Reading the “Memoirs of the Life of Florence Hall” ThroughThe Long Songof the Caribbean Colonial Archive

Abstract

AbstractThis article suggests that we should analyze the mediated and fragmentary narratives of the lives of the enslaved—the predominate format of such texts in the archives—as well as self-written slave narratives. Although not biographical in the same fashion as the self-written texts, these more ephemeral texts can also enhance and productively contribute to our understandings of the literary and discursive features of the era. In order to attend to such texts, we need to develop more dynamic reading strategies for the multiple voices and varied formats common to them. One such strategy is animated by arguments about alternative histories suggested by neo-slave-narrative novels like Andrea Levy’s The Long Song (2011). I suggest that drawing on the models of the imaginative possibilities of neo-slave-narrative fictions, along with conceptually related links to both Edward Said’s hermeneutics of contrapuntal reading and Saidiya Hartman’s exegetics of critical fabulation, reveals how an ephemeral and fragmentary text or “textual splinter” like “Memoirs of the Life of Florence Hall” may yield more complex readings and help us consider what the lives of the enslaved might have looked like, as well as offers portraits of the discursive networks in which it existed.The … archive was not meant to encode the nuances of Hall’s voice or memories of her experiences. The archive was instead meant to document the power of the establishment and the data that would be useful to its perpetuation.