Slavery's Archive and the Matter of Black Atlantic Lives

How do we redress the ongoing violence of slavery's archive and its effects on our present? Thinking with three recent articles that address the history of slavery and the slave trade in the Atlantic world, the following short reflection considers different approaches to contextualizing Black lives in the past and present.¹ Two of the three articles, by Stephanie E. Smallwood and Saidiya Hartman, critically engage Hartman's 2008 essay "Venus in Two Acts."² The third article, Simon P. Newman's "Freedom-Seeking Slaves in England and Scotland, 1700–1780," explores hundreds of eighteenth-century newspaper advertisements for runaway enslaved (and "servant") men and women in England and Scotland. For vastly different audiences and to different ends, Hartman, Smallwood, and Newman contend with the erasures of enslaved people from the archives and national or imperial historiographies. Seemingly disconnected by geographies, methods, and fields, these articles, brought together in conversation, invite us to consider the state of historical research on Black lives and how to approach their erasure in the field of history.

In the wake of her previous work and a summer of intense police brutality, Hartman writes about the stakes of engaging slavery's archive in the enduring context of Black death, the seemingly unchanged patterns of anti-Black violence, and how we must make room for the ways in which Black people live, mourn, and steal away to grieve in the midst of this ongoing terror.³ Smallwood, in revisiting "Venus in Two Acts," reassesses her own book, Saltwater Slavery, to demonstrate the method of exploring the "counter-factual"—what is in the archive but is denied—as the starting point to writing histories of slavery (or the slave trade). Smallwood also offers us an incredibly thorough historiography of the uses of slavery's archive from the early twentieth century—when the planter's perspective prevailed in authority and objectivity—to the 1970s, when social historians shifted their method to "bottom up" by using an "abundance" of archival material to tell the enslaved story. What Smallwood points out, important to us for this short reflection, is the move to quantitative methods—the counting and tallying and charting of bodies, demographics, and geographies that gave historians "evidence" that enslaved people shaped their environments and families and enacted resistance. However, these data did little to elaborate the social and intimate lives of enslaved people. Smallwood explains, "What is lost in uncritical celebration of the new approach is attention to how it also helped to sediment a theory of historical knowledge production that figured the archive as merely a repository of free-floating empirical facts to be lifted off the page by the researcher."⁴ This critique provides the entry point for a closer look at Newman's article.

Newman uses quantitative methods to examine eighteenth-century newspapers from Scotland and England for evidence that legal slavery existed and persisted in the United Kingdom despite the absence of explicit laws. With hundreds of runaway ads (and others for sale) attempting to reclaim people in the language of "property," Newman argues that slavery existed in the United Kingdom for people of African descent and was distinct from other forms of servitude in the region. More than this, he asserts that the threat of New World slavery—of being sent to the Caribbean plantation system—was ever present, making servitude for Africans and their descendants in the United Kingdom unique among the servant classes. Newman convincingly makes the case that slavery was pervasive in the eighteenth-century United Kingdom. The corpus of runaway ads exposes the violence and surveillance against enslaved people in the region. But we must still ask: What are the consequences of reproducing archival representations of enslaved people as "quantitative data" to prove these points? This method raises larger questions about the disavowal of slavery's existence in the UK historical guild and the demands for a particular kind of empiricism required to make Black lives visible.

Both Hartman and Smallwood call for a crucial encounter with the broader structures of knowledge production and the effects that histories of racial subjugation...