Consent in the Presence of Force: Sexual Violence and Black Women's Survival in Antebellum New Orleans

The burgeoning historiography on sexual violence in the Atlantic world has long grappled with the consent/coercion binary, but it is Owens who has cracked the conundrum by recognising how consent is coercion when extracted from the enslaved. Challenging the very notion of the conceptual utility of ‘consent’ when framed in binary opposition to ‘coercion’, Owens's Consent in the Presence of Force offers an arresting alternative: consent ‘is not the key to sexual safety but instead a guarantor of sexual violence’ (8). Nevertheless, Owens consciously resists reading Black sexual pleasure in this work. She points to the anachronistic nature of our search for pleasure (framed under sexual modernity) in slaveholding sexual cultures and rightly highlights how the intellectual meshing of consent with pleasure can lead us down the historical garden path. Although Owens is not the first to question our contemporary insistence on the articulation of a woman's consent as the standard for measuring willing and desire in the sexual encounter, her reframing of consent as an instrument of domination in the case of enslaved and freed Black women is nothing short of trailblazing. Grounded firmly in a Black feminist tradition of storytelling and critical fabulation, Owens argues her case with compelling conviction over five substantive chapters. Importantly, she centres legal sources to tell a cultural history, teasing out the ways in which law constructs and upholds cultural norms, thus reinforcing the conflicting logics of property rights, rape as physical force and the contractual bind into which enslaved women were trapped. Rather than jumping straight into the legal entanglements, however, she approaches her subject from a different vantage point in Chapter 1. While scholars have long recognised how violence permeated the Atlantic world and the lives of the enslaved, Owens doubles down on this to stress the quotidian nature of violence in shaping enslaved women's relationships to, and within, sexual encounters from the outset. This lays the foundation of her argument: despite the extraordinary lives of the women presented in the book, sexual violence was ordinary, expected and survived by enslaved women more generally. Consent – the yes to the sexual encounter – is far from a single moment, the utterance that transforms violence into desire. The following three chapters carefully chart how sexual violence played out in legal fictions that made impossible the rape of Black women, yet legitimated white men's insistence in securing Black women's consent through transactions and contracts. The process of extracting that consent—which Owens brilliantly expresses and explores as ‘pursuit’ in Chapter 2—was violence, a sheer terror that shrouded enslaved women's existence and shaded their sexual encounters. Chapters 3 and 4 examine some of the mechanisms of sexual consent, exploring sex work and concubinage, respectively, to flesh out how the imagined exchange of sex for potential freedom was fashioned into a transaction by which Black women were understood to have waived any expectations of protection from violence. Furthermore, the fact that ‘white men pursued, secured, and displayed their acquisition of Black women's consent through various transactions and contracts’ was itself the problem (14). Here lies the thrust of the argument: The pursuit and extraction of an enslaved woman's consent transforms the ensuing sexual encounter into a deeply unequal transaction. The yes conceals, even erases, the violence done by denying ‘the presence of force’, instead offering a semblance of equity between parties that fuels the narrative of enslaved women's desire for interracial sexual encounters. Thus, consent rewrites the script of sexual violence as mutual transaction built on the fantasy of enslaved women's agential parity with white male enslavers. Owens builds on the argument made by numerous scholars in the field that attachment to white men was the necessary price for manumission by demonstrating how intimate connection was a double-edged sword, promising freedom and simultaneously deepening enslaved women's subjugation. The book's final chapter zooms out to explore the racial geographies of what Owens terms the ‘Antebellum Atlantic’ as mapped by enslaved women. Her storytelling talents are on full display here, as she traces the everyday experiences of the enslaved woman Alexina Morrison with finesse, care, compassion and scholarly insight. The culmination of Owens's efforts, the critical fabulation of the Antebellum Atlantic seen through Alexina's eyes, is perhaps the closest historians have gotten to understanding the contours and complexities of life for enslaved and free(d) Black women. Owens's crisp yet lyrical prose jampacks her relatively short book with numerous arguments and interventions that are convincingly evidenced —an impressive accomplishment indeed. Perhaps the book's only shortcoming is the shortness of Chapter 4, which runs at only fourteen pages. Due in part to the chapter's brevity, the exploration of concubinage as a transaction does not quite capture how contract and consent functioned within what were imagined as affective, longer-term sexual relationships, and misses the important point that concubinary experiences for many enslaved and freed women (particularly in the Iberian Atlantic world) were modelled on, or even framed as, common-law marriage. The contrast between the analytical depths offered in ‘the concubine’ and ‘the quadroon’, for example, is particularly stark by the end of Chapter 5. Understandably, Owens draws from a rich Anglophone historiography that has long debated plaçage and the ‘quadroon’ but has tended to avoid intense discussion of concubines and concubinage. However, it is my hope that the influence Owens's book will undoubtedly have will inspire more scholars to engage more directly with the question of concubinage in the Atlantic world and the vast literature on the subject penned by Latin American and West Central African historians. Beyond the core argument of consent as an instrument of violence, Owens offers further exciting methodological and theoretical interventions. Bookending the introduction and substantive chapters are two key provocations: untruth and belief. In her Preface, Owens pushes beyond the scholarly debates on archival ‘silences’ and ‘reading against the bias grain’ to boldly challenge the very nature of the archive as ‘the lies of white men’ (4). Her unequivocal stance on the webs of untruth spun as fact in the sources historians analyse to understand the past asks us to rethink our relationship with ‘the truth’: ‘How do we transform fiction into history?’ (4). Building from the basic assumption that the archive is a constellation of self-interested fictions, Owens carves out a pioneering approach that enables her to see sexual consent as a tool wielded in the service of such fictions. After tracing exactly how that tool functioned to create the world enslaved women learned to survive, Owens boldly proclaims the inability of ‘rape’ as a concept and principle to account for the lives of Black women, built as it is on the premise that consent to the sexual act negates the ‘presence of force’ that would otherwise transform violent sex into a crime. This raises another pertinent question: Why must we ‘believe’ women claiming sexual violence? Consent requires belief based on our credibility in the agency of the consenting party, and as Owens shows us, it upholds the fiction of contract. Believing a woman means believing that the contract has been breached and the onus lies on proving that breach. In forcing us to recognise the inconspicuous ways in which our contemporary understandings of sexual violence are founded on contractual notions of consent, Owens opens a new challenge: What grammars and vocabularies can be developed to hold the sexual lives of Black women, for whom concepts such as ‘rape’, ‘consent’ and even ‘pleasure’ have been found wanting? Contemporary debates on transactional sex, especially in the sex industry, echo loudly and uncomfortably across the book: ‘when sex is understood as a transaction, women are imagined as culpable for their own violation’ (14). Rather than protecting women from sexual violence, Owens leaves us in no doubt that consent insulates the perpetrator from culpability for that violence. Once given, a woman's yes cannot be retracted, nor can it be renegotiated. Instead, it is read as an invitation, the ushering in of unspeakable levels of violence, all at her behest. That this instinctively feels like a more accurate reflection of how power and sex have historically functioned, and indeed continue to into the present day, is as sobering as it is illuminating.