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BRIAN CONNOLLY AND MARISA FUENTES |
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This special issue of the journal asks how the violence of the archives of slavery contributes to the production of a history of our present. What is
at stake in revisiting the devastation and death contained in the documents of slavery? And is such a revisiting even possible? As several of the authors note, all archives are incomplete—such historical accounts
written primarily by the most powerful have overwhelmingly informed
our understanding of the past. But what is it about the archives of slavery,
the more than 400-year span of forced labor and death of Africans that
requires that we pause to consider their particular silences? It is partly
about violence—the varied forms of violence on black bodies in slavery
that created the conditions by which they are made invisible, mutilated and
difficult to reach; they are not easily articulated or narrated in the historical
accounts. Even as we formulate new methods that challenge archival
power, some things remain unrecoverable, silent. We have irretrievably lost
the thoughts, desires, fears, and perspectives of many whose enslavement
shaped every aspect of their lives.
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STEPHANIE E. SMALLWOOD |
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Somewhere along the thousands of miles of African Atlantic littoral that
was the extended site of the transatlantic slave trade, some time in the more
than four hundred years that the enterprise built on transacting in captive
people endured, an event takes place aboard one of the vessels that served as
the system’s engine. Enslaved Africans gain decisive control of the vessel in
which they are held captive: "The Captain being a’shore, the Slaves rose, kill'd
one man and a Boy, and run the Sloop ashore and escaped." The captives
thereby take what was supposed to be a routine and mundane occurrence—
according to the worldview of their captors—and turn it into an event that
demanded documentation beyond the daily recording of shipboard routines.
These events took place aboard the Cape Coast while the vessel was in the
vicinity of Winneba, off the coast of present day Ghana, on September 6,
1721, and were narrated in the "Letter Books" that organized correspondence
between the English Royal African Company's London headquarters and its
employees in Africa and the Caribbean. In addition to reporting the status of
the property the vessel had carried, the missive officials penned to describe
the incident also offered an explanation of what had taken place: "It would
be a very unaccountable history," the letter reads, "that Thirteen men & four
boys Slaves should attempt to rise upon Seven White Men was it not that it
seems they were all out of Irons by ye Master’s orders."
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What More Remains:
Slavery, Sexuality, South Asia |
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ANJALI ARONDEKAR |
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What more remains? At stake here is slavery's plangent entanglement with
the idea of the archive. As emergent archival forms push against, or even
record the violence of slavery's past(s), we are asked here to consider anew
the persistent failure of such efforts. Central to such failures has been the
recovery of an archive of slavery that continues to elude any attempts at a
redemptive historiography. As the editors of a recent Social Text special issue
on the question of recovery and slavery note: the limits of recovery in "the
field of Atlantic slavery and freedom" have reshaped the very parameters of
historical methods and debate. Indeed, nearly every theoretical account of
Atlantic slavery stages the historiography of slavery as the place where absence
and archive meet. A similar reading of archival loss, paucity and erasure
even animates scholarship that challenges the foundationalism of Atlantic
slavery as the "origin-story" for the African diaspora.
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DAVID KAZANJIAN |
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These two epigraphs bring forth an agonism. Is the archive of slavery so
saturated by silence, death, and commodification that black life remains
indiscernible even as discerning remains urgent, as Saidiya Hartman suggests?
Or are archives of slavery in the Americas overflowing with black
lives that we are not particularly good at discerning, as Herman L. Bennett
argues? I want to linger with and reflect upon this agonism in the interest
of widening the frame that often restricts the provocative questions raised
by "Venus in Two Acts," the same ones this special issue addresses. I want
to set out on transnational, multilingual, and textually difficult paths; to
unsettle what we understand as "the archive of slavery"; to revise what we
think of as "freedom."
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Enslaved in the City on a Hill:
The Archive of Moravian Slavery
and the Practical Past |
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SETH MOGLEN |
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Historians have long recognized the central political conundrum of the archive:
the powerful leave behind the fullest records. They leave behind, too,
the most detailed narratives about the past, narratives that justify their power.
The exploited and oppressed usually leave behind more meager traces.
Their narratives are often difficult or impossible to retrieve. They have less
access to literacy and to the means of preserving or transmitting their stories.
Their masters often employ violence to impose silence and have the power to
shape and censor the archive. The historians of the peasant, the prostitute,
and the proletarian have always faced distinctive methodological difficulties. Read |
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Accounting for "The Most
Excruciating Torment": Gender,
Slavery, and Trans-Atlantic Passages |
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JENNIFER L. MORGAN |
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As early as the sixteenth century, it was not uncommon for slave ships to deliver
large numbers of women into slavery in the Americas. In 1566, the slave
ship Santiago left Sierra Leone carrying 77 women and children and 15 men to
the island of Puerto Rico. In 1642, the Dutch ship the Prinses made the trip from
Luanda to Pernambuco in northeastern Brazil in less than 40 days, loaded with
152 captives, 98% of whom were women. One cannot help but ask the question:
why were so many women aboard these ships? The presence and absence
of women in the Middle Passage is difficult to track, not least because female
captives have failed to capture the attention of scholars, except as indices of
the relative strength of African polities. Thus, examples including the refusal
of the Obas in Benin to sell any male slaves to the Portuguese after 1530, and
unbalanced sex ratios like those found on board the Santiago are noted in the
scholarship on African slavery primarily in relation to the strength or weakness
of a patriarchal African state.
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