Archival Silence

For the past decade or so, since the publication of the special issues of Social Text The Question of Recovery: Slavery, Freedom, and the Archive” (2015) and of History of the Present From Archives of Slavery to Liberated Futures?” (2016) archives have become a central problem for scholars of slavery and for the historical profession more generally. Called the “archival turn” this scholarship draws inspiration from postcolonial studies and literary criticism to think about how documents enter the archive, which ones don’t, and how that imbalance shapes the stories we can tell now, and the ones we never will. That point, about the limits of an archive, is a very old one to the profession, with Marc Bloc or E.H. Carr making versions of it in their classic works of historiography. The more recent literature builds on and supplants an older epistemology of the archive not to lament what is not there, but to show how the presence of certain figures is still encoded in silence. If this literature has seemed dominant for a while, the criticism of it is clearly growing, and growing more public, as a recent keynote address at the Omohundro Institute’s annual conference made apparent.

While I have been actively following this literature for a while, a recent title on archival production has helped me see the debate differently. Martin Dusinberre’s Mooring the Global Archive is a potentially transformative book. In it, he shrewdly foregrounds what he can find through deep archival research, and what that research will never tell him. Perhaps the most important methodological point comes early in the book when he lays out three archival traps: History as Moments of Birth; The Global as Googleable; Fixation on the Written Word. Each are unpacked with care, and I cannot do them full justice in this post. But together they indicate how scholars can move between an abundant archive and the many silences that coexist in it.

Karin Wulf, in her role as director of the John Carter Brown Library, has urged scholars recently to think of archives as places where people shout at us. Thinking of a “shouty archives” is a provocative move, and one that I will think about for a while. Dusinberre’s work makes me wonder, however, if naming the shouting in the archive may well be calling us into a trap. It is critical, at the very least, to know what they are shouting, why they are shouting, and where they hope to lead us. No matter the abundance of sources in repositories, archives are curated, invested, and interested spaces. So when you hear the voices come through loud and clear, Dusinberre’s book cautions, it is best to ask what they aren’t shouting, and what might lie beneath all the noise and bluster.

A final note to say that Dusinberre’s work will be on many of my syllabi for years to come, and it gave me a chance to look at some of my favorite works on slavery, silence, and the archive. They include the full suite of articles in the special issues I mention above, as well as:

Jenny Sharpe, Immaterial Archives: An African Diaspora Poetics of Loss (2023)

Marisa J. Fuentes, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive (2016).

Saidiya Hartman, “Venus in Two ActsSmall Axe 2008 (12) no. 2: 1-14.

Laura Ann Stoler, Along the Archival Grain: Epistemic Anxieties and Colonial Common Sense (2010).

Achille Mbembe, “The Power of the Archive and its Limits,Refiguring the Archive ed., Hamilton et. al. (2002).

Carolyn Steedman, Dust: The Archive and Cultural History, (2002).

Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (1995).

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