Jenny Shaw on The Women of Rendezvous: A Transatlantic Story of Family and Slavery

This discussion is with Professor Jenny Shaw, an Associate Professor of History at the University of Alabama where she teaches classes in the histories of the Caribbean, the Atlantic World, Comparative Slavery & Emancipation, and Early Modern Black Britain. She is the author of Everyday Life in the Early English Caribbean: Irish, Africans, and the Construction of Difference (University of Georgia Press, 2013) and she has published in Past & Present, The William & Mary Quarterly, and Slavery & Abolition. In this conversation we discuss her latest monograph, The Women of Rendezvous: A Transatlantic Story of Family and Slavery published by the University of North Carolina Press in 2024. We discuss the transatlantic story about five women who birthed children by the same prominent Barbados politician and enslaver. Shaw centers the experiences of the women and their children, intertwining the microlevel relationships of family and the macrolevel political machinations of empire to show how white supremacy and racism developed in England and the colonies. 

What is Conversations in Atlantic Theory?

These conversations explore the cultural, political, and philosophical traditions of the Atlantic world, ranging from European critical theory to the black Atlantic to sites of indigenous resistance and self-articulation, as well as the complex geography of thinking between traditions, inside traditions, and from positions of insurgency, critique, and counternarrative.