Rethinking the Archive of Enslavement

For several years now, literary scholars, especially those who work in early literary periods, have been asking questions about the authority of the documents on which their work is based and the relationship between old texts and contemporary theories: How are we to read evidence in the archive outside our own (presentist) set of interests and desires? On what authority are we to recover the voices of those who inhabit these archives especially when they were enslaved and hence silenced? Can we isolate literary beginnings that are not mere projections of our own desire for a singular archive and a seamless canon of letters? These questions are particularly pertinent to fields that are defined as early where questions of beginnings and genealogy inform and haunt literary history. The project of Early American Literature has a long experience dealing with such matters.

Consider, for example, the roundtable “Historizing Race in Early American Studies,” published in volume 41, number 2 (2006), of Early American Literature. For this roundtable, Sandra Gustafson asked three major scholars in the field—Joanna Brooks, Philip Gould, and David Kazanjian—to discuss the question of race in early American literature. The issues at hand, here, were essentially three: the imagination and constitution of race in the inaugural moment of American culture; the genealogy of racial categories in the national consciousness (and unconscious); and the expanding geography of race as it made its way from the murky beginnings of early settlement to the consolidation of the Republic. In her introduction to the roundtable, Gustafson isolated one issue directly related to the problem of beginnings, namely

the uneasy fit between the texts that we study and current definitions of “the literary.” … The project of unearthing “lost” texts has of necessity gone hand in hand with the creation of interpretive methodologies for reading works that do not match current critical conceptions of the literary or fit into critical narratives that have been laboriously pieced together over the last few decades.

(309)

Could the poetry of Phillis Wheatley, for example, be read outside the framework of her discovery and establishment as a founding figure in a reconstructed literary tradition? Was there a reading of Wheatley that was not a projection of our own desire for early American, more specifically, African American, beginnings as a response to the crisis of the present? Did Wheatley’s poems inaugurate a moment of writing located in a world that was distinct from our own preoccupations?

However, what initially appeared to be a problem of genealogy was also about the relationship between an archive, especially one that seemed tenuous in its inauguration, and the demand of the present: How could an archive that was as old, or older, than the American Republic speak to the politics of the present? What kind of recuperative work was needed to animate this archive so that it could be read not as an antiquarian project but as a living principle of American life and writing? The three contributors’ responses to the problem of the archive in relation to the politics of the present—and the genealogy of racial categories—pointed both to the possibilities and limits of an archiving project as an essential feature of literary and cultural history. In effect, the three contributors seemed caught in a swing bridge between texts located in an early period and their reading in the present. Concerned with the belated entry of race as what she called “a central axis of American experience,” Brooks set as her goal “locat[ing] narratives, theologies, theories, and imaginings” that gestured beyond what she called “normalizing discourses such as citizenship or rationality towards other ways of being, thinking, and feeling” (315). Trying to avoid the danger of replicating “a kind of mystical faith in subalternity,” Kazanjian set out to deconstruct the idea and ideal of individual and communal agency by developing “a historical genealogy of subjection” (329, 332). Gould went even further, arguing that the orientation of the canon of African American letters to the antebellum period tended “to produce critical vocabularies of race and racism that are read backward, so to speak, onto eighteenth-century writing...