Agent: Anjali Singh, Ayesha Pande Literary. Titled Wake: The Hidden History of Women-Led Slave Revolts, the 150-page work emerges out of Hall’s 2004 dissertation on the same topic. Readers will be left with plenty to think about. Plus, his roomy panels and full pages leave space to breathe, and to reflect. Martínez’s resonant black-and-white art cleverly integrates historical scenes into the present-day narrative. Hall’s singular look at these women, along with her own experiences and resilience, highlight how entwined the past and present really are. Hall must imagine how these enslaved women rose against their dire straits, filling in scenes such as one where a woman may have burned her enslaver’s house down following the death of her friend, then attempted a mass escape. The accepted history of Middle Passage slave revolts has always been that enslaved women rarely participated in revolt. Blending present-day memoir and historical reconstruction, the story follows Hall as she strives to write her dissertation on women-led slave revolts, only to discover a handful of examples and obstructions from institutions seemingly invested in keeping these stories buried (such as being barred from accessing an insurance company’s slave ship records). The accepted history of slave revolts has always told her that enslaved women took a back seat. Hall discovered that out of the 35,000 slave ship voyages documented, there were revolts in a tenth of them. Hall’s nuanced and affecting debut graphic narrative uncovers history that has either been assumed non-existent or rendered violently so by its almost complete erasure from official record.
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