Pages of Resistance

Abstract


 
 
 The Pages of Resistance exhibition project is a digital humanities and public history project dedicated to the study of slavery and rebellion during the slave trade era, occurring in Latin America and the Caribbean during the 1800s. Its focal point is the curation of a travelling exhibition on enslaved Muslim African literacy, conceptualized in this paper as a form of spiritual resistance to bondage. The inspiration for this project is based on the digitization of three sets of nineteenth-century Qur’anic and non-Qur’anic manuscripts found on the bodies of enslaved Muslim Africans after they perished the night of the Malês rebellion in January 1835 in Bahia, Brazil. The Pages of Resistance exhibition project, which currently concentrates on Brazil, is a part of a broader initiative that is focused on Muslim African diasporic history during the Atlantic slave trade era. It is a collaborative initiative between cross-disciplinary researchers and creative producers engaging in digital scholarship and multimedia art production. This article discusses the concept and Public History of the Pages of Resistance project as well as the context in which it is situated, and it describes the methods applied in the research process of this multilingual initiative. In doing so, this project reflects other anti-racist initiatives in the field of public history, situating itself between the intersections of Blackness, memory, religion, and resistance by marginalized groups and minorities.