Representing Sexual Violation in the Archive of Caribbean Enslavement

Abstract

Representing Sexual Violation in the Archive of Caribbean Enslavement Jennifer Reed (bio) This essay considers the problems that inhere in attempts to represent a difficult and disturbing Caribbean archive: the sexual violation of enslaved persons. The problems of representing enslaved persons in the archive have been taken up with particular intensity over the last twenty years across scholarship that engages with the history of the enslaved. Discussion has centered around issues of ethical and responsible representation of an archive that typically frustrates attempts to access more than a glimpse of the lived experience of enslaved persons. Two central questions recur through this scholarship. First, how should we engage with an archive in which information about enslaved persons is painfully absent? Second, and relatedly, what should we do with the information the archive has in abundance, in which the enslaved enter the record through acts of violence? Saidiya Hartman has asked how scholars can represent violence without, as she puts it, "committing further violence in [one's] own act of narration."1 Hartman and Ian Baucom refer to an archive of "traces," and labor with the question of what to do with those traces.2 In Specters of the Atlantic: Finance Capital, Slavery, and the Philosophy of History (2005) Baucom assembles what he calls a counterarchive of the case of the slave ship Zong, in which the ship's captain threw one hundred and thirty-two slaves overboard when they ran out of drinking water.3 He asks whether to document this event is to repeat its "profound human damage" [End Page 89] and argues that representation and documentation of this terrible archive is necessary because it is not, in any meaningful way, in the past but persists in shaping our modern moment.4 In Spectacular Suffering: Witnessing Slavery in the Eighteenth-Century British Atlantic (2016) Ramesh Mallipeddi extends this argument about "the problem of archival power," as he puts it, writing that in the case of the slave archive, "[g]iven that the horrific legacies of Atlantic slavery and antiblack racism continue to structure our long contemporaneity, attention to the constitutive role of violence in the formation of the archives and to the methodological challenges inhering in recovery is urgent and necessary."5 This essay describes an attempt to work with an archive that is saturated with violence and deprived of the voices and accounts of the lives of the enslaved persons who suffered this violence. My focus is on the enslaved women who were subjected to sexual violation by Thomas Thistlewood, a slave-owner in Jamaica in the second half of the eighteenth century. In response to Mallipeddi's suggestion, I present a case study of a digital mapping project that seeks to represent the sexual violation that these women underwent while also giving as full an account as possible of the lives of the women who lived with this violation. Specifically, in this essay I respond to Mallipeddi's call to bring "attention" to the "challenges," and as such I present this work not as a model or exemplar but as part of an ongoing collective effort to think about these challenges. The purpose of these digital maps is to disrupt the visual tranquility of the archival maps, instead providing a visual record of a landscape stippled with acts of coerced sex that either lived in the memories of, or lurked as possibilities for, the women who had to live their lives in that space. The mapping focuses on the women as individuals and provides the fullest possible representation of their lives as they were lived on the property that is mapped. This essay describes the archive of sexual violence that we have access to in Thistlewood's diary and the methodology that the mapping project uses to represent the experience of each woman who experienced sexual violation on Thistlewood's property, Breadnut Island Pen. Sexual Violation in the Archive We have access to very specific accounts of the coerced sex that the women living on Breadnut Island Pen endured through the detailed diary that Thistlewood kept. He kept this diary from his arrival in Jamaica in 1750 to his death there in 1786. The entries provide a...