She establishes the central importance of the white gaze and its false construction of “perfect laboring bodies”: young, fit, black males. The following chapter, “Imagined Bodies,” sets up one of Mustakeem’s important historiographical interventions. Whilst this chapter perhaps lacks a better grounding in West and West Central African historiography, it makes clear that the arrival of European ships and the expansion of the slave trade left individuals, often regardless of status, vulnerable. From a woman grabbed by two men as she went to bathe in a nearby river to two men tricked aboard a ship and plied with alcohol, the precarious and destabilising impact of Atlantic Slavery is continually emphasised. It begins along the coast of West and West Central Africa, recounting the numerous ways individuals fell into captivity. The book is broadly structured through the processes of warehousing, transport, and delivery. Slavery at Sea: Terror, Sex, and Sickness in the Middle Passage is a handbook to the infamous “Middle Passage.” This is a text anchored in the Atlantic Ocean, taking the reader along each point in, what Mustakeem refers to as, “the human manufacturing process.” Charting the hundreds of thousands of voyages taken by English and American sailors and their enslaved cargoes, Mustakeem “min for the forgotten” shifting our understanding of the Middle Passage from a symbol or transitory event to an empirically grounded lived experience.
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