Race,slavery, and the expression of sexual violence in Louisa Picquet,the Octoroon

ABSTRACT

Historically, victims of sexual violence have rarely left written accounts of their abuse, so while sexual violence has long been associated with slavery in the United States, historians have few accounts from formerly enslaved people who experienced it first-hand. Through a close reading of the narrative of Louisa Picquet, a survivor of sexual violence in Georgia and Louisiana, this article reflects on the recovery of evidence of sexual violence under slavery through amanuensis-recorded testimony, the unintended evidence of survival within the violent archive of female slavery, and the expression of “race” as an authorial device through which to demonstrate the multigenerational nature of sexual victimhood.     

Daily risks: A biocultural approach to acute trauma in pre‐colonial coastal populations from Brazil

Brazilian coastal pre‐colonial skeletal series were examined for accidental fractures, which were grouped according to biomechanical interpretation of the causative events, and results were interpreted based on cultural and environmental aspects. More than 19% of the shell mound builders and 27% of the fisher–hunter–gatherers presented healed fractures. Both series presented balanced values between male and female (18.7 and 20%, respectively, for shell mound builders; 28.1 and 25.6%, respectively, for fisher‐hunter‐gatherers), and more than the double that proportion of the individuals (69.6% for shell mound builder and 88.5% for fisher–hunter–gatherers) had localised lesions, associated with only one traumatic event. The most common type of fractures were those caused by falls blocked by lower limbs (47.8% for shell mound builders and 46.1% for fisher–hunter–gatherers), interpreted as a result of moving along the rocky coastal cliffs. Despite these similarities, both series presented particular aspects which were related mainly to differences in subsistence strategies. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.