Discuss the role of archives—their limitations, possibilities, and politics—in doing historical research.
For many historically marginalised communities, the archive is a graveyard. The only surviving evidence for the lives of countless individuals are records of the suffering and violence that they were subjected to, particularly in the context of colonialism. This is demonstrated when engaging with records of the transatlantic slave trade, where archival sources detail the horrific treatment and commodification of enslaved Black people, but simultaneously provide crucial documentation of individual lives and existences. Reckoning with this paradox of representation brings into question the limitations of the archive, and to what extent records of extreme violence and suffering could have productive possibilities for the reclamation and re-storying of history. Christina Sharpe addresses this in her work In The Wake, asking “in the midst of so much death and the fact of Black life as proximate to death, how do we attend [. . .] to the largeness that is Black life, Black life insisted from death?”.[1] This essay will explore how archival re-imaginings create the potential for Black lives in the archive to be redefined, becoming imbued with this “life insisted from death.” Through reclaiming the subjectivity and life of enslaved people within death, creative engagement with historical material can disrupt archival silences, presenting new possibilities to hear the voices of those absent from archives in both the past and the present.
For Sharpe, Black lives are constantly in states of death and dying, a consequence of what it is to be “living blackness in the diaspora in the still unfolding aftermaths of Atlantic chattel slavery,” which she terms “the wake”.[2] She demonstrates how the legacy of slavery in the form of the wake pervades the twenty-first century, calling chattel slavery “an ongoing disaster” and describing her experience of living in “the wake of the unfinished project of emancipation”.[3] Sharpe describes the inevitable entwinement of blackness and death with the phrase “partus sequitur ventrem (that which is brought forth follows the womb),” illustrating how “the Black child inherits the non/status, the non/being of the mother”.[4] This sense of inherited “non/being” is evidenced in records from the transatlantic slave trade, where the scarce archival fragments detailing Black lives are marked by the absence of subjectivity and life in their descriptions. Instead, enslaved Black people are commodified, being listed among objects such as groceries and items of clothing in customs records of imports and exports, as well as being assigned exact financial value.
In a record giving “An Account of the Goods Wares and Merchandise imported into and exported from the British West India Islands [. . .] between 5 Jan 1787 and 5 Jan 1788, distinguishing each Species of Goods,” the enslaved Black people trafficked from Jamaica, Dominica, and Grenada are categorised as “Negroes” and listed between “Lumber” and “Bacon and Hams” on the list of exports.[5] This record details the trafficking of 6740 enslaved people from these islands, stripping these individuals of any subjectivity, personhood, or humanity, and reducing them to objects that are listed between building material and meat. This erasure is seen in similar documents, such as in a customs record from 1789–1790, where 21,218 enslaved people are listed alongside items such as coffee, brown sugar, goat skins, and tobacco.[6] In a record from 1791–1792, the financial value assigned to enslaved people is also documented, emphasising their status as a commodity; the value of 14,676 enslaved people was recorded as being £660,420.[7]
Records such as these, while acting as vital evidence for existence, give no insight into individuals or even recognise them as people, instead assigning them monetary value and categorising them among material commodities and animals. These records therefore demonstrate the limitations that archival resources can present. Though they provide crucial historical accounts of the transatlantic slave trade, within these records the only evidence for life is found through the documentation of enslavement and suffering, emphasising Sharpe’s notion of “Black life as proximate to death.” In an effort to reckon with the deathly inheritance of being born “in the wake,” Sharpe presents her concept of “wake work,” which she describes as “a mode of inhabiting and rupturing this episteme with our known lived and un/imaginable lives”.[8] In attempting to counter the “episteme” of recorded history, she asks that “we might imagine otherwise from what we know now in the wake of slavery”.[9] Wake work as a praxis allows for the emergence of critical methodologies that push against archival narratives, finding the capacity for resistance against depictions of violence, objectification, and death.
Sharpe’s concept of combining care with imagination as a form of wake work is seen in an archival context through the work of Saidiya Hartman and her notion of critical fabulation. In her essay “Venus in Two Acts,” Hartman articulates a desire to go into the archives and generate narrative exploration “without committing further violence”, in the same vein as Sharpe’s careful approach.[10] She makes note of the fact that “there is not one extant autobiographical narrative of a female captive who survived the Middle Passage,” calling this a “silence in the archive”.[11] In naming this silence, Hartman identifies that the only traces of these figures are stories about “the violence, excess, mendacity, and reason that seized hold of their lives [and] transformed them into commodities and corpses [. . .] the archive is, in this case, a death sentence, a tomb, a display of the violated body, an inventory of property”.[12]
Hartman recognises that enslaved people in the archives are not portrayed as being human subjects or possessing life, but are, rather, recorded in terms of their deaths or as property, as in the case of the customs documents explored in this essay. Embodying the aims of wake work and extending this notion to archival settings, she seeks both to reflect upon and remedy this silence. Sharpe expresses that “we, Black people everywhere and anywhere we are, still produce in, into, and through the wake an insistence on existing: we insist Black being into the wake”, and Hartman theorises disseminating this notion through the archives, insisting on Black being and existence.[13] She names her method “critical fabulation,” stating her intention “isn’t anything as miraculous as recovering the lives of the enslaved or redeeming the dead, but rather laboring to paint as full a picture of the lives of the captives as possible”.[14] Hartman describes how narratives might be formed with and against archival silences, and the importance of “reckon[ing] with the precarious lives which are visible only in their disappearance”.[15] By taking moments of death and using them to imagine life, Hartman resists the episteme of the archives, working, as Sharpe suggests, to rupture historical narratives and instead to insist on Black subjectivity and living.
While both Sharpe and Hartman’s work focuses primarily on the existence of African Americans “in the wake,” the archival documents explored within this essay additionally highlight the importance of an engagement with the ongoing legacies of slavery in Britain, not only in historical research but also through these critical, creative methods. Angeline Morrison, in her 2022 album, The Sorrow Songs, does just this, demonstrating the transferable nature of wake work to other disciplines as she strives to enact this method in the context of traditional British folk music. Similar to Hartman’s discovery that “there is not one extant autobiographical narrative of a female captive who survived the Middle Passage,” Morrison was troubled by the lack of Black British figures in traditional songs who were not portrayed in extreme stereotyped or derogatory ways. She remarks, “I was looking for songs where the Black person got to be a part of the action – a regular human [. . .] I wanted an equivalent to the traditional folk songs [. . .] and I didn’t find anything like that”.[16] Morrison therefore undertook similar work to Hartman, looking to the archives for traces of existence. She uses these scraps and fragments creatively to generate stories that give subjectivity, voice, and life to those previously only recorded due to the cessation of these qualities. One such example is “Unknown African Boy, (d.1830).” In this song, Morrison draws from archival material that recounts items washed up on the Isles of Scilly from a wrecked slave ship, including “the body of an unknown ‘West African boy,’ estimated age around eight”.[17] In her effort to use the archives to give voice to a previously unheard narrative, she chooses to write the song from the perspective of the boy’s mother:
O my brown arms, they are so sad and empty,
O where, o where is my little son?
He’s stolen away by English slavers,
With a cudgel blow, and a pointed gun.[18]
In naming and dwelling on this tragic event, Morrison is aligned with Hartman’s vision not to do something “miraculous” or be seen as “redeeming the dead,” but rather “laboring to paint as full a picture of the lives of the captives as possible.” Morrison continues this by not recounting violent details of the boy’s death, but rather giving imagined voice and subjectivity to his mother, who expresses a message of hopefulness:
O I’ll send my spirit out into the darkness,
Into stars, and the wind, and the sea I’ll go;
My spirit will fly into earth and water,
That a mother’s love he might then know.[19]
If the sea be your bed, and the waves be your pillow,
May the sun in the sky keep you from all harm.
The earth is your mother now, dear baby;
She will hold you safe in her soft, brown arms.[20]
Through this approach of letting a Black woman narrate and control her own story, and not seeking to recreate scenes of violence or suffering, Morrison demonstrates how archival material can be re-purposed into something meaningful and restorative. She is aligned with the aims of Sharpe and Hartman in treating history with care, and does not attempt to exceed the limits of the archives. Rather, she works within them to give the boy’s mother subjectivity and life, where, historically, the only record of her existence is her son’s death. Here, Morrison fulfils Sharpe’s notion of “insist[ing] Black being into the wake” through creating life, rather than recounting its cessation. Throughout the album, Morrison insists on Black being through her expansion of and reflection upon historical scraps, many of which are derived directly from death in the form of gravestone inscriptions (such as “The Beautiful Spotted Black Boy,” “The Hand of Fanny Johnson,” and “Slave No More”). Thus, Morrison is seen to truly be affirming subjectivity and eliciting life out of death through these songs.
Morrison demonstrates how historical research can work alongside creative methods, reclaiming stories, lives, and narratives from records depicting the commodification of Black bodies. Her rendering of Sharpe’s wake work and Hartman’s critical fabulation demonstrates how, in death, individual stories can be imbued with life, not through further trauma and discussion of violence, but through caring and regenerative creative work that seeks to imagine the richness of life that is absent from the archives. This work allows for the expansion of archival limitations, offering some respite and subjectivity for Black life to escape its proximity from death, and the opportunity to explore and develop archival silences into voices. Sharpe, Hartman, and Morrison do not seek to dig up the archival graveyard, but instead use their creative methods to lay flowers at its graves, as they dwell on the lives and stories of its individual occupants.
For more sources related to those discussed in this essay, please see our collection, British Mercantile Trade Statistics, 1662–1809.
[1] Christina Sharpe, In The Wake (Duke University Press, 2016), 17.
[2] Ibid., 2.
[3] Ibid., 3.
[4] Ibid., 15.
[5] British Online Archives, British Mercantile Trade Statistics, 1662–1809, “CUSTOMS 17/10: Accounts, January 1787 to January 1788”, available at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/43760/customs-1710-accounts-january-1787-to-january-1788#?xywh=0%2C-1581%2C5751%2C10200&cv=165, image 166.
[6] British Online Archives, British Mercantile Trade Statistics, 1662–1809, “CUSTOMS 17/11: Accounts, January 1789 to January 1790”, available at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/43761/customs-1711-accounts-january-1789-to-january-1790#?xywh=-1%2C-2000%2C6151%2C10909&cv=131, image 132.
[7] British Online Archives, British Mercantile Trade Statistics, 1662–1809, “CUSTOMS 17/13: Accounts, January 1791 to January 1792”, available at https://britishonlinearchives.com/documents/43763/customs-1713-accounts-january-1791-to-january-1792#?xywh=-2%2C-1993%2C6144%2C10895&cv=107, image 108.
[8] Sharpe, In The Wake, 18.
[9] Ibid.
[10] Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two Acts,” Small Axe 26 (2008), 2.
[11] Ibid., 3.
[12] Ibid., 2.
[13] Sharp, In The Wake, 11.
[14] Hartman, “Venus,” 11.
[15] Ibid., 12.
[16] Angeline Morrison, interviewed by Jon Wilks, “The Sorrow Songs Interview,” Tradfolk, 16 December 2021 (n.p.).
[17] Angeline Morrison, The Sorrow Songs Notes and Lyrics, (2022), available at https://www.angelinemorrisonmusic.com/the-sorrow-songs-lyrics, 2.
[18] Ibid., 1–4.
[19] Ibid., 15–18.
[20] Ibid., 21–24.