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Event
Caribbean Studies Seminar Series
CLACS Caribbean Studies Seminar Series actively promotes intellectual engagement and knowledge exchange by providing scholars - including postgraduate students and early career researchers - with the opportunity to present their interdisciplinary, comparative and integrated research on the Caribbean.
Enquiring about Freedom: Networks of Resistance and Confrontation of Women of Colour in Tortola (1807 – 1828)
Speaker: Amy Cottrill (University of Leeds)
Chair: Sabrina Brown (Birkbeck)
Between 1821 to 1828, a Commission of Enquiry was conceived to investigate the ‘state’ and ‘condition’ of the kidnapped Africans on Tortola in the British Virgin Islands. It documented swathes of women’s experiences as they sought connections across statuses amidst the trauma of the Middle Passage and apprenticeship. Using these voices as raw material, a gendered entanglement of stratified female resistance networks emerged from within masculine colonial networks, persisting despite the violent, imperial frameworks that dictated Tortolean bureaucracy, and the Commission itself. Masculine networks were not without confrontation themselves; the innerworkings of this hierarchy fractured under political and religious conflicts. Some networks were small and isolated, operating within intimate relationships themselves. Others were large and complex, enmeshed with generational colonial hierarchies. The extensive, often disputed, documentary processes of Commissioners John Dougan and Major Thomas Moody, stitched this patchwork of female networks together. It formed a powerful resistive pattern via the lines of confrontation and support that crossed the rigid numerical categorisation of the Tortola Schedules.
Using James Scott’s Domination and the arts of resistance hidden transcripts as a methodological framework, kidnapped African women articulated ‘hidden transcripts’ consistently and daringly in the unsafe, hierarchical, masculine spaces of the Commission. This micro-historical research fills gendered gaps in conversations on the illegal transatlantic slave trade. Resistance, collaboration, and hierarchy are brought together in a humanised exploration of the interconnected lives of women of colour, where their wider connections to imperial frameworks are considered through an important geographical locale in the British Caribbean.
Amy Cottrill is an incoming PhD student at the University of Leeds, funded by the White Rose College of Arts and Humanities. Her project is titled, ‘Testifying through Terror: Reading Resistance in the Testimonial Voices of Enslaved People during Conspiración de La Escalera’. She will utilize legal and trial records to examine the African identities and experiences that shaped resistance within the 1844 investigations resistance of a supposed slave uprising in Cuba known as Conspiración de La Escalera. Amy recently concluded Leeds’s MA Race and Resistance program. Her thesis, supervised by Professor Manuel Barcia, explored the interconnected networks of support and hierarchy between women of colour on Tortola during the early 19th century. Amy recently presented this research at the Society for Caribbean Studies’ Postgraduate Conference. Amy’s primary research interests are intersectional histories of the Caribbean and African diaspora, specifically focusing on gendered resistance, testimony, and voice.
Sabrina Bowen is a 3rd year PhD Student at Birkbeck, University of London. Her research explores the inter-generational roles of the Caribbean diaspora in the development of their homelands. She is a freelance Sensitivity Reader and Fundraising and Development Manager at Action for Global Health, an influential membership network convening more than 50 organisations working in global health. As the CHASE EDI Ambassador, Sabrina co-organised Birkbeck's first Global Majority Doctoral Conference.
All are welcome to attend this free seminar, which will be held online via Zoom at 16:00 BST (UK time). You will need to register in advance to receive the online joining link. Please click on the Book Now button at the top of the page to register.
Seminar Programme 2024/25
Autumn term
24 September 2024
22 October 2024
19 November 2024
3 December 2024
Spring term
Organiser: Eve Hayes de Kalaf (IHR), supported by the Society for Caribbean Studies.
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This page was last updated on 30 April 2025