Silence and Violence in the Archive of Slavery

I n his classic text, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History, MichelRolph Trouillot asked of the Haitian Revolution: “Howdoes one write a history of the impossible?”1 Planters and colonial powers represented the thirteen-year event that resulted in the enslaved overthrow of colonial power and the independent state of Haiti (the first black republic of the Atlantic World) as an “unthinkable history,” “a non-event,” even as it was happening. Although Trouillot wrote specifically of Haiti, his work on how social and political inequalities of the past shape the ways historical events are recorded in their moment and then archived, retrieved, and written about in the present is widely applicable to historians of slavery. The archive of slavery is steeped in silences. This is true especially for the colonial Caribbean, where enslaved individuals left few if any sources of their own and often appear in the archives as voiceless and fleeting figures. In this way, to write a history that recognizes the complex personhood of the enslaved, while adhering to traditional disciplinary methodologies, appears to be nearly impossible. How do historians of slavery, facedwith a disruptive, fragmented, and contested archive, recreate the lifeworlds of enslaved individuals who appear as fleeting moments in the archives?2 How do we engage with an archive and a discipline very much tied to imperialism and colonial violence? How do historians make space for a cultural and social history of the enslaved while recognizing the condition of slavery, which betokens alienation, abjection, and social death? While Trouillot acknowledged that “history is the fruit of power,” it is for this reason that wemust study its production: “Power itself is never so transparent that its analysis becomes superfluous.” Indeed, Trouillot argued that “the ultimate mark of power may be its invisibility; the ultimate challenge, the exposition of its roots.”3 The three articles under consideration here reveal the fraught relationship historians have with the archive of slavery and the ways in which we might address the silences that abound in it. One of the fundamental challenges historians of slavery face is how to exhume the lives of the enslaved from the archive of slavery. Saidiya Hartman begins “The Dead Book Revisited” by asking: “Howdowe attend to black death? Howdowe find life where only traces of destructions remain?”4 Reflecting on two of her previous