Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible (review)

In Black Lives in the English Archives, Imtiaz Habib turns to a wide range of those archives in order to recover, as the 'Introduction' puts it, 'The Missing (Black) Subject'. His book is a detailed and sophisticated study that makes a significant contribution towards filling the yawning gap in our knowledge, a gap that apparently we did not know was there. In the 'Introduction', Habib draws attention to many missed scholarly opportunities in the course of his survey of historical and literary-critical trends. He reflects on the ways in which these trends have produced an erroneous perception of 'absence'.

At the core of this book, Habib has compiled a richly informative 'Chronological Index of Records of Black People, 1500-1677', printed as, in effect, Part II of his study. The Index comprises 448 items arranged by year, with transcriptions, details of the documentary source and notes. This alone gives the lie to persistent claims that early modern England was 'race-innocent' (p. 9). Habib attributes the tenacity of such a view not only to the political and legal 'invisibility' of black people 'who remain, like animals, an un-legalized entity' (p. 6, n. 16) in the period under investigation, but also to the contingencies of archival practices and the triumph of 'theory in a poststructuralist age' (p. 9). In the 'Introduction', Habib develops a reflexive cross-disciplinary account of the conditions of possibility for archival evidence that might constitute 'imprints of the invisible'.

By scouring, for example, royal household accounts, estate records, parish church archives in and outside London, and a wide range of 'legal, taxation, medical and civic archives', Habib recovers evidence of 'the varied impress of black working lives' (p. 3). The first part of the book is a multidisciplinary narrative exposition of the historical material, drawing out the significance of particular items from the index. There are five chapters. Chapter 1, 'Early Tudor Black Records: The Mixed Beginnings of a Black Population'; Chapter 2, 'Elizabethan London Black Records: The Writing of Absence'; Chapter 3, 'Black Records of Seventeenth-Century London: A Benign Neglect and the Legislation of Enslavement'; Chapter 4, 'Black People Outside London, 1558-1677: The Provincial Backdrop'; Chapter 5, 'Indians and Others: The Postcolonial Dream'. This chapter has previously been published in the Journal of Narrative Theory (36.1 (2006), 1-13), as 'Indians in Shakespeare's England as "the first-Fruits of India": Colonial Effacement and Postcolonial Reinscription'.

An 'Afterword' provides a statistical analysis of the 'black archives' and an assessment of the importance of the patterns this analysis reveals. Throughout, Habib is careful to underline the 'symptomatic' nature of his data, reminding the reader that 'actual numbers' of black people in early modern England 'are liable to be much higher' (p. 261). There are eleven tables in this section; Habib's discussion of them in the first two parts of it is nuanced, despite the relative brevity of the chapter. However, this brevity also contributes to a radically compressed style in the third, final part, plunging the reader into a dense assembly of theoretical concepts relevant to thinking about the 'racialized subject' (pp. 270-72). In light of the importance of understanding 'what makes coherent the synchronicity and interdependence of the genesis of racism and colonialism in the history of modern Europe' (p. 271), it is disappointing that the discussion must gesture at, rather than elaborate on the relevance of his historical study to current debates. This is particularly evident when considering Habib's diverse cast of theorists: Zizek, Agamben, Deleuze and Guattari, Althusser, Balibar, Hardt and Negri, De Certeau, as well as Stallybrass, and White, all get a mention in less than three pages (including the notes).

Similarly disappointing are some of the reproductions that illustrate the text. A case in point is the potentially interesting Figure 6.1, 'A partial representation...