Archive Of Slavery Research Articles

Undoing slavery’s anonymity: The politics of identification in twenty-first century Black Canadian poetry

This essay discusses the language strategies deployed in twenty-first century works by three Black Canadian poets that engage with the archive of slavery (Sylvia D. Hamilton, charles c. smith and M. NourbeSe Philip) and reads them as performing a counter-pedagogy of cruelty against African-descended peoples. The analysis focuses on the politics of identification pursued by these poets in order to bring back the memory of enslaved Black subjects into the realm of the ‘human’, and particularly the recurrent device of naming or renaming as a way to counter one of the most pervasive dehumanizing practices of slavery, the erasure of one’s past and the imposition of anonymity. By means of this linguistic resource they achieve common aims: restoring dignity to the enslaved, constructing an alternative site of memorialization, and dismantling hegemonic narratives of Blackness in the nation.

The World That Fear Made: Slave Revolts and Conspiracy Scares in Early America

The World That Fear Made: Slave Revolts and Conspiracy Scares in Early America

Silence and Violence in the Archive of Slavery

Silence and Violence in the Archive of Slavery

Unmaking the tricolore: Catherine Flon, material testimony and occluded narratives of female-led resistance in Haiti and the Haitian Dyaspora

ABSTRACTThe Haitian Revolution was the most radical antislavery and anticolonial struggle of the modern Atlantic World and the only successful slave revolution. Yet the dominant, white-authored colonial archive, which privileges written texts over forms of non-literary expression that flourished in the archive of slavery, conspicuously occludes the historical agents at its locus. While Michel-Rolph Trouillot set a precedent for rehabilitating these histories, the voices of the women that were so central to this historical moment remain concealed, peripheral and ultimately ignored. Using a creative interdisciplinary methodology, this article interrogates how unarticulated narratives of Haiti’s revolutionary women might be reassembled from disparate sources, looking closely at the mythologised figure of Catherine Flon, who purportedly sewed together the first Haitian flag at the Congress of Arcahaie on 18 May 1803. It also examines how artists and community groups in Haiti and across the Haitian dyaspora aim to preserve such figures for posterity.

The nameless and the forgotten: maternal grief, sacred protection, and the archive of slavery

ABSTRACTDeath, particularly of enslaved infants and children, cast a long shadow over the experiences of enslaved mothers. Almost half of all enslaved infants died within the first two weeks of birth and another quarter died by age two. Although profit–loss calculations tabulate the frequent deaths of enslaved youngsters, these accounts reveal very little about cultural conventions on maternal grief or how enslaved mothers responded to their children’s deaths. In addition to using the rhetorical to draw attention to the loss women experienced and archival silences on maternal grief, this article challenges the claims that enslaved Africans welcomed and celebrated death because it freed loved ones from bondage and reunited captive Africans with their ancestors. Attention to expressions of grief and evolving grieving practices reveal the transformation of enslaved people’s culture and the invisible suffering of the enslaved, which are sometimes overshadowed by narratives of resistance and the resilience of African culture and black mothers.

Valency and Abjection in the Lynching Postcard: A Test Case in the Reclamation of Black Visual Culture

If lynchings were often theatrically constructed and essentially public performative rituals, then a question arises: is it possible to construct a photograph of the black lynched body as a record of performance art? In the following essay, focusing on postcard images of lynching produced during what might ironically be termed the form's ‘heyday’, from 1899 to 1910, I shall be thinking around this question. This article will also speculate on how the limits of black agency have been set and determined within the photographic archive of slavery and its immediate inheritance. What I now want to ponder is whether it can be right to come at the image of the lynched body, when photographed by white witnesses who may also be perpetrators, as a visual space in which any degree of black expression let alone black agency can be isolated? If these images are to be understood as anything beyond records of atrocity and articulations of victim-hood, then a new standpoint is required. Such a standpoint denies the assumptions of white power, white guilt and white terror which still dictate the perceptual parameters for the cultural reception of these unique images. This new standpoint demands that we see in these tortured forms something perhaps with both an iconic and an aesthetic status which circles around an abject reliquary import.

Postcolonial Interventions into the Archive of Slavery: Transforming Documents into Monuments in Beryl Gilroy’s Stedman and Joanna

This essay explores the ways in which contemporary postcolonial writers like Caryl Phillips, David Dabydeen and Beryl Gilroy engage with the archive of slavery, focusing in particular on Gilroy’s novel Stedman and Joanna (1991). Borrowing from Michel Foucault’s work The Archaeology of Knowledge (1969), I argue that the reliance of authors on the narratives of slave captains and plantation owners may be troubling because of the possibility of turning these documents into monuments, creating what I call “docu/monuments”. Gilroy’s close reliance on John Gabriel Stedman’s writing and reluctance to provide her female protagonist Joanna with narrative agency ensure that her text, and Joanna in particular, remain in bondage to the archive. However, if Gilroy’s novel confirms the status of Stedman’s work as a docu/monument, Stedman and Joanna performs another important memorializing function as a flawed monument to the slave trade; one that, though unable to free itself from Stedman’s original narrative, nevertheless makes an attempt to think creatively about the past of slavery.