Fruits of Their Labor (eBook)

Fruits of Their Labor explores how enslaved men, women, and children experienced forced reproduction in the antebellum South and considers the impact of those experiences on their day-to-day lives. It considers four main aspects of these experiences: enslavers' interference in relationships, fatherhood, medical governance, and marketization. Using the life cycle as a framework, it argues that forced reproduction affected all members of enslaved communities at every stage of their lives. The book further argues that elite white people strengthened the institution of slavery on the backs of enslaved peoples' reproductive and productive labor by following proto-"eugenic" pronatalist ideology that set the foundations for racist ideology enforced by white supremacists in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. The book's framework allows for a broad exploration of the emotional and physical trauma that sexual violence and forced reproduction left behind. Djelid thus argues that the role of enslaved fathers was diminished in order for slaveholding men to promote themselves as the sole patriarch on the plantation. Fruits of Their Labor considers how enslavers regimented food and medicine to ensure that enslaved children grew up into "likely" producers and reproducers, and finally, it interrogates the intergenerational trauma of sale and separation, as enslaved parents reckoned with the reality their children were to be sold as producers and reproducers.