Biography and the Black Atlantic

Introduction: Biography and the Black Atlantic

Introduction: Biography and the Black Atlantic lisa a. lindsay and john wood sweet In recent years, historians and other writers have begun to produce a surge of studies of the “Black Atlantic” organized around particular life stories. This approach builds on and also suggests the limitations of scholarship over the last generation, which has focused on the myriad flow of captives, capital, and cultures around the early modern Atlantic world.1 Now, many scholars are populating this abstract and anonymous Atlantic with the historically situated experiences of individuals. A number of life histories are already in print, and more are in preparation.2 In some ways historical works like these echo themes explored by novelists like Barry Unsworth, Toni Morrison, Manu Herbstein, and Caryl Phillips.3 Collectively, these studies suggest that we are in a moment of intense concentration on the Black Atlantic as lived experience. In this volume, leading historians of Africa, the Americas, and Europe explore the potential for and implications of biography as a method for interpreting the connected histories of Atlantic societies. They do so through broad, conceptual analyses as well as case studies of individuals of African descent who lived, moved, and struggled through the early modern Atlantic world. By attaching names and faces to broad processes such as slaving, enslavement , identity formation, empire-building, migration, and emancipation , biography can illuminate the meanings of these large, impersonal forces for individuals. The Black Atlantic is both a space and an argument.4 For cultural theorist Paul Gilroy, the modern Black Atlantic was a location of both physical movement—migrations and crossings both forced and voluntary—and of continual cultural exchange, shaped from the start by racial violence.5 The cultures of the African diaspora were hybrid and creative, even as they reflected Introduction 2 displacement, loss, and trauma. Moreover, the violence and slavery at the heart of the Black Atlantic were not aberrations that set African peoples apart from modern society; rather, the Middle Passage and plantation slavery— “capitalism with its clothes off,” as Gilroy described it—were fundamental to modernity itself.6 Columbus sailed to Elmina on the Gold Coast of Africa long before the fateful voyage of 1492, and subsequent developments—from colonialism to the plantation complex, national independence movements, and decolonization—were the result of political, commercial, cultural, and ideological relationships between peoples of Africa, Europe, and the Americas.7 Iftheterm“BlackAtlantic”isredundant,itnonethelessembodiestwolines of argument that remain worth engaging.8 First, although the importance of Africa, its peoples, and their descendants in the history of the Western world has been vigorously championed by certain scholars over the years, they have been and remain too often overlooked in the academic field of “Atlantic history .”9 Africans entered the Atlantic not as fodder for subsequent cultural transformation, but as people already familiar with instability and adaptation . Second, the complex process of racial formation that shaped identities and relations in the emerging modern world warrants continued exploration . Gilroy’s Black Atlantic analyzed the ways European racialist thinking subjected people of the African diaspora to specific forms of violence and subordination and excluded them from ideas of modernity, thus creating the conditions for creative cultural production and trenchant critique. The people whose life stories are the heart of this volume were shaped by such forces. And, as the chapters that follow suggest, their strategies of affiliation went beyond (or around) the oppositions of race. While the “Black Atlantic” represents an argument, biography represents a method. Why approach the Black Atlantic through the lens of life stories? For one thing, biography populates the Atlantic world with real individuals. Part of the power of biography as a narrative strategy is the capacity to move readers’ emotions by helping them imagine being someone else. As Joseph Miller reflects in his chapter, focusing on individuals—and trying to trace them through the historical record wherever they might lead us—has a tendency to disrupt broad generalizations and grand preconceptions, reminding us that even seemingly vast, impersonal processes such as slave trading and commercialization were experienced.10 Biography, Miller argues, reveals that, at the broadest scale and in the most intimate ways, there can be no such thing as a static history of slavery. Mediating on the classic work of sociologist Orlando Patterson, Miller agrees that at the moment of enslavement the Biography and the Black Atlantic 3 fundamental feature of slavery is a radical and intense alienation. But...