Engendering Blackness: Slavery and the Ontology of Sexual Violence

by Patrice D Douglass

Genres: Nonfiction

352 pages, Hardcover

Published June 24, 2025

Reviews

[Luke Blanchford · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a profound scholarly work that looks at the genocidal aspects of slavery through the lens of sexual violence. The work disrupts all tropes of multi-cultural feminism, queer theory, white fragiity and also black masculinity studies through its close material readings of the background of rape on the plantation. I especially appreciated its keen criticism of the slave film genre, for occluding the unrepresentable violence down to slave women, through Hollywood tropes of production value and liberational fantasy. In this sense, I find the book to fit very well into the lineage of Afro-pessimism, from Du Bois to Fanon, but taken to new depths via black feminism.

[Sinem Esengen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Easy read but content wise very deep - and a full of telling narratives.