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Reviewed by:
  • Biography and the Black Atlantic ed. by Lisa A. Lindsay and John Wood Sweet
  • Philip Gould (bio)
Biography and the Black Atlantic Edited by lisa a. lindsay and john wood sweet Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2014 370 pp.

The two parts of this volume’s title would seem to pose the problem of critical redundancy. “Biography” and the “Black Atlantic” have been critically entwined with one another for quite some time. Paul Gilroy’s influential formulation, in which racial identities are structured on mobility and cultural exchange (“routes” as opposed to “roots”), has informed the burgeoning scholarship on black life writing, written or related, during the long eighteenth century. The study of the early Black Atlantic has proliferated over the past decade to the point where Olaudah Equiano and Phillis Wheatley are no longer the only household names in the literary and historical canon. It includes many other black subjects whose textual lives—in journals, memoirs, spiritual and conversion narratives, letters, and lyric poetry, among other genres—now appear in scholarly editions and anthologies. These texts constitute the backbone of the early Black Atlantic. [End Page 244] They lend themselves to scholarly consideration of the histories of slavery and the slave trade, the early modern black diaspora, and the history of racial ideology, as well as the formal and narrative complexities of the slave narrative genre.

So when the coeditors of Biography and the Black Atlantic initially ask, “Why approach the Black Atlantic through the lens of life stories?” one might respond by countering that we have always done so (3). Yet that response would be mistaken, for this volume of accomplished historical essays focuses largely on the lives of lesser known black subjects whose life stories were not published. These essays target the often startling experiences of black subjects on the archival margins. They remind us, as the editors’ introduction argues, that the study of slavery cannot be conducted only through empirical analysis of quantitative data. This volume aims to remedy that by rehumanizing the scholarly project. Its focus is on what one contributor calls “the lived experience of individuals and groups”; it resists the field’s preoccupation with “large, impersonal forces,” which presumably tends to produce a “static history of slavery” (64, 2, 3). New World slavery “viewed from the bottom up” belies that kind of determinism and stasis (15). It “put[s] a human face on the slave trade while illuminating in microcosm how it worked and upon whom it preyed” (96).

The anthology is organized according to categories that testify to Gilroy’s influence on this historiographic approach. Its opening, methodological part on “Parameters” is followed by essays focusing on the subjects of “Mobility,” “Self-Fashioning,” and “Politics.” The conceptual and historical boundaries articulated in the opening part generally challenge the viability of national boundaries and traditional periodization. Joseph Miller usefully considers the methodological implications and critical stakes of this “biographical turn.” His critique of modern sociology’s decontextualization of history targets the influential work of Orlando Patterson, particularly the rubric of “social death,” and signals the book’s thematic emphasis on forms of black agency that ultimately enable dynamic histories of slavery. Martin Klein’s essay similarly acknowledges the challenges of writing about subjects who did not really become active in print culture, but he goes on to develop possibilities for future scholarship, emphasizing, for example, the importance of underutilized missionary archives for researching West African histories of slavery.

The part on “Mobility” traces the diasporic movements of those whose [End Page 245] experiences in slavery and freedom took them along various transatlantic or hemispheric routes. These essays often focus us on the importance of idiosyncratic familial relations as well as the complex relations between racial identity and upward mobility. (In that sense, the organizing rubric of “mobility” denotes social as well as geographical meanings.) These chapters, too, are quite self-conscious about source materials and critical method, but they do not refrain from reasonable inference and speculation. Cassandra Pybus uses “The Book of Negroes” (the 1783 British log of those ex-slaves evacuated from the United States to Nova Scotia), for example, to put together the fascinating story of Jane Thompson...

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