Breaking Free: Digital History and Escaping from Slavery

It is both exciting and intimidating to have one's work the subject of a scholarly Forum in the William and Mary Quarterly. I am very grateful to my colleagues for their thoughtful reflections on my article, and I hope that their musings and my response may encourage others to experiment with digital scholarship. I agree completely with Hilary McD Beckles, who suggests that born-digital scholarship can enable us "to break free of traditions of methodological bondage," encouraging "a new way of reasoning and writing," which in the case of my article may help enhance the ways in which we see and experience the world of the enslaved.¹ As Jessica Marie Johnson notes, the article contributes to a growing literature that "challenge[s] gaps in the imperial archive by turning to the archive of black letters, music, and material culture hidden in plain sight."² By enabling authors to deploy different kinds of sources and media, the OI Reader has the potential to allow us to conceive of new kinds of scholarly articles.

The reviewers have raised many stimulating ideas, suggestions, and criticisms, and I shall try to address a few of these in ways that I hope will encourage Quarterly readers to think about both freedom-seeking enslaved people in Jamaica and the potential and drawbacks of digital publications utilizing new media. All of the reviewers have been kind enough to assess "Hidden in Plain Sight" as an attempt to advance historical knowledge and understanding by new means, and I appreciate Beckles's thoughtful assessment of how this article contributes to the larger subject of resistance to racial slavery in Jamaica. His brief discussion of the nature of walking, running, and escaping emphasizes the significance of running away as an assertion of humanity by black people that was denied and debased by whites. The digital tools and additions form part of the evidence and the analytic framework for what remains an academic article, one that seeks to address that humanity by trying to describe the world of those enslaved people who, as Edward L. Ayers puts it, "were not meant to be seen."³ Celia E. Naylor asks how we can "represent, reconstruct, and remember the humanity of each and every enslaved woman, man, and child who stole themselves in the process of reclaiming their bodies and lives."⁴ I do not believe that this is achievable, but I do think that how we try to learn a much as we can about these people can shape and enrich our understanding of the world they inhabited and the choices that some of them made. My article represents an effort to encourage readers to approach the sources we read— from newspaper advertisements to plantation records and descriptions of early modern Jamaica—from new perspectives, seeing and hearing familiar sources anew.

Sharon M. Leon's remarks build from Toni Morrison's deft critique of the reading and understanding of literature (and history) in Playing in the Dark to explore how "Hidden in Plain Sight" asks "readers to imagine an Africanist presence in the Jamaican landscape." Surely all good historical writing shares the goal of enabling a reader to imagine past societies and their inhabitants, seeing with one's mind's eye what Leon describes as "what is unarticulated, unpreserved, and unexplored."⁵ Using modern and multimedia additions may enhance our understanding of how enslaved people and masters experienced Jamaica, but as Naylor astutely points out, the selection and deployment of these recordings and images can no more be taken at face value than can the eighteenth-century images and descriptions they challenge. Naylor generally approves of my attempt to problematize James Hakewill's representations of Kingston and Spanish Town by working with an artist to insert more enslaved and free people in order to render urban spaces more congested and, I would contend, more authentically black. But by using other images of black people crafted by Hakewill and various white artists of the era, each of these enhanced urban scenes "introduces other problematic layers of (re)presentation and interpretation." Naylor is absolutely right...