Slavery's Archive and the Matter of Black Atlantic Lives

Abstract

H ow do we redress the ongoing violence of slavery’s archive and its effects on our present? Thinking with three recent articles that address the history of slavery and the slave trade in the Atlantic world, the following short reflection considers different approaches to contextualizing Black lives in the past and present.1 Two of the three articles, by Stephanie E. Smallwood and Saidiya Hartman, critically engage Hartman’s 2008 essay “Venus in Two Acts.”2 The third article, Simon P. Newman’s “Freedom-Seeking Slaves in England and Scotland, 1700– 1780,” explores hundreds of eighteenth-century newspaper advertisements for runaway enslaved (and “servant”) men and women in England and Scotland. For vastly different audiences and to different ends, Hartman, Smallwood, and Newman contend with the erasures of enslaved people from the archives and national or imperial historiographies. Seemingly disconnected by geographies, methods, and fields, these articles, brought together in conversation, invite us to consider the state of historical research on Black lives and how to approach their erasure in the field of history. In the wake of her previous work and a summer of intense police brutality, Hartman writes about the stakes of engaging slavery’s archive in the enduring context of Black death, the seemingly unchanged patterns of anti-Black violence, and how wemust make room for the ways in which Black people live, mourn, and steal away to grieve in themidst of this ongoing terror.3 Smallwood, in revisiting “Venus in TwoActs,” reassesses her ownbook, Saltwater Slavery, to demonstrate themethod of exploring the “counter-factual”—what is in the archive but is denied—as the starting point to writing histories of slavery (or the slave trade). Smallwood also offers us an incredibly thorough historiography of the uses of slavery’s archive from the early twentieth century—when the planter’s perspective prevailed in authority and objectivity—to the 1970s, when social historians shifted their method to “bottom up” by using an “abundance” of archival material to tell the enslaved story. What Smallwood points out, important to us for this short reflection, is the move to quantitative methods—the counting and tallying and charting of bodies, demographics, and geographies that gavehistorians “evidence” that enslavedpeople shaped