Archives of the Dispossessed

Almost two decades ago Saidiya Hartman asked how we can mourn an event that has not yet come to an end.1 That question, of how to approach the horror of enslavement through a present in which the past lives on, echoes in Stephanie E. Smallwood’s meditation, “The Politics of the Archive and History’s Accountability to the Enslaved.” Smallwood reflects on her own journey in writing Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Diaspora: from frustration at the silences of the archive of slavery—the unknowability of the internal experience of enslavement—to a recognition that in fact historical research and writing produce the archive. In approaching the production of archives in a new way, Smallwood explores the possibility of “counterhistories” that could be accountable to the enslaved, doing the work in the present of remembering the past. She questions what it means to read the archive “against the grain,” forswearing the metanarrative of a historical search for truth.2 She gives the example of her own work in Saltwater Slavery, reading the marginalia in the numerical ledgers of the slave trade as literary text, to give “interpretive weight to the captives’ experience of ‘a journey in which some-one died fifty-one times.’”3Hartman, in response, extends her own reflection on how to reckon with Black death and the relationship between the then and the now of Black death. However, she continues to express frustration with “slavery’s archive, which provides such a meager picture of the life and thought of the enslaved.” For Hartman, it appears that literary approaches will always be needed for us to imagine the experience and “apprehend the philosophy” of those who were ensnared in bondage.4How can we read the archives of slavery? As Smallwood shows, an earlier generation answered this question with skepticism and even contempt. Fugitive slave narratives and autobiographies could not be trusted; Works Progress Administration interviews with former slaves were unreliable. When historians and literary scholars began to read these sources carefully in the 1970s, they discovered a treasure trove of personal accounts of the experience of enslavement, at least in the antebellum United States. Yet the archives of the slave trade and the Middle Passage, as Smallwood recounts, remained impervious to efforts to listen for subaltern voices. The ledgers of numbers, the ship manifests, even bills of sale lent themselves to databases, to quantitative approaches to history. The words were the words of the merchants and enslavers, not the enslaved. How to write a history accountable to the enslaved?More recently, historians have plumbed new archives, especially those of legal records, inspired by the romantic aspiration to hear the voices of those silenced by traditional archives. In legal records, especially suits for freedom, we find fragments of enslaved people’s self-presentation. Historians, like Smallwood, have also grown more self-conscious about reading “against the grain” and treating the archive as a self-conscious production, as, for example, Marisa Fuentes’s recent Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive.Simon P. Newman’s article “Freedom-Seeking Slaves in England and Scotland, 1700–1780” presents one example of self-consciously reading the archive against the grain. He reads advertisements for fugitives from bondage as well as advertisements for “Negro” women, boys, girls or “Servants” for sale, documents written by slave owners, for the mundane and cruel purpose of recapturing freedom-seekers to enslavement or selling them in the marketplace. While these advertisements are among the more traditional white-authored texts in the slavery archive, Newman examines them with an eye toward their eventual disappearance, asking implicitly what their presence for a time in a changing archive might suggest. Newman uses these ephemera to illuminate racial slavery in Britain, an institution about which most Britons have almost total amnesia, showing that “many enslaved Africans and their descendants who were brought to Britain as domestic servants, craftsmen and sailors remained bound by and vulnerable to the conditions of New World slavery.”5 Despite legal precedents regarding the “free soil” of Britain,6 it would be more accurate to consider Britain, to invert the Rupert Brooks poem, as a corner of a foreign field forever America.Mindful of the meagerness of these ads, Newman applies quantitative techniques to them, not only reading the descriptions but counting the racial descriptors, skills, languages, and other attributes by which enslaved people were identified and also counting the number of advertisements over time. He parses the legal status of individuals named as both “slaves” and “servants” for a period of years. Finally, he speculates on the motivations of those who ran away, based on their choices, and on the few accounts we have from fugitives themselves. In this, however, he seems not to seek the “truth” of the subjective experiences of the enslaved but to repopulate the landscape that was eighteenth-century Britain with the fact of the many enslaved individuals who are so often absent from the literary and visual representations of that time. Thus, like Smallwood and Hartman, Newman helps us construct new archives and imagine new counterhistories

Aesthetics · Art · Diaspora · Literature · Marginalia · Metanarrative · Narrative · Political science · Politics · Reading (process) · Sociology · Cuban History and Society · Gender Studies · History · Latin American and Latino Studies · Law · Race, History, and American Society

• The Politics of the Archive and History’s Accountability to the Enslaved

  Stephanie Smallwood•History of the Present•2016

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• The Dead Book Revisited

  Saidiya Hartman•History of the Present•2016

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• Freedom-Seeking Slaves in England and Scotland, 1700–1780

  Open Access•Simon P Newman, Simon Newman•The English Historical Review•2019

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• The Time of Slavery

  Saidiya Hartman•South Atlantic Quarterly•2002

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