Scholars of slavery have long confronted the inherent politics of the archive. We often rely on documents that were produced by slaveholders or institutions that supported slavery, which have narrowed our historical gaze and tainted the histories we wish to write about enslaved people with the colonial perspectives of the institutions that enslaved them. Historians must constantly confront the partial, inherently anti-Black ontological claims embedded in these records. When the records tell of enslave-able souls, of “piezas” or of “nègres,” these are words that recordkeepers selected in order to preserve the society, commerce, and beliefs of slave owners, traders, and beneficiaries. The first strategy of historians has been to expand their sources. We also read “against the grain,” around documents’ storytelling (for example, by exploring a freed person’s experience of constructing or inhabiting raced language), or historians can tune their analysis to the documents themselves using Ann Laura Stoler’s model of reading “along the archival grain,” considering how the colonial archives “animates political energies and expertise,” how it is itself an instrument of colonial regimes. Stoler’s method has also inspired another approach, what Saidiya Hartman and Stephanie E. Smallwood call “counter-history,” which endeavors to uncover the “detail” that the archives attempt to “ignore, marginalize, and disavow.” Counter-history is an attempt to write a human history of people whose encounter with the commodifying Atlantic (including the institution of slavery and its archives) turned them into objects.

Three new books on how Africans shaped the Americas grapple with the politics of archival interpretation in constructing the histories of slavery and empire. In different ways, they demonstrate the importance of not just reading traditional archival sources anew, but of engaging with previously overlooked sources, such as sound, and of challenging the very epistemic premise of knowability when it comes to Western historiographies of the enslaved. In the process, these texts expand our vision of Africans in the Atlantic World beyond the once-dominant creolization or “Atlantic” model (in which all Africans eventually merge into a Euro-American culture). The Africans in these three texts directed their environments and shaped the records by which we know them today qua Africans.

Mary Caton Lingold’s account of African musicians in the Atlantic uses familiar sources—especially travel narratives and natural histories—to trace the “sound legacy” of Africans who lived in the Atlantic world from 1600 to 1800. Her close reading reconstructs the multisensory sound, vibration, dance, and ritual that shaped nearly every sphere of life for Africans and their descendants on both sides of the Atlantic. Limited sources still contain brilliant detail of what Africans created under slavery. For example, exoticized rendering of African instruments in John Stedman’s 1790 account of Dutch Suriname also contains information on the instruments’ physical materials, while a record of Jamaican music in Western notation by a Mr. Baptiste in 1688 captures real, albeit edited, “creolized” music-making. (Readers can hear various interpretations of Mr. Baptiste’s pieces at Mary Caton Lingold, David Garner, and Laurent Dubois’s website, musicalpassage.org.)

Much of the monograph draws from print sources written by Europeans, and Lingold takes great pains to disavow their racism and limited scope, so much so that at times, it distracts from her analysis. Yet Lingold also takes an innovative leap beyond “reading against the grain” by interpreting the bala (a large and fragile xylophone with gourd amplifiers, also called a marimba) as an archive itself, a way to transmit music and its accompanying meanings across generations. Instrument builders create objects with the capacity to create certain sets of sound based on “sound designs” such as length and numbers of strings, size and shape of a drum, and other physical features. The rest of the book suggests that the sounds built into the bala and other instruments are all the more significant for the African and creole spiritual and cultural practices and meanings coded within these sounds. By reading familiar sources alongside this new archive, Lingold expands our knowledge of African and Afro- creativity under enslavement and adds to the argument that enslaved people and their culture did indeed survive slavery.

While Lingold turns to African instruments as an archive, Sara E. Johnson upends our understanding of traditional Western archival sources by uncovering the formative intellectual labor of enslaved people behind their production. Writing about the life of the pro-slavery encyclopedist, lawyer, and deputy to the French National Assembly Moreau de Saint-Méry, Johnson exposes the esteemed Frenchman’s reliance on enslaved workers from whom he extracted labor, content, and expertise to fill his own archives and books.

Encylopédie Noire is the counter-biography of a man who made a business of knowledge production. Chapters 1, 4, and 8 of Johnson’s book form an encylopédie noire of the enslaved people behind Moreau’s knowledge. They provide a counter-history to Moreau’s printed and unpublished scientific writing, an attempt to recover the enslaved men and women whose experiences Moreau elected to misrepresent and suppress in his professional writings. In the process, Johnson dissects Moreau’s methods for collecting information on African-descent people: oral interviews, observations of his own household and surroundings, and intimate and exploitative physical examinations. Her commentaries expose Moreau’s writings to his own practice of scientific inquiry, which, unshockingly, do not meet his stated empirical standards. For example, Moreau’s published writings on the “characteristics” of African people (such as their supposed capacity to survive on less food than whites) ignored his own observations (in this case, mass starvation of enslaved people) that would have shaken the institution’s foundations.

The other half of Johnson’s book is an examination of language (specifically, the press and translation) as a tool of French colonial society. Two sets of texts—Moreau’s translations of natural history and a Kikongo vocabulaire published by his brother-in-law Baudry des Lozières—demonstrate how foreign language acquisition of indigenous African languages by Frenchmen extended their business interests and power to dominate landscapes and people. But Johnson also reveals the indigenous and enslaved interlocutors who provided material for these texts and explores how these texts might have spoken to them. Baudry des Lozière’s vocabulaire, for example, contains slaveholders’ anxiety to preserve control and hints at how African knowledge might have unraveled their control. Similarly, a foray into African linguistics wrests out of the pathological vocabulaire a brief window into the multiple West African notions of captivity that diverged from French colonial chattel slavery and may have encouraged enslaved people to practice petit-marronage.

We must search beyond the document that speaks for itself, beyond the sight of colonial systems, and even beyond our own modern, historical pretentions to superior understanding.

The skeleton of Johnson’s work is an encyclopedia, an Enlightenment-era pretention to universal knowledge that was also an instrument in the colonial search for knowledge and mastery over things and people. But Johnson’s penultimate chapter upends this pretention with an enormously creative meditation of enslaved literacy, of what Africans would have made of the upside-down brands on their own flesh, of printed runaway advertisements, or of the words spoken by slave owners. On Johnson’s pages, European knowledge and language literally break down (“essssssssskkkkkkkkkkllllllllllavvvvvv [short e in an English context]; esklave = vika? Esklav ¹ vika? Esklav = mvika?,” Johnson writes, to explore how a Kikongo speaker might have heard and understood a slave owner’s words). The form of the chapter suggests that historians of enslaved people can only write by fiction or cacophony; nothing else is salvageable from the archives of slavery. Johnson’s African subjects are, in the end, knowable only through radically novel historical method.

Like Johnson, John Garrigus’s history of enslaved resistance in French Saint-Domingue works with traditional archival sources like court records, planters’ correspondence, and colonial administrative records. But without being explicit about it, Garrigus also unearths another source of historical memory and knowledge: the land itself in the area around the town of Cap Français in the generation before the Haitian Revolution. In this place, enslaved people survived a devastating coincidence of disease, drought, blockade, famine, and poison trials over forty years. This terrain was seeped with violence and death (of human and environmental origin) and then overlaid with new living pathways made by enslaved people. The book’s seven main maps visualize what the land weathered, remembered, and inspired: waves of anthrax outbreaks across livestock and enslaved communities, poison investigations launched against enslaved people, the cross-plantation communications and gatherings of enslaved people, and the spread of revolutionary violence in these same places because of the preceding events.

Garrigus turns to the devastated terrain of Cap Français to uncover a genealogy of the enslaved loyalties and communities that, he argues, were a necessary condition for the Haitian Revolution. The African character of survival gives texture to this revolutionary backstory. A deadly cycle of disease and torture spiraled through this region beginning in 1757, when a West African man named Médor confessed that he had used “bad medicine” in a failed attempt to heal fellow enslaved people. As anthrax and famine together ravaged the land in the subsequent decades, killing thousands of enslaved people and decimating livestock, slave owners searched for “poisoners” to blame. They tortured and interrogated hundreds of enslaved people, even after French physicians discovered the bacteria that was causing mass death. Garrigus calls attention to the African linguistic meanings that birthed planters’ terror; what these trials overlooked was that what the French called “poison,” Africans understood as medicine, spiritual protection, knowledge, and healing. Enslaved people really were using “poison,” not for the reasons that slave owners imagined, but rather as a way to survive the death that haunted the land and conditioned their enslavement. As a whole, the monograph tells the story of how communities based in shared African practices and beliefs weathered this environment of death, and shows that these African communities formed physical and social pathways across this terrain of epidemic infection and torture. The best-known of these African associations grew up around Makandal, a self-freed Kongolese healer. Garrigus hypothesizes that Makandal’s followers used and understood spirit-filled objects according to Central African precedents and that they organized themselves with a Central African political vision that granted their priests spiritual, judicial, and economic powers over the community.

This story could only have been written by starting in the land. The earth held starved bodies, drought-dried riverbeds, and anthrax spores. It also transformed under the activity of enslaved people, as their communication and community cut paths through mountains and valleys. Garrigus’s innovative methodology reveals how Africans together with the land endured the mid-18th-century poison scare and sowed seeds of revolution. Garrigus is not the first historian to turn to the physical environment to tell the story of the Haitian Revolution. Marlene Daut and Michel-Rolph Trouillout before her have drawn our attention to the Haitian intellectuals of the early 19th century who invoked the land and the dead as witnesses to the terrors of colonial-era slavery. Here Garrigus’s narrative cuts short; the ever-mounting dead are conspicuously absent from the communities he studies. Acknowledging the dead would require opening up the world to layers of spiritual power, beyond the sight of this historical—and fundamentally political—narrative.

Yet that is what historians of enslaved people are called to do. We must search beyond the document that speaks for itself, beyond the sight of colonial systems, and even beyond our own modern, historical pretentions to superior understanding. It is worth abandoning the boundaries of our 19th-century discipline to tell the story of what Africans made in the Americas. 

Featured image: Pascoal Roiz, A portolan chart of the Atlantic Ocean and adjacent continents (1633). Courtesy of the Library of Congress