Incidents in the Life of a Scholar, or How the History of the Slave Trade Could Revitalize the Historian's Craft

In 1904, German historian Karl Lamprech raised the question, "What is History?" in a series of lectures that he delivered at Columbia University. A few decades later in 1952, the renowned Australian philologist and archeologist Vere Gordon Childe repeated the question in his book of the same name, which was then followed by British historian, E.H. Carr, in 1961, who like his predecessors wanted to know, What is History? Beyond the ivory tower, in the midst of Nazi occupation, French historian Marc Bloch penned a reply in his meditation about the practice of history aptly titled The Historian's Craft (1953), which subsequently provided the groundwork for generations of historians interested in pursuing social history.¹ A century later, the publication of Saidiya Hartman's Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route, implicitly if unwittingly raises the question that Lamprech first posed, and offers a response in a way that Bloch never could have imagined in her historical meditation of the international slave trade.

Hartman is not the first to write on the history of the international slave trade, a number of books have been published in the field of late. In 2005, Anne C. Bailey seemed to accomplish the impossible by writing an oral history of the Atlantic slave trade.² Bailey reconstructed the history of the Middle Passage by interviewing those currently living on the Ghanaian coast and using their stories about the slave trade as a way to challenge the European sources that otherwise dominate the historical record. Like Bailey, Hartman, too, is interested in unearthing any extant stories and histories about the trade, but often encounters Ghanaians unwilling to discuss slavery. Entering a slave dungeon with a Ghanaian teenager, Hartman questions the girl about what she thinks about the history of the dungeon. The girl, who Hartman in a slick allegorical move refers to as "Phyllis," shrugs off the question, by telling her it's a "sad story what happened to the slaves" and then dismisses the subject by inviting Hartman to lunch (p. 117).³ Hartman thus never finds as many people willing to talk about slavery as Bailey does, but, then again, that is not her point.

Hartman's goal was to "retrace the process by which lives were destroyed and slaves born" (p. 6). In so doing, she chose Ghana as the site of her investigation because "nine slave routes traversed" the country and it "possessed more dungeons, prisons, and slave pens than any other country in West Africa" (pp. 6–7). Hartman's choice of Ghana is not surprising. The subject of Ghana, in particular the Elmina Castle—the fifteenth-century Portuguese slave trading post—has been of particular interest to British historians over the last half-century or so. From the 1963 publication of A.W. Lawrence's The Trade Castles and the Forts of West Africa (1963) to the 2006 publication of William St. Clair's magisterial study, The Grand Slave Emporium: Cape Coast Castle and the British Slave Trade (2006), which attempts to tell the story of the "men, women, and children who spent part of their lives within its walls," Ghana has been the source of many subjects of the international slave trade.⁴ Unlike St. Clair, Hartman does not provide an extensive historical study based on the otherwise untapped sources of "journals, letters, and ledgers, and accounts" that inform St. Clair's study.⁵

The absence of primary material in Lose Your Mother thus reveals perhaps the most important insight into how Hartman constructed her study. When the subject of Elmina Castle first appears in Lose Your Mother, for example, Hartman does not offer a historical assessment. Rather she describes standing on a bridge across from the castle and witnessing the business of the town unfolding in its ordinary iterations and how townspeople brushed by her with disdaining...