EVERYBODY'S GOT A LITTLE LIGHT UNDER THE SUN

Abstract

This article examines the production of The Book of Negroes during the British evacuation of New York in 1783 and situates it as the first government-issued document for state regulated migration between the United States and Canada that explicitly links corporeal identifiers to the right to travel. I do this to argue that the body made legible with the modern passport system has a history in the technologies of tracking blackness. I explore surveillance technologies of transatlantic slavery, namely lantern laws, and I examine arbitration that took place at Fraunces Tavern in New York City in 1783 between fugitive slaves exercising mobility rights claims by seeking to be included in The Book of Negroes and those who claimed them as property. Coupling the archive of The Book of Negroes with a discussion of rituals and practices engaged by free and enslaved blacks, I suggest that these interactions with surveillance served as both strategies of coping and critique, and in so being represent acts of freedom. This article begins with a story of black escape by taking up the surveillance-based reality television programme Mantracker to question how certain technologies instituted through slavery to track blackness as property anticipate the contemporary surveillance of the racial body.