A Kick in the Belly, Stella Dadzie
A Kick in the Belly, Stella Dadzie
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A Kick in the Belly
Women, Slavery & Resistance

Author: Stella Dadzie

Narrator: Bahni Turpin

Unabridged: 5 hr 49 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Publisher: Tantor Media

Published: 10/20/2020


Synopsis

Enslaved West Indian women had few opportunities to record their stories for posterity. Yet from their dusty footprints and the umpteen small clues they left for us to unravel, there's no question that they earned their place in history. Pick any Caribbean island and you'll find race, skin colour, and rank interacting with gender in a unique and often volatile way. In A Kick in the Belly, Stella Dadzie follows the evidence, and finds women played a distinctly female role in the development of a culture of slave resistance—a role that was not just central, but downright dynamic.

From the coffle-line to the Great House, enslaved women found ways of fighting back that beggar belief. Whether responding to the horrendous conditions of plantation life, the sadistic vagaries of their captors or the "peculiar burdens of their sex," their collective sanity relied on a highly subversive adaptation of the values and cultures they smuggled with them naked from different parts of Africa. By sustaining or adapting remembered cultural practices, they ensured that the lives of chattel slaves retained both meaning and purpose. A Kick in the Belly makes clear that their subtle acts of insubordination and their conscious acts of rebellion came to undermine the very fabric and survival of West Indian slavery.

About Stella Dadzie

Stella Dadzie is best known for her co-authorship of The Heart of the Race: Black Women's Lives in Britain, which won the 1985 Martin Luther King Award for Literature, and was recently re-published by Verso in the Feminist Classics series. She is a founding member of OWAAD (Organisation of Women of African and Asian Descent), a national umbrella group that emerged in the late 1970s as part of the British civil rights movement, and was recently described as one of the "grandmothers" of Black Feminism in the UK. Her career as a teacher, writer, artist and education activist spans over forty years.


Reviews

Goodreads review by Teresa

writing: clear & concise pace: great topic: slavery, west indies, resistance, women importance: SO MUCH. do we need any more evidence for reparations? but this is why we aren't taught abt slavery in detail......more

Goodreads review by 2TReads

I don't usually rate non-fic, but this one needed ot. This was a great read! -As my two estates are at the two extremities of the island, I am entitled to say from my own knowledge...that book-keepers and overseers kick black women in the belly from one end of Jamaica to the other- Matthew Monk Lewis......more

Goodreads review by Colin

A Kick in the Belly is a short but indispensable study of the British Empire's crimes in the 17th, 18th, and 19th-century slave trade. However, what is far more consequential is how those women, specifically enslaved West Indian women in the Caribbean, fought and resisted the brutal conditions of sl......more

Goodreads review by Aaron

Thought it was great, a hard mission to fulfil the aim of the book, which is to fill the gaps caused by hundreds of years of white washing and centring europeans and white Americans at the centre of the movement for abolition. Dadzie does a great job at giving black women back their voice and their......more