamaica was one of the most profitable and violent slave societies in the British Empire, shaped by plantation capitalism, colonial warfare, racialized violence, and continuous forms of resistance. While enslaved and Maroon men have often stood at the center of historical narratives about rebellion, marronage, and anti-slavery resistance, women’s roles have remained much less visible or – alternatively – mystified.
The dissertation therefore asks how enslaved and Maroon women resisted slavery, how their resistance was recorded or silenced in colonial archives, and how it has been remembered, marginalized, or reinterpreted in Jamaican cultural memory. It brings together the history of slavery and resistance with questions of gender, violence, and remembrance. In doing so, it examines both the archival traces of women’s actions in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and early nineteenth centuries and the afterlives of these histories in contemporary memory.
The project draws on a broad range of sources, including plantation records, court proceedings, runaway slave advertisements, colonial correspondence, diaries, and travel accounts. I am looking forward to reading these sources critically, with particular attention to the ways in which colonial archives often distorted, criminalized, or obscured the actions of enslaved and Maroon women. In addition, the project includes a remembrance component based on oral history interviews with Maroon descendants and members of the wider Jamaican public. These interviews will not treated as direct testimony about the eighteenth century, but as part of a longer history of cultural memory, silence, and reinterpretation.
The central hypothesis of the project is that women’s resistance in Jamaica has been subject to a double marginalization: first, in the colonial archive itself, where women often appear only indirectly, fragmentarily, or through the language of punishment and control; and second, in later narratives of Jamaican resistance, where male figures and militarized forms of rebellion have often dominated public memory.
By tracing both the historical practices of resistance and their later remembrance, the dissertation aims to contribute to a more nuanced understanding of gender, violence, and memory in the history of slavery and Maroon societies.
What I need the IRB for
The IRB will allow me to develop precisely those parts of the project that cannot be realized within the local academic infrastructure at Ruhr University Bochum alone. While RUB provides an excellent environment for developing the theoretical and methodological framework of my dissertation, the specific archival holdings, local expertise, community contacts, and memory cultures central to this project are located elsewhere. I therefore look forward to using the IRB to connect archival research, fieldwork in Jamaica, and international academic exchange in a way that is essential to the project’s design. It will enable me not only to access relevant sources, but also to enter into scholarly and local conversations that are indispensable for understanding both the historical record and the contemporary remembrance of women’s resistance in Jamaican plantation and Maroon societies. These activities are not separate additions to the project, but closely interlinked: archival findings shape the questions I bring to the field; conversations in Jamaica may point me toward overlooked sources or local forms of memory; and international academic exchange helps me refine the theoretical and methodological framework of the dissertation.