Slave Stories

Beskrivelse

Slave Stories reveals the complex and often painful interactions between enslaved individuals and Danish judges in the courts of the Danish West Indies. It explores how these voices clashed with the harsh realities of slavery and legal systems.

An intimate look at how enslaved people voiced their struggles amid the brutal legal framework of the Danish West Indies.

In the courts of the Danish West Indies, hundreds of enslaved men and women engaged in a fraught dialogue with a small group of Danish judges. This conversation was deeply influenced by the tensions between slavery and prevailing sexual and family norms.

Some enslaved individuals presented themselves as respectable Christians, a strategy that eventually enabled victims of sexual abuse and rape to share their stories publicly. Others drew upon African-Atlantic traditions to explain their domestic disputes. Despite the power of these personal narratives, they rarely swayed the legal outcomes.

The judges, while appearing to accept slave testimonies, often delivered guilty verdicts and imposed harsh punishments. Although slaves were given a voice, their words frequently fell on deaf ears.

Slave Stories by Gunvor Simonsen reconstructs these personal accounts and highlights the distortions imposed by the Danish West Indian legal system. Through this lens, the book brings us closer to the lived experiences of enslaved men and women in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, in what is now the US Virgin Islands.

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