Silence and Blindness: Newman's Digitally Enhanced Imaginary

Abstract

Silence and Blindness:Newman's Digitally Enhanced Imaginary Sharon M. Leon (bio) In 1992, future Nobel Prize—winning author Toni Morrison published a slim work of literary criticism. Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination urged readers and literary critics to explore the meaning and import of the Africanist presence in the American literary canon. Morrison's exploration of American Africanisms—which she defined as "the denotative and connotative blackness that African peoples have come to signify, as well as the entire range of views, assumptions, readings, and mis-readings that accompany Eurocentric learning about these people"—revealed how deeply racial domination infused the reading and writing of American classics. Morrison posited that "through the simple expedient of demonizing and reifying the range of color on a palette, American Africanism makes it possible to say and not say, to inscribe and erase, to escape and engage, to act out and act on, to historicize and render timeless. It provides a way of contemplating chaos and civilization, desire and fear, and a mechanism for testing the problems and blessings of freedom."1 For readers and writers, Morrison reminds us, the Africanist presence, while not necessarily in the center of the frame, is always there, shaping and pushing the narrative from the shadows, whether readers choose to acknowledge it or not. In "Hidden in Plain Sight," Simon P. Newman takes up the significant tasks of both returning enslaved runaways to the Jamaican landscape and beginning to explain why the white population did not acknowledge their presence. He asks, "How were runaways able to remain free for extended periods?" His thesis is a straightforward one: "Put simply, many hid themselves in plain sight, concealed amid Jamaica's large population of enslaved people and free people of color. They took advantage of what whites did and did not see in the Jamaican social and physical landscape."2 Though Newman's thesis appears to be a simple one, his methodology is considerably innovative in terms of framing and sourcing. [End Page 19] I began by referring to Morrison's argument in Playing in the Dark rather than to Newman's thesis because his method asks the reader to engage in imagining that is grounded in historical sources and data. Newman asks his readers to imagine an Africanist presence in the Jamaican landscape. To assist his readers in that imaging, he deploys a number of approaches that are relatively unusual in the realm of traditional historical scholarship, and he supports his thesis with a refreshingly interdisciplinary marshaling of sources. Rather than simply treating multimedia sources as supplementary illustrations, Newman interrogates, integrates, and enhances them, bringing them into dialogue to produce a more complex vision of the past. Although all historical scholarship is a representation of an irretrievable past, Newman's work goes beyond the presentation of the available sources, offering some suggestive new creations that help readers understand the perspectives of the historical actors on whom he focuses. Newman asks the reader to undertake a fictive journey through Jamaica with a real historical actor, Dr. John Quier. That journey, from Quier's home in Lluidas Vale to Spanish Town and on to Kingston in the 1780s, is the conceit that structures Newman's historical narrative—a linear movement along an imagined path. The reader moves with Quier through the landscape, inhabiting his white gaze and encountering the range of sights, sounds, and people that would have confronted him along the way. Through the journey, the reader has the opportunity to engage with an array of sources in new ways. Newman and his collaborators enhance the reader's experience with multimedia sources created specifically for this piece, including dramatic readings of primary documents, augmented maps and historical images, and twentieth-century audio clips that are suggestive of historical soundscapes. Newman justifies the creation and use of these materials by asserting that engaging with them "will enable us to move closer not just to an understanding of what whites saw but more crucially to a better sense of how enslaved Jamaicans—and especially those who sought long-term escape—were able to take advantage of what whites failed to see in order to remain at...