Punitive Reproduction in The Fortunate Transport

Abstract:This essay examines The Fortunate Transport (ca. 1750) as a palimpsest of enslaved and criminalized colonial women. Published anonymously under the signature “A Creole,” the novel is narrated by a formerly enslaved woman who recounts the adventures of her mistress, Polly Haycock. Polly is “begot by Chance” because of a rape that occurs while her mother is asleep, dreaming of colonial Jamaica. Her early life is spent in sex work and theft before she is transported to the New World. I attend to the ways in which the novel experiments with the term “creole,” using it to signify racial mixing, intimacies between bonded laborers, and disembodied authorial personae, and show how a strikingly synoptic picture of sexuality’s critical role in imperial world-building emerges from this slipperiness.