Derica Shields - Bad Practice

In 'Bad Practice', Derica Shields proposes the "bad practices" of the enslaved as an inheritance beyond property and consanguinity. In this ambitious book project, an unrealised lecture series traces the period between the 1807 abolition of the slave trade and the 1833 abolition of slavery, when debates in UK Parliament blamed enslaved people’s practice of herbal abortion for the declining plantation population. These maligned practices undermined the "breeding" policies that abolitionists and planters agreed should be implemented on West Indian plantations. Featuring annotations which attempt to place the many theoretical works and pop cultural references cited on an equal level with new writing, as well as a scrapbook style assortment of images, Bad Practice thinks deeply and acts against white supremacy, and proposes nourishing, if often also heavy alternatives rooted in Black feminist research.