SOAS Research Online

Abstract

Centered around and bringing forth the resistive remnants of Black and Indigenous gender nonconformity in a distinct socio-temporal context of racial capitalist regulation of sites of labor in eighteenth-century New Orleans, this chapter engages the temporality of work in its violent, extractive modes. It critically reads the archive to demonstrate that gender nonconforming individuals and communities of color were dispossessed in colonial Louisiana not only due to their perceived race and class, but also their gender difference. Hamzić insists that to understand work and livelihood—past or future—we must search for and engage these forms of embodiment.