The Case of Prisoner “______”: Carcerality and the Archival Erasure of Black Women in Postapprenticeship Barbados

After an enquiry into the conditions of the female penitentiary in Barbados in 1853, the Commissioners found a concerning irregularity—a Black woman who had been confined for two years gave birth a few months after leaving the prison, suggesting that she had become pregnant during her incarceration. The Barbados Governor and House of Assembly took this event seriously, concerned not for the woman’s bodily autonomy, but for the neglect and lack of surveillance that led to, as they called it, the woman’s “misconduct.” They sought testimony from the prison warden, the guards, and the prisoner herself, who the investigators label solely as two blank lines: _____ _______. In an attempt to preserve her anonymity, then, the House purposefully sidelined the woman at the center of the case. Using the interviews, testimony, and report on prison conditions included in the Minutes of the Barbados House of Assembly, I analyze the concerted archival silencing of this formerly incarcerated woman and the implications for the study of gender and prisons in the Caribbean. Though scholars like Diana Paton, Dawn Harris, and Cecilia Green have studied the racial and gendered nature of penal policy after emancipation in Jamaica and Barbados, none have focused on female penitentiaries nor on the experience of incarcerated Black women. This presentation considers the difficulties of accessing the social histories of incarcerated women in the Caribbean through archives that routinely silence their presence and the violence they faced, as well as speculating on the ways women navigated these spaces of confinement by creating networks of support through the porous borders of the prison.