| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2

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| Book Review | The Journal of American History, 91.2 | The History Cooperative

Book Review

Ghosts of Slavery: A Literary Archaeology of Black Women's Lives. By Jenny Sharpe. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003. xxvi, 187 pp. Cloth, $49.95, ISBN 0-8166-3722-9. Paper, $17.95, ISBN 0-8166-3723-7.)
In the past decade scholars of slave societies in the Americas have produced a highly reputable body of discursive literature that focuses on the experiences of free and enslaved African women and their mixed-race offspring. Much of the historical research has been detailed and has served to force a meaningful rethinking of the traditional historiography. Jenny Sharpe has produced an interesting text, written against this recent work. She is critical of much of it and seeks to unsettle its core assumptions before it hardens into a new orthodoxy.	1
This is as it should be. But the burden of the task is not light given that the recent work is rooted in respected empirical research and utilizes an array of impressive conceptual tools and methods. Ghosts of Slavery, then, comes up against a solid record of scholarly output and inevitably is assessed within this framework. Unfortunately, it does more to remind us of the high quality of this earlier scholarship than to indicate its shortcomings. It is a useful summary of selected debates that defines in part this literature and serves to illustrate the central role of the Caribbean experience within the Atlantic context.	. . .

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