Issue: Issue 125 The Question of Recovery: Slavery, Freedom, and the Archive

February 11, 2016 | Features

This article uses a collection of African American women’s friendship albums held at the Library Company of Philadelphia to reflect on scholarly resistance to reading disappointment, and negativity more generally, in the archives of black freedom. Rather than viewing these … Continue reading “Disappointment in the Archives of Black Freedom”

February 11, 2016 | Features

This article explores the problem of torture and secrecy in the archives of conspiracies, seditions, and black resistance movements in the colonial Americas of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. Using the example of the Tailors’ Conspiracy, a seditious … Continue reading “Secret and Spectral: Torture and Secrecy in the Archives of Slave Conspiracies”

February 11, 2016 | Features

February 11, 2016 | Features

This article describes the process of looking across post–Civil War political, labor, and social archives for black community formations, black imaginaries around freedom, and fugitive legislative changes in an attempt to recover freed people’s theorizing of the political.

February 11, 2016 | Features

Considering the question of the recovery of marginalized voices in the archives, this article reflects on the problem of finding and interpreting the personal responses of African Americans to the assassination of President Abraham Lincoln in 1865. Black freedom was … Continue reading “Lincoln's Black Mourners: Submerged Voices, Everyday Life, and the Question of Storytelling”

February 11, 2016 | Features

This contribution to a roundtable on the question of recovery makes a case for overreading the archives of the black Atlantic diaspora not only for what they tell us about who did what, where, and when but also for scenes … Continue reading “Scenes of Speculation”

February 11, 2016 | Features

This article explores under what conditions, with what methods, and in relation to what materials the question of recovery with respect to slavery and freedom can be posed. Accounts of Black Atlantic and African American slavery are central to understanding … Continue reading “History Hesitant”

February 11, 2016 | Features

This article investigates the possibilities of storytelling and black Atlantic literature in forging new critical approaches to the archive of New World Asian indenture. It also emphasizes the significance of the comparative study of bonded labor to our understanding of … Continue reading “Storytelling and the Comparative Study of Atlantic Slavery and Freedom”

February 11, 2016 | Features

February 11, 2016 | Features

Creative historical scholarship demonstrates that archives are not just the records bequeathed by earlier times. Archives also consist of the tools we use to explore the past, the vision that allows us to read its signs, and the design decisions … Continue reading “Mapping a Slave Revolt: Visualizing Spatial History through the Archives of Slavery”

February 11, 2016 | Features

In response to Vincent Brown’s contribution to this roundtable, this article argues for the importance of attending to issues of design in digital humanities projects that aim to recover and reassess the archives of slavery.

February 11, 2016 | Features

The spatial and cartographic turn in the humanities invites experimentation with new modes of historical storytelling. Those modes—interactive, participatory, and ever evolving—may redefine our vision of scholarship by creating innovative ways to distribute and create historical knowledge. If the ultimate … Continue reading “Mapping Space, Power, and Social Life”

February 11, 2016 | Features

This afterword revisits the archive as a problem space for scholars grappling with slavery and its afterlife.

February 11, 2016 | Features