Colonialism, Slavery, and the Archive: Old and New Practices
Brown, Vincent
Dillon, Elizabeth
Bald, Vivek
2016-11-04
view transcript only
Welcome and good afternoon everyone.
This is the third session of our Mellon Sawyer Seminar
entitled "Colonialism, Slavery and the Archive: Old and
New Practices" and I'm very pleased to welcome you.
My name is Lisa Lowe I am the director of the Center for
the Humanities here at Tufts.
This session concerns the question of archives and archival research,
which of course lies at the heart of original literary and
historical work, offering us a unique chance to do research based upon often
unpublished primary source materials.
Archives are of course collections of materials, text, documents and
artifacts kept and preserved by organizations like universities, churches,
corporations or historical societies.
Yet, in as much as the archive refers to collected papers,
we also use this term to refer to the epistemological parameters for
knowing, reading and making legible the past.
In this session, our distinguished speakers will be discussing the interests
that constitute archives and our research.
And they'll address questions such as,
is knowledge produced by an authorizing state or agency?
How does a collection sanction or advance the national interests of a state?
Or uphold a particular concept of history, knowledge and consequently citizenship,
gendered or racialized personhood, or who can belong to that society?
If the official archive naturalizes colonialism and slavery, for
example, the ownership of people or the denial of humanity to the colonized or
the enslaved, what does it mean to try to recover lost histories in those archives?
I have the pleasure of introducing our three speakers and the two moderators.
Professor Vincent Brown is the Charles Warren Professor of History, African and
African American Studies and
Director of the History Design Studio at Harvard University.
His research, writing and teaching, and other creative endeavors are focused on
the political dimensions of cultural practices in the African diaspora,
with a particular emphasis on the early modern Atlantic period.
He's a native of Southern California, he was educated at UC San Diego,
where I actually taught with his parents.
[LAUGH] And he received his PhD in history from Duke University
where he also trained in the theory and craft of film and video making.
He's been the recipient of many fellowships,
including the Mellon New Directions Fellowship, the Guggenheim Fellowship,
the National Humanity Center Fellowship.
He's the author of numerous articles, and reviews, and scholarly journals.
And the principle investigator, and curator for
the animated thematic maps, slave revolt in Jamaica 1760 to 1761,
a cartographic narrative which I think we'll be visiting during the session.
And he was producer and director of research for the television documentary
Herskovits at the Heart of Blackness, which received many awards.
His first book, The Reaper's Garden: Death and
Power in the World of Atlantic Slavery was co-winner of the Merle Curti Award, and
received the 2009 James Rawley Prize and the 2009 Lewis Gottschalk Prize.
Professor Elizabeth Maddock Dillon is professor and
chair of the department of English and co-director up at Northeastern University,
and co-director of the Northeastern Lab for text maps and networks.
She teaches courses in the fields of early American literature, Atlantic theater and
performance, and trans-Atlantic print culture.
She's the author of a brilliant book, New World Drama,
The Performative Commons in the Atlantic World, 1649 to 1849.
Which won the Bernard Hewitt Award for outstanding research
in theater history from the American Society for Theater Research.
And also, her first book, The Gender of Freedom, Fictions of Liberalism and
the Literary Public's Fear, which won the Hayman Prize for
Outstanding Publication in the Humanities at Yale University.
She's the co-editor with Michael Drexler of the newly published
The Haitian Revolution in Early United States, Histories,
Geographies and Textualities.
And she's also a co-director of the Dartmouth Summer Institute in
American Studies.
Vivek Bald is a scholar, writer and
documentary film maker whose work focuses on histories of immigration and
diaspora, particularly from the South Asian subcontinent.
He's a professor at MIT and the author of Bengali Harlem and
the Lost Histories of South Asian America, published by Harvard University Press.
And co-editor of The Sun Never Sets,
South Asian Migrants in an age of United States Power.
His films include Taxi-vala/auto-biography, a 1994 film,
and Mutiny, Asian storm British music made in 2003.
Professor Bald is currently working on a transmedia project aimed at recovering
the histories of the peddlers and seamen from British colonial India,
who settled in the US in communities of color during the Asian Exclusion era.
This project consists of the Bengali Harlem Book as well as a documentary film
and a digital archive called The Lost Histories Project and
an oral history run site.
He's also working on a second book, The Rise and Fall of Prince Ranji Smile,
Fantasies of India at the Dawn of the American Century.
He is, as I said, Associate Professor of Comparative Media Studies and
writing at MIT and a member of MIT's open documentary lab.
Our two moderators and commenters, our own faculty Professor Kris Manjapra,
Associate Professor in the History department and
Professor Kendra Field, Assistant Professor in the History department.
Our format will be that we'll hear from our speakers, and
then we'll take a short break where you can share some refreshments.
And then, we'll come back and both Professor Professors Manjapra and Field
will give some comments and questions to open our discussion for the afternoon.
Thank you.
>> [APPLAUSE]
>> Good.
Well, I'll thank you Lisa for that very generous introduction,
I'm really happy to be here.
I also wanna thank Kris Manjapra as well as Lisa Lowe for
the invitation to come, Kendra Field.
And my co-panelists as well, Elizabeth Maddock Dillon,
Vivek Bald, thank you very much, it's always nice to be with you.
We have been doing different kinds of things together over the last couple of
years and it's always a pleasure to have the opportunity to think with them.
I also wanna thank Khalil Tire, for helping to organize our visit today.
I'm really excited for this discussion, and I'm gonna speak briefly as a result,
because I really wanna hear the conversation that we have and
I'm hoping to learn as much as I can from that.
In part because I'm convinced that creative archival practice can encourage
inter-disciplinary and
innovative historical scholarship and that is my primary field, history.
Were that the challenges the boundary of conventional challenges of boundary of
conventional methodology and historiography.
There's a special concern of my own as a multimedia historian of slavery
with a stubborn interest in exploring histories of common people,
who left few documents of the kind routinely archived for preservation.
Only by wrestling creatively and
collectively with the difficult archival problems presented by these histories,
I think we can hope -- it's only by doing that that I think we can hope to find new
avenues for pondering and representing history's most vexing subjects.
When we do, we find that the archive is not only the records bequeathed
to us by the past, it's also the tools that we use to explore us.
Division that allows us to see its traces, and
the design decisions that communicate our sense of history's possibilities.
Recently, I pursued this challenge by attempting to map the history of
the greatest slave revolt in the 18th century British Empire.
In 1760, some 1,500 enslaved black men and women,
perhaps fewer to probably many more, took advantage of Britain's Seven Years War
against France and Spain to stage a massive uprising in Jamaica.
The United Kingdom's most profitable and
strategically important colony in the Americas at the time.
Over the course of 18 months the rebels killed as many as 60 whites and
destroyed many thousand pounds of property.
During the suppression of the revolt, over 500 black men and
women were killed in battle, executed, or committed suicide.
Another 500 were transported from the island for life.
Colonists value the total cost to the island at nearly a quarter million
pounds sterling.
Historians trying to explain the event must contend with a long tradition of
singling out black violence as explosions of disorder without justification or
clear intention.
Such descriptions of black freedom struggles as riots and
rampages have provided a handy justification for denying legitimate
claims to political participation and rights, as with more recent disturbances.
People at the time debated whether the Jamaica rebellion was a spontaneous
eruption or a carefully planned affair.
Historians still debate the question.
Their task made all the more difficult by the lack of written records produced
by the insurgents themselves.
I wanna suggest that we can improve our knowledge by examining
the revolt's spatial history.
The historian Richard White has succinctly characterized spatial history as the study
of movements of plants, people, animals, goods and information over time.
With movement, interaction, and
transformation, patterns are made and remade.
And given the importance of such spatial relations in time,
historical analysts need to find an iconographic lexicon or visual language,
that may discover and illustrate such spatial practices and processes.
This calls for a new historical cartography.
Seen now less as a techno-scientific form of observation than as
a rhetorical practice that can define, clarify and
advocate visions of the world that might otherwise go unarticulated.
Cartography visualization can be, says Richard White,
a fundamental part of historians' analytic process, a means of doing research,
generating questions and reviewing historical relations.
This is how we can use spacial history to reevaluate the received stories
upon which we build our own versions of the past.
So the animated thematic map that Professor Lowe referred to,
narrates the spacial history of the Jamaican Revolt, breaking
its movement down into the networks and circuits that defined its progress.
To teachers and researchers, the presentation offers a carefully curated
archive of key documentary evidence produced in the period.
To all viewers, the map suggests an argument,
about the strategy of the rebels, about the tactics of counterinsurgency.
About the importance of the landscape to the course of the uprising and about
the difficulty of representing such events cartographically with available sources.
Composed from several 18th century diagrams, a terrain map and
an estate map form the base maps for
our narration, which graphically depicts a chronological database of locations.
Contemporary accounts of the revolt, drawn from diaries, letters,
military correspondence and newspapers, yield the descriptions of the positions,
movements and engagements of rebels and counter-insurgents.
These locations were cross-referenced with multiple sources whenever possible.
Latitudes and longitudes were then reckoned by correlating the base maps with
satellite images.
I think that resolution's probably too low for you to read any of the actual
information in that database, but you'll have to trust me.
That's a locational database.
The symbol design in which fading tracer lines track
the movement of units tries to account for the uncertainty of much of the data.
Early iterations of the map which featured symbols such as push pins
Inappropriately signified too much clarity, but
then blurred circles would be confusing for users.
Solid lines tracking movement did not reflect the nature of guerrilla warfare.
In which rebels dispersed over the landscape in loose formations and
their pursuers hunted rumors and chance sightings.
Yet without some kind of traces between the points, it became difficult for
the map to suggest that the movements were directional at all and
we knew from our research that they were.
So the graphics we use ultimately attempt to balance intelligibility with ambiguity
while maintaining viewer sense of the interpretative character of the database.
Now, mapping the revolt and its suppression illustrates something
that is difficult to glean from simply reading the textual sources.
The colonists and imperial officials who produce the historical record were
universally unsympathetic to the rebellion.
So the written record skews our understanding toward the perspectives of
slave holders.
But we learned something else by plotting the combatants' movements in space.
Tracing their locations over time,
it's possible to discern some of their strategic aims, and
to observe the tactical dynamics of slave insurrection and counter revolt.
The uprising encompassed three major phases of sustained action alongside more
dispersed and sporadic skirmishes.
The first was the revolt in Saint Mary's Parish that you see here,
generally named Tacky's Revolt after one of its principle African leaders.
This was followed by a much bigger revolt on
the west side of the island in Westmoreland Parish.
And finally, survivors of the Westmoreland insurrection trekked across two parishes,
raiding estates along the way.
These campaigns adapted to geographical constraints.
On the windward side of the island, the north side, heavy rainfall and
dense vegetation limited movement more than on the leeward side,
where the drier climate allowed for greater mobility.
Still, within each phase of the rebellion the routes travelled by the rebels through
woods, mountains, hills, swamps and rivers indicated strategic objectives.
Viewed on the map, the insurrection appears to have been the product of
genuine strategic intelligence, one that utilized Jamaica's distinctive geography
and aimed toward the creation of alternative enduring societies.
Recognizing a real threat to the maintenance of the colony,
the British mounted a rapid and diversified response.
Drawing upon the highly coordinated efforts of the regular military,
the haphazard and decentralized tactics of the local militia, and
the rough-hewn warfare of marooned allies,
each of which traverse the landscape in distinctive ways.
Now, there are obvious limitations to
plotting a turbulent slave revolt on a map like this.
By using British maps that highlight the placement of forts, towns and estates,
our maps tend to reify colonial geography.
Even more fundamentally, cartography itself presumes the natural existence of
points on a grid as much as history naturalizes the timeline.
So these are both ultimately folk ways for representing space and time that have more
in common with slave holder's epistemes than with those of their slaves.
The spacial schemas of the rebels, their landmarks and pathways, and
their sense of timberality are probably irretrievable in cartographic form.
Moreover, maps orient viewers by offering an orderly aerial view.
But gazing down from above makes it hard to see chaos and confusion,
the most essential features of a protracted insurgency.
Of course, if this limitation arises from the sources,
it also reflects the nature of guerrilla warfare, itself.
Uncertainty was, after all, the rebels' best weapon.
So quantitative reports must be taken as impressionistic.
Like words, numbers produced during disorienting events were the products
of bewilderment, fear, and rumor.
So if the map draws a clearer picture of the extent and
contours of the insurrection, it cannot convey the ambition, desperation,
shock, dread, cruelty, blood lust, and sheer mayhem of the experience.
These are matters best left to the historical imagination of viewers and
readers.
Let me finish with a few general thoughts about what I learned from making this map.
First and most fundamentally, employing analytic thematic cartography
can help us to address historical questions.
In this case, we can be more confident, I think,
that the Jamaican uprising of 1760 and 61 was carefully planned,
coordinated in its distinct regions and phases, if not over the entire island, and
executed with attention to the particular features of the local landscape.
Second, this kind of mapping reveals a more complicated and
nuanced picture of power as spatial practice.
With the geography of sovereignty appearing less like the territorial
claims of imperial maps and more like the enclaves of association and
quarters of control described by Lauren Benton's history of European expansion.
Such a view illustrates space as a production of human relationships and
perspectives, rather than as a static context.
Mapping this insurrection has also compelled me to think about the
possibilities of the digital humanities for the kind of history that interests me.
Beyond their engagement with archivists,
historians don't always produce collaborative work.
However, few historians have the requisite skills and
experience to perform all the various roles involving creating multimedia works.
As I was painfully aware during my own association with the cartographers
that Axis Maps, who coded this map here.
Collaborative scholarship will necessarily make up a greater proportion of our
portfolios.
Finally, scholars working in subaltern history rarely have the kind of big
databases that inspire projects in text mining, topic modeling,
or network analysis.
And I now believe that this may be more a virtue than a limitation.
Without big numbers to crunch, scholars must exploit the potential of digital
tools to craft scholarly designs that appreciate the interdependency of
interpretive knowledge and aesthetic expression.
In this way, I think we may produce an enlightening synthesis of quantitative
approaches in social science, the interpretive bent of the humanities, and
the creative wonders of the arts, thanks.
>> [APPLAUSE]
[NOISE]
Yep,
there
we
go.
Okay,
we
got
it
working,
at
last.
So let me just join Vince in saying what a pleasure it is to be here.
And I am grateful to Lisa and Chris for inviting me and
looking forward to Kendra's comments.
A pleasure to be with Vince and Ubek and talking about these ideas.
So this
is actually a piece that is forthcoming in the journal American Literary History.
That's very much about these questions of colonialism, slavery,
and the digital archive.
So I'm gonna read bits of this and then talk through some bits of it too,
to try to fit into our timeframe here.
So I'll start in with the introduction,
which is titled The Coloniality of Knowledge in American Literature.
Transladio Studi, and let me say by way of introduction that I
really want to juxtapose this term translation to poetics, right?
So there's a way in which the digital archive is seen as translating
as sort of merely translating existing materials.
And I wanna insist that actually, there's a poiesis there.
There's a creation, or a bringing forth, to use Heidigger's term.
And on top of that, translation is never particularly simple anyway.
So, not to downplay how complex that is.
The term translatio studii, literally the transfer of translation of knowledge
is one that speaks as well of western imperial triumphalism.
From the medieval origins of the term to its 18th century
association with the movement of the seed of culture from Greece and Rome,
to Europe and ultimately to America.
Closely associated with translatio imperii
the celebration of an imperial movement of power from east to west.
The term translatio studii resonates both with respect to the turn to the archive
in American literary studies which is my field.
And with respect to the history of the colonialism,
an empire embedded on those archives.
In short the notion of a transfer of knowledge
in the Americas is deeply enmeshed with the politics of empire.
The intimate relation of these two terms, translatio studii and
translatio imperii makes visible what we might call the coloniality of knowledge.
The extent to which the forms of knowledge and
power are deeply related to one another in American archives and in our uses of them.
The large scale remediation of archival materials into digital forms
that marks the latest turn in literary and historical scholarship must also,
I wanna argue, be viewed in relation to both translation and imperial domination.
So this assertion that power shapes the archive is in no way a new one.
Theorists of the archive from Derrida to Foucault to Hartman and
Michel have persuasively and powerfully described how power informs the archive.
And the extent to which the archive itself manifests the entwined nature
of knowledge and power.
But, as Annlar Stolar points out,
the knowledge power nexus is forged both by way of the contents of the archive.
That is, the decision as to whose lives and
records are considered worth preserving, and also their form.
An archive is not, and this is quoting Stoller an inert site of storage and
conservation but is rather a site of knowledge production, end quote.
The coloniality of knowledge is lodged in this grid of intelligibility
in the ways of framing information that determine what constitutes facticity.
What constitutes and does not constitute the human.
The form of an archive, what comprises an item, how the coordinates or
metadata of an item are defined such that the item can serve as a unit of knowledge.
Speak of and construct what Stoller describes as
the legitimating social coordinates of epistemologies.
In the case of American literature's turn to the archive, the issue of coloniality
is particularly pressing not simply because of the colonial origins of the US,
but because of the ongoing nature of that history in the present.
Coloniality here names the ways in which colonial forms of power and
knowledge extend from the period of European colonization of America
into the global present.
Following Silvia Winter,
we might put an even more exact point on the nature of colonial power.
Colonial power works implicitly or explicitly.
Distinguished human life that's worth sustaining from quote,
life unworthy of life.
That's one term.
A division that's used in turn to justify and enact the extraction of labor and
resources from colonial sites for the purposes of capital communication.
Furthermore, the colonial modes of racialization and dehumanization that
operate in the service of capitalism are not simply a thing of the past.
As Lisa Lowe argues in a recent issue of social text.
Quote, the operations that pronounced colonial divisions of humanity,
settler seizure and native removal.
Slavery and racial disposition, and
racialized expropriations of many kinds are processes, not sequential events.
They're ongoing and continuous in our contemporary moment.
Not temporarily distinct or as yet concluded, end quote.
So, in some while the colonial period maybe stored away in the past,
coloniality has the capacity to shape both how activities,
how archives were created and how they're understood today.
Further, given the coloniality of archives themselves,
the fantasy of recovering a past that infuses so
much archival research is one that may well give us pause.
And in fact, that's kind of the thrust of Lisa's piece in social text,
the title is History Hesitant.
And she does a beautiful job of helping us think about that pause.
The new availability of digital archives gives the coloniality of archives
additional fuel and force.
Particularly when we imagine archives as sources from which to simply draw
information.
So I used this term translatio studii to point to the very long history of
empire that's created and shaped early American archives and
to its residents in our current digital scholarly moments.
This newest translation of analog materials into digital form
enables unprecedented speed and access, yet that enhanced access is not innocent.
Remediated digital archives are not divorced from the structures of power,
knowledge, and authority that inform analog archives or from new and different
iterations of authorizing power that are masked as mere transfer into digital form.
The forms of remediation that digitization enacts, the translations that occur
across an array of relations from source to analog archive, from analog
to digital archive, from archival form to scholarship, each require our attention.
So in what follows, I wanna argue that the translation,
the of digital archives, holds both peril and promise for
the creation of new knowledge in America literary studies.
Digital archives can reproduce and even reinforce the coloniality of knowledge but
by engaging with the affordances of the digital for
reconfiguring archival structures.
At the level of form they also present an opportunity for
engaging in freedom dreams of decolonization.
And here I'm using Robin Kelly's term.
Freedom dreams for
pursuing the possibility of the decolonization of knowledge production.
So the area that I,
That I focus on here is the Caribbean.
And the digital project that I'm involved in now is called
the Early Caribbean Digital Archive, a wonderfully collaborative Project.
And I'm happy to say that two of the graduate students who do
fabulous work here are in the audience.
Raise your hands, Liz and Donya.
So I'm grateful for, really,
the collaboration that we have working on this.
So the geography of the early Caribbean is one that's fractured by empire.
The imperial regimes of England, Spain, the Netherlands, and France all asserted
sovereignty over Caribbean islands or portions of them from 1492 forward.
The resources of the Caribbean were extracted from its soil by forced labor
and shipped to European cities.
As were the written and material records of Caribbean life.
So, currently one can find more archival material related to the early Caribbean in
the repositories of Europe and the US than on Caribbean soil.
The British Library, for instance, has longer runs of early Jamaican newspapers
than does the National Library of Jamaica.
And in fact, if you want to conduct research in
the National Library of Jamaica You have to pay a daily fee.
Oops, I'm sorry I missed.
[LAUGH] I
didn't think this picture was that funny, so okay.
[LAUGH] So when you work there you have to pay a daily fee to plug
in your computer to cover the electricity cost.
Because the library simply doesn't have the resources to provide free access to
electricity to its patrons.
In contrast to the strained budgets of the Jamaican Library,
Yale University, which houses important Caribbean collections is now,
Let's see.
Is now completing a $70 million, two year renovation of its rare book library.
This differential in resources derives from a deep historical connection.
It's not just an inequality, it's a history that's built that inequality.
Significant portions of the wealth that built and sustained, yeah,
were derived from the Caribbean and Africa by way of a slave trade.
For instance, and here we'll go back to this, Nice man with the round face,
Colonel Phillip Livingston, the first endowed professorship at Yale college.
The Livingstonian Professorship of Divinity was the result of a 1745 gift
from this man who was a leading importer of slaves to the United States from
Jamaica.
So we don't need to look far to find the connections between existing
impoverishment of Caribbean cultural resources And
the wealth of European in US ones.
Further accelerating this inequality is the effect of differential
resources on the creation of digitized collections.
In the US and in Europe, archival materials related to dominant national
histories are the most likely targets for early and large scale digitization.
The papers of George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin, for
instance, are all the subject of major digitization projects.
Those of enslaved and indigenous peoples in the Caribbean are not.
The contents of the archives are also determined in multiple ways
by the knowledge regimes of imperialism.
The British library for instance holds 40 copies of 15 different English language
editions of Brian Edwards, the History and Civil of the British Colonies and
the West Indies Published between 1793 and 1848.
Edwards was a post slavery plantation owner in Jamaica for more than a century
and in fact still today his tax served as the authoritative history of Jamaica.
Together with his account of the geography, climate, colonial history and
agricultural production of Jamaica, Edwards' text includes a poem attributed
to his tutor Isaac Teale which is titled The Sable Venus, An Ode.
The poem is 24 stanzas long, praising the sable queen of love
as the white sibling of the white Venus of classical tradition.
And this is from the quote from the poem quote.
The loveliest limbs her form compose, such as her sister Venus chose.
In Florence, where she's seen, both just alike, except the white.
No difference, none at night, the beautiest dames between.
So as these lines indicate, the sable Venus is primarily a figure of sexual
allure available for in the dark, that is for unforeseen sexual alliances.
What we might also wanna just call rape.
From the second edition forward,
Edward's history includes an engraving of Sable Venus.
This is the engraving here, which depicts an African woman in transit to America.
This is an image of the middle passage.
Just so you can see a contrasting one,
that's also a different representation of the Middle Passage.
The engraving depicts a woman in transit to America.
Arrayed as the Goddess of Love, poised, contra-postal upon a half shell and
escorted across the ocean waves by cherubs, dolphins,
and the gods Neptune and Trident.
The Voyage of the Sable Venus, engraving that appeared in Edward's History,
was produced by William Grainger after a painting by Thomas Stothard.
Sable Venus then is the product of the imaginative labor of at least four
white European men, Teal, Edward, Stathard, and Granger.
She in short,
a gauzy collective fantasy that authorizes the rape of black women by white men.
And one that serves as the frontest piece of the most authoritative account of
the history of Jamaica, at least through the 19th Century.
Edwards puts the bodies of enslaved women to work in his history in other ways
as well.
The fourth volume of the history offers a pro slavery
ethnography of Africans in Jamaica.
Here Edwards describes the torture to death of two rebellious slaves.
And suggests that death was not particularly painful to them given quote,
the courage or
unconcern with which people of Africa manifest at the approach of death.
To bolster his claims, he cites the words of one of his slaves, a woman named Clara.
And says that she says,
people are not killed in the Caribbean as they are in Guinea.
But, interestingly, there's a footnote concerning Clara.
And he talks about her here, Clara, a most faithful and well disposed woman.
And here I wanna point out that while he's busy talking about
how she reinforces his idea that the Caribbean is a kinder,
gentler place for enslaved people than Africa,
she also gives an account of the practice of inoculation against yaws in Africa.
A practice that Edwards clearly views as appalling,
but that speaks to us as contemporary readers of the kind of medical knowledge
that slaves such as Clara brought to the Caribbean.
But given the structure of the book and the conventions of cataloging,
which attribute metadata to illustrations and not to footnotes, the figure of
the Sable Venus has a distinct prominence, and the image has been widely purveyed.
Clara, on the other hand, remains present only in a footnote.
The next kinda point that I wanna make is that there's been a lot of work done about
the question of absence, right, of lost archives.
And what do you do with the absence of enslaved voices in the archive?
And my feeling about this is that there is, yes, on the one hand,
the technology of the archive, the technology of literacy in English,
a literacy that was forcibly denied to slaves,
excludes enslaved people from being producers of the archive.
But on the other hand,
what's interesting is that colonialism required the labors of slaves, right.
And so it required the presence of slaves, and those individuals
are present in the archives, even despite the efforts to erase them.
And that's why I think there is this opportunity for
what I'm gonna talk about in terms of remix,
of rethinking ways in which to read that presence in the archive.
So the colonial archive is defined by a fundamental contradiction.
Given the silence forced upon them,
slaves are absent from the archive as producers of official knowledge, even as
they are present in, and central to, the archive as producers of economic value.
The inter-radical presence of enslaved peoples in the archives makes it
possible to read, narrate the dehumanization and
active bicoloniality, and to create a counter archive.
So what does this counter archive look like, and how do we get there?
Acts of juxtaposition, decontextualization and recontextualization,
what I call remix and reassembly, allow the archive to tell a different story
from the one that colonial knowledge regimes reproduce.
Deforming the archive also enables creative revisions of the metadata used to
access the archive, thereby changing what counts, and is available as, knowledge.
In literary terms, the return to the archive with scissors
has perhaps most brilliantly been engaged by NourbeSe Philip in her work, Zong!,
which I'm guessing many of you are familiar with.
A book length poem, and this a page from the poem, that cites and
remixes the language of a court case concerning the infamous 1781 massacre
on the slave ship Zong, during which 133 slaves were thrown overboard and
drowned for the purpose of gaming insurance payments for their deaths.
A second example of this is Robin Coste Lewis's National Book Award-winning
collection, the title poem, Voyage of the Sable Venus,
which turned specifically to the figure of the Sable Venus in the archive.
The poem is, and these are Lewis's words, comprised solely and
entirely of the titles, catalog entries, or exhibit descriptions of
Western art objects in which a black, female figure is present, end quote.
Lewis's searing poem of found titles places the coloniality of
the archive on display, and questions it by means of recontextualization.
Lewis's work of assemblage extracts the Sable Venus from a text such as
Edward's History, where her figure was used to naturalize empire and
white male access to enslaved black women.
And, instead, uses this figure to narrate the profound complicity of museums,
library and archivists in creating and
sustaining knowledge practices of racial and sexual domination.
So with respect to scholarship and the digital archive, then,
how might we think about, similarly,
about this work of poiesis in the terms which Philip and Lewis engaged, as well.
In the field of media archeology, scholars have made the case that the digital
archive is not simply a site of more capacious or more accessible storage.
Instead, the translation from analog to digital
involves a fundamental shift in the way meaning is created through the archive.
Lev Manovich, Wolfgang Ernst and Jussi Parikka contend that the narrative
motive understanding that characterizes the analog archive, or even the codex
form that we're so familiar, shifts in digital media to a different model.
For Manovich, this model is the database.
And Ernst, in turn, emphasizes the algorithmic or
computational nature of the digital archive, an archive built in bits.
The shift from narrative to algorithmic ontologies foregrounds the fundamentally
combinatory nature of meaning, itself.
We make meaning by placing words, or bits, in relation to one another.
In the digital archive, these relations are more subject to disassembly and
reassembly than in the analog archive because of the mechanism of the media,
itself.
And, hence, this passage that I think is terrifically important.
Algorithmic objects are objects that always come into being and
anew processually.
They do not exist as fixed data blocks.
So that any digital account is going to be necessarily
engaged in this kind of recombinatory, remix process, no matter what it is.
Narratives in the analog archive, then, must be
reconstructed in the digital archive in order to be accessed as narratives.
Materials in the digital archive thus invite us, and even force us,
to attend to the construction and deconstruction of historical narratives.
Now, I think I've probably overstayed my time here.
But let me just give you one example of what this looks like in the early
Caribbean digital archive.
This is the archive that we're working on at Northeastern.
So one of the categories that we put in that archive is embedded slave narrative.
So we have Clara's narrative in there as a standalone narrative.
And Clara's narrative there without the name Brian Edwards on it.
So this capacity to, I'm gonna
read this last passage because I think it says it well.
The particular ease with which the digital medium can disassemble and
reassemble texts, as with the case of Clara's embedded slave narrative, lends
itself to locating and recontextualizing embedded slave narratives.
If the form of the archive sustains, I'm sorry.
Here we go.
No longer embedded within a text under the name Brian Edwards.
Albeit necessarily linked to it with identifying information.
Claire's narrative stance both alone and in relation to the next context
of other embedded slave narratives that form a collection of texts.
In this sense, we are undoing the stitches that bind the codex and disturbing
the pride of place according to the author's name on the spine of the book.
We are manifestly deforming the book, as well as engaging in a form of
scholarly poetics that aims to bring forth new knowledge.
An emphasis on poetics as it occurs in the archives is not an abrogation of
responsibility to archival accuracy and truth-making but an engagement with it.
And a deeply humanities oriented one, at that.
Just as the creators and curators of the EDCA, and
her I also cite Vince's work on the slave revolt in Jamaica.
And the [INAUDIBLE] one early African-American Print Project,
just as all of those projects make choices about how to represent and
encode information, so too does the British Library.
The Library, World CAT, the Library of Congress and
the Oxford English Dictionary.
Given that we live in a world where the formal aspects of technology increasingly
shape what counts as knowledge, what's speakable or unspeakable or
what's invisible and visible in the search algorithms that we
now use to sort through the flood of information to which we have access.
We need all the more modes of humanity's analysis that ask us
what acts of making are at stake in digital translations.
Thank you.
[APPLAUSE]
All right, thank you.
Thank you all for coming.
It's great to see such a full room.
I wanna echo the thanks to Lisa, Chris, Kendra, Kalila.
And the advantage of going after Elizabeth and
Vince is that I have the benefit of their resonance between all of our work.
And so I thank you for that.
And so as Lisa mentioned in the introduction to us,
much of my scholarly and creative work over the last several
years has focused on two groups of South Asian migrants.
Who came to the United States between the late 19th and mid 20th centuries.
And lived within African-American and
Puerto Rican community in New York, New Orleans, Detroit, and elsewhere.
I've been obsessively tracing these migrants, their trajectories and
their cross-racial life-making, through multiple archival sources and
through interviews with family members and descendants.
Both of these groups of migrants were Muslim men from Bengal,
who came to the United States via eastern ports.
The first was a group of peddlers of silk embroideries who
started coming to the US in the 1880s to sell their wares to
tourists In places like Atlantic City and New Orleans.
Taking advantage of a turn of the century craze over what was called Oriental goods.
They established an extensive network that stretched from Calcutta
to the US Northeast, throughout the Southern states and into the Caribbean.
And although most cycled back to India to their villages,
a small number set up shop in New Orleans, married local creole of color and
African-American women and settled into the neighborhood of Treme.
This is Motzid Ali and Ella Blackman Ali.
The second group of early South Asian
muslim migrants were workers on British steamships who jumped ship in New York,
Baltimore and Philadelphia starting in the 1910s.
And set up clandestine networks to access restaurant and
other service sector jobs in Manhattan.
And industrial jobs as far away as Detroit, Michigan and Columbus, Ohio.
Like the peddlers, this was a transient population.
And most of the shipworkers ultimately moved through onshore networks and
different jobs and returned to their villages in East Bengal.
But here again, a small number of men stayed in the US,
settled into local communities of color, particularly in and around New York.
And married women from their adopted neighborhoods.
So that by the 1940s and 50s, they had created a unique,
largely undocumented but broadly multi-racial community.
Made up of South Asian Muslim men, their African-American,
Puerto Rican and sometimes Italian wives and their mixed race children.
As a result of these two migrations, by the mid-20th Century,
there were Bengali African-American and
Bengali Puerto Rican families living in Treme, New Orleans.
In Charleston, South Carolina, Galveston, Texas, West Baltimore,
Chester, Pennsylvania, Black Bottom and Paradise Valley, Detroit.
In Central and Spanish Harlem, the Lower East Side,
Brooklyn, the Bronx, Staten Island and New Jersey.
In fact, by 1950, there were already grandchildren of turn of the century
Bengali peddlers living as part of black communities in New Orleans,
Charleston and other seven cities and as far away Central America.
The people at this center of this research,
peddlers from what is now in Indian West Bengal and
shipworkers from what is now Bangladesh, have been absent and unaccounted for
prior accounts of South Asian immigration to the United States.
These prior accounts focus primarily on Punjabi immigration to the West Coast
in the period between 1904 and 1924, a history of that for
a number of reasons left stronger traces in the archive.
Prior accounts of South Asians in the US also largely took for
granted or took immigration laws at their own word.
That is because the US enacted severe anti-Asian immigration laws
in 1917 that weren't fully lifted until 1965.
Scholars assumed that significant immigration from the subcontinent
simply did not occur between 1917 and 1965.
So there's a way that these most from migrants from different parts of Bengal
who were in fact a presence in the US, by the hundreds if not by the thousands.
Both before and during the Asian Exclusion era, remained unknown to South Asian and
US historians simply because nobody was looking for them.
There are, of course, other reasons that their histories
were previously lost to the narrative of South Asian America.
Most of these men were sojourners, rather than immigrants who,
as I mentioned, eventually went back to their villages
in the subcontinent leaving no lasting traces of their time in the US.
These men were also either undocumented or
operating in the gray areas of of the anti-Asian immigration regime.
As such, they did not follow the iconic immigrant pattern of creating
visible ethnic enclaves in major cities and recreating families and
communities in Little Indias.
Instead they settled and
quietly integrated into existing communities of color.
I also have always suspected that the peddlers and seamen were ignored,
because the few Indian historians in the 1960s and
70s who did appear to have heard about the lascar sailors who married black women.
Thought of them as a small group of anomalous figures who had
exited from the South Asian-American narrative by virtue of their marriages.
All that said, I think it's important to think of the peddlers' and
the shipworkers' position in the archives as a function of their position,
vis a vis the nation states that were producing these archives.
Producing the ship manifests, census sheets and so on, as a means of
broader surveillance, imperial administration and social control.
The Bengali Muslim ship workers and peddlers were living with a compromised
legal status in the cracks and fissures of both British and US Empire.
To the British they were criminalized as maritime deserters, and
to the US they were criminalized as illegal aliens.
The majority of the peddlers and ship jumpers, thus by necessity,
had to disappear into their respective neighborhoods.
And live, as we say now, in the shadows of the immigration laws.
This of course presents a challenge to the historian.
The histories of these early South Asian Muslim migrants, the African-American and
Latina women with whom they partnered,
and their interracial families primarily exist in two places.
First, in the fragmentary archival documents scattered across
many different archives in locations across the globe.
And second, in the stories, memories and
personal photographs of these families, children and descendants.
Who are, themselves, spread out,
with little remaining connection to one another.
Much of the work of my book consisted in locating and
stitching together the first of these, the scattered archival documents,
into a historical narrative that was previously absent.
In some senses, I was guided in this process by the past work
of the Subaltern Studies Collective.
In the 1980s, Subaltern Studies scholars transformed Indian historiography
by reading colonial archival documents between the lines and against the grain.
To recover a sense of the agency of Indian peasants and
workers engaged in everyday forms of resistance against the British.
In my case, in addition to critically reading individual archival documents,
much of my work on the book involved a kind of cumulative process.
And this as we'll see, also echoes some of what Vince was saying about his project.
Amassing hundreds of census records, ship manifests, marriage, birth, and
death records.
Finding the same people, groups of people,
or populations turning up in different locations over time.
Plotting out voyages, filling in the blanks, enabled me to get a sense of
the individual and collective trajectories of South Asian peddlers and seamen.
And understand the shape, spread and functioning of the networks that they
built across the US Northeast, and Midwest and South.
This, in turn,
gave me a sense of their choices in agency as migrants navigating to imperial powers.
I've lost my myself here, okay.
Two imperial powers that sought to limit their movements and control their labor,
as well as the choices in agency of members of local populations.
The African-American, Puerto Rican, and other communities, and
particularly the women from these communities, that harbored these men and
provided them the possibility of building lives.
The work of the book therefore was to build upward from this massive documents,
to connect all the dots.
And to find the human stories that the documents told individually and
cumulatively, as a kind of archive culled from within the archive.
I'll try to briefly walk you through some of this work to illustrate.
In the early stage of the project I didn't yet
know anything about the peddler network.
I knew that there were Bengali Muslim ship
workers who had jumped ship in New York.
And I had found a number of marriage certificates, like this one,
that showed that these men were marrying African-American and
Puerto Rican women in Harlem, and on the Lower East Side.
But while I was going through these marriage records in
New York Municipal Archives, searching for
grooms with common Bengali Muslim surnames, such as Ula, Udeen, Mia, and
Ali, I came across the records of two brothers named Bahadir and Rosdam Ali.
Both had married African-American women in Harlem in the early 1920s.
But the brother's places of birth were neither East India nor
Calcutta, as I had seen on other documents.
One had been born in Waveland, Mississippi and
the other in New Orleans, Louisiana around the year 1900.
And while their father had an Indian name, Mosid Ali,
their mother was listed as Ella Blackman.
Among other things, this prompted the question, who was this Mosid Ali, and
what was he doing living in New Orleans at the turn of the 20th century?
This prompted me to look at US Federal Census Records from New Orleans
in 1900 and 1910 and 1920, searching for the name Ali.
This revealed that Mosid Ali was not alone.
There were in fact multiple interconnected groups
of Bengali Muslim men living in New Orleans and listed as peddlers.
They steadily grew in number between 1900 and 1920.
And a small number married African-American and Afro-Creole families,
into those families in the neighborhood of Treme, as I mentioned.
Subsequent searches of the census found men from
the same group in Galveston, Savannah, and Charleston.
Then when I searched a database of Ellis Island passenger arrivals,
I found the same men arriving in New York on passenger ships from Liverpool and
Southampton, as early as 1895.
Once a year, like clockwork, at the beginning of each summer.
Here again, they were listed as peddlers, but they were not headed for New Orleans.
They were on their way to Atlantic City and Asbury Park.
It took some time, but a series of other discoveries,
one paragraph story in a Chicago newspaper about Hindu peddlers in New Jersey.
A local history of Atlantic City that emphasized The boardwalk town's place
as the premier summer holiday destination for working and
middle class northeasterners, and a series of British ship records.
And I'll scroll through these.
That traced the men's full global circuits, ultimately made clear that these
men were selling Indian embroidery to American tourists in New Jersey,
and a series of other winter destinations across the US south and the Caribbean.
But as I collected more and
more archival traces of this network, one ship manifest in particular struck me.
It is the same one I showed earlier from 1897.
But I hadn't noticed at first that in a very light handwriting in
one column of the manifest was the word deported next to all 12 peddlers.
And what I came to understand, again, through a small newspaper clipping,
is that they had been deported under what was called the Alien Contract Labor Law.
Which was a law passed in 1895 as a sort of extension of the Chinese Exclusion Act,
that was aimed at excluding Asian laborers.
By excluding American employers from bringing in
contract workers from outside the United States.
So these men because they were traveling in this big
group got the attention of folks at Ellis Island, and
were put in detention under suspicion of being contract laborers.
As I dug into this particular incident,
I discovered that the deportation was not the end of the story.
After being shipped back to London, half of the men signed on with a group of
miners, on their way from Liverpool to South Africa,
which was another location where men from their network were selling their goods.
So they were clearly signing on as minors as a way of getting there.
But then my assumption was that they would then escape from that commitment,
whatever it was, and sell their goods in South Africa.
So that they wouldn't have a complete loss that year.
And also within just a few years every single one of these men made their way
back into the United States and started popping up on other archival documents.
But now they travel in groups of two or three rather than 12 or 15,
avoiding suspicion that they were contract workers.
And in one case that I found, Ahadir and Rostum's father Mosid Ali written here
as "Mock-Sad" Ali [LAUGH] traveled to a Canadian port instead of to Ellis Island.
And then made his way across the more porous US Canadian border by train,
ultimately returning to his family in New Orleans.
I emphasize all this because what we have here, as I mentioned,
are documents of state surveillance and border control.
But in these documents as we collect them and as we stitch them together,
we start to see a story of South Asian migrants actively
maneuvering and navigating through the global controls
of two of the most powerful imperial powers of the day, or the most powerful.
So this was the kind of work that went into the book.
And we can talk about this later,
but after the book came out,
something really interesting and unanticipated started to happen.
One after another, the children and descendants of people I had found
in the archives and written about in the book started contacting me,
over email, Facebook, through my website, even via Twitter direct messages.
So of each new person I started collecting new stories and
new elements of the visual record of the history that I've been writing about.
The photographs that had been tucked away in shoeboxes,
in closets, in the attics and in the yellowing albums.
As new people stepped forward, not only did the number of potential subjects for
the linear traditional documentary, which I've been working on as well, expand,
but I began to get a sense of the possibilities for a web space and
the web based experience.
I also found myself in the position of putting people
back in touch with each other.
The children of mixed Bengoli African American, Bengoli Puerto Rican.
Families who knew each other as children and are now in their 60s and 70s.
Which again has provided a sense of possibility for the web project
as a platform not just to collect stories and images, but to reconstitute
aspects of a community that existed for a brief moment 50 or 60 years ago.
So I'll just take you quickly through some of the aspects of the web
based project which is still very much in process.
Let me see if I can click out of this.
Okay.
[COUGH] So, the web-based part of the project,
what I'm calling the Lost Histories Project,
is centered on the idea of creating a semi-curated, but collectively produced,
and scalable space for the descendants of mixed, to South Asian, African-American,
Puerto Rican Families to share stories, memories, reflections and photographs.
To essentially reveal through their individual and family stories,
a larger history of early South Asian Muslim immigration and settlement.
Of cross-racial and interracial community and collective life-making.
So there are a couple of design imperatives that we started with.
With, and one, I'll click through to enter,
one is the idea that the design should be as simple and straightforward as possible,
also that it be, as I mentioned before, sort of infinitely scalable.
So for example, as you scroll through here, different images slide in
from the side, each oneof whicc Connects to a different family story.
Right?
And so, in terms of scalability, all one needs to do is just keep adding more and
more stories and it can grow as more people come forward with their stories.
Similarly, within each story, there's the capacity for and
a design centered around sort of infinite number of pieces of media.
Where there is images, video and
usually include video from the documentary that maybe did not
make it into the documentary where we can edit slightly longer pieces for this.
It also includes things like personal archives.
So, for example, in the case of one of the women who we've interviewed for
the documentary, Helen Ullah.
She had married a man from Sylhet, in what's now Bangladesh.
And she still had every single document.
Well, in addition to this document that is a list of family members and
villages, so that his family could reconnect to the family back home.
But in addition to that, you have every piece of paper from
the process of Sadulah going from being undocumented to documented.
Including his green card, police kind of document saying that
he had never been involved in a crime, all of this.
So these kinds of These kinds of state archival documents
that now really recontextualize as a family archive that gives us
a sense of what this experience was like at an individual level,
this very fraught process, right.
And I'll just show you very quickly.
One of the other things, as I mentioned, that we are trying to do here is to use
photographs, not as evidence, but as the beginning point.
Not the end point, but a beginning point for further storytelling,
so that people would be able to add and annotate photographs.
And to do so either, we're just building this out, but to do so either by
typing in text saying, this was my uncle, or I remember this event, or whatever.
Or by clicking on this button and actually recording a story in audio that then would
go into kind of a queue, and eventually be clickable from the photograph, itself.
So, again, the idea is to use these as they are a kind of archive.
But they're also a prompt to further storytelling and
the creation of a further, larger archive.
So I'll just finish, I went on way too long, but I'll just finish
with just some of the thoughts, kind of meta thoughts about this.
So in a sense what I'm describing here are three connected archival practices that
are aimed at recovering the histories, as much as possible, of the colonized,
racialized, and criminalized,in this case, Asian immigrants, whose entry into
the country and whose day to day presence within its borders was criminalized.
First, the practice of culling fragments of a subaltern presence
from official state documents, and assembling them into their own archive.
Second, the practice of critically reading these documents for a sense of the lives,
trajectories, and decisions made by these subjects.
And, third, the practice of building a new archive through the images, stories,
memories and ephemera of the colonized, racialized and criminalized.
One that is allowed to exist in its multiplicity and multivocality, and
even in its contradictions.
And, okay, so I'll just finish by saying at the heart of all of these
practices are assertions about what counts as an archive,
what counts as history and, of course, who counts as subjects of history.
[APPLAUSE] Thank you for this wonderful and
beautiful presentation.
All right, thank you much, and thank you to our wonderful panelists, and
to Lisa and to Chris for bringing this together.
So I am not going to even begin to attempt to summarize all that we just heard.
I'm gonna leave that for our Q&A.
But what I think I can do is maybe build upon
a thread that we left off with Vivek's words.
And it's also something that we talked about on Monday.
So a subset of the folks in the room are a part the Mellon Sawyer Seminar, and
we meet every other Monday.
And this Monday we read, hi, Patrick.
This Monday we read a number of pieces by our panelists, as
well as by David Scott on the archaeology of black memory from Small Axe.
And we talked in our session with the fellows,
that included postdocs as well as faculty, largely from Tufts,
about kind of the relationship between the old and new.
And the relationship between official and unofficial, and
many other kind of vague and interesting binaries.
So I'm gonna, [LAUGH] I'm gonna talk a little bit about old and new stuff.
And then open it up for the few questions that came out of that discussion about
your works and about what we heard today.
I'll just talk for five minutes or so.
So we've been thinking in preparing for this panel about old and
new practices of archiving among scholars and writers, also among activists,
artists and those engaged in the histories and legacies of colonialism and slavery.
And at first, this began as a discussion of the really exciting new approaches,
some of which we've heard about today to archival practice, to evidence and
narrative, exemplified by the really brilliant scholarship of today's speakers,
Vince Brown, Elizabeth Dillon and Vivek Bald.
In the course of dialogue with Lisa and Chris about this, this brought up for
me kind of a history of older archival practices, intellectual traditions, and
disciplinary developments that, themselves,
were shaped by the impact of slavery, colonialism and, indeed, segregation.
So I will say that my own work, like Vivek's, is also family history work,
which is probably why I end up thinking about a lot of old ways of collecting,
those boxes in the attic, and that sort of thing.
And it's also work on my own ancestors, so
that brings up questions about objectivity and evidence and so forth, what counts.
I love those questions that you ended with.
So some of the moments that are on my mind whenever I enter, say, state archives,
the more quote, unquote official stuff,
are moments about access that emerge from within the black
intellectual tradition that's at the core of some of our concerns today.
So, for instance, the wonderful, important scholar, JA Rogers,
who worked as a Pullman porter, and turned over his wages to the white
train conductor on the train in order to ask him to enter the library for
him since he was not allowed to enter the library.
They would go city to city, Chicago and other cities, and the white conductor
would look at him like he was crazy, and say, well, you're wasting your wages.
And he'd go in anyway and get the documents that he wanted for him.
Produced a large number of books as a result of that.
John Henrik Clarke, walking up three stories to Arthur Schomburg's office in
search of quote, black books, and what he called the lost pages of our people.
John Hope Franklin, who has recounted over the course of his life, and
recounted often,
the basic logistics in being an African American scholar in the Jim Crow South.
So being seated in an empty room at the Raleigh Archives, being quote,
snuck into segregated archives in Baton Rouge on V-J Day in 1945,
allowing him to do his research secretly while the rest of the town celebrated.
Or not being allowed to use the bathroom at the archives of Duke university,
where he later became a professor.
And yet, it seems to me, access to official or state archives is not for
the most part, or at least for this moment, who knows what happens come next
week [LAUGH] my most pressing daily concern [LAUGH].
[LAUGH] So for good reason today, many of us are much more concerned with questions
that have emerged as a result of, or in the midst of, your own scholarship, and
with the opening up of these kinds of archives in the post- Civil Rights era,
at least in the US.
So questions about archival silences,
which span all three of the works today, about voice and about erasure.
Questions about what counts as evidence, who counts, and
about scholars' relationship to what we study.
So what comes to mind for me are Sterling Stuckey's 1968 article,
Through the Prism of Folklore, when he pioneered the use
of folklore as a window into the quote, inner lives of enslaved Africans.
Or argues for the use of poetry, song, and
movement as historical evidence in some of the works that we read of yours for
Monday, talking about the body as a memory machine.
And also, more recently, the works of,
let's say, the late Leslie Brown, Robin Kelley, Saidiya Hartman,
along with powerful questions raised in Fitz Brown's 2009 article,
which we read for Monday, that urge us to think carefully about what we do when
faced with archival silence, right, or what we perceive to be archival silence.
What do we think about filling that space with, if anything?
So, during Monday's discussion in our own efforts to think about responses to this,
we were thinking about official and unofficial.
And I found myself kind of pushing back on any sort of kind of binary between
official and unofficial largely because of the realm of family history.
So, in thinking about my own work on African American migration,
in my own ancestor's migration, I realized it took a number of
years before I realized all the stories I'd heard, that were oral history stories,
that themselves I kind of argue to make count, were stories about men.
And that the keepers of these stories, at least the spoken ones were largely women,
and these were freedom stories.
These were stories about slavery and freedom.
They were stories about, that our family took pride in, right as quiet and
not so quiet, freedom fighters who escaped lynchings, purchased land, built schools.
And these were things that were so powerful, I'd say, for a large part of
the 20th century that it took a long time to kind of see how completely
the 20th century of respectability and the legacies of the Jim Crow era.
Really had almost entirely erased women's experiences of this particular moment,
including especially experiences of sexual violence.
So, I suppose this brings me to an interest I'd like to put on the table here
which is intercommunal dynamics.
Can we draw out and indeed celebrate kind of community
archival practices as we read for Monday and by the work of David Scott.
He talks about Robert Hill's archive in the UNIA.
Whilem also keeping our eye on intercommunal politics, conflict and
erasure, right.
The layers of intersectionality of that are necessarily part of even the most
imaginative, creative and liberatory archives as we might call them, right?
So, I think of E Francis White's quote,
where she writes the stories that we refuse to tell do matter.
So, to conclude, like all of us I think in this room and my own work with the past,
I'm shaped not only by my training as a professional historian, but
as a human being engaged in collective practices, in family formation,
in storytelling, in curation and in cultural traditions.
And so, I think as people concerned with the past, and as many of us as historians,
it's important to incorporate into any discussion of new practices,
also reconsideration of the old.
The ways in which human beings have consistently collected, archived and
curated behind closed doors, as a matter of survival and creative expression.
The relationship between history and memory.
The relationship between a diversity of individual and collective pasts, and
a vast world of meaning-making that goes beyond written words and text.
So, this picks up on some of what we've read from Monday in terms of
David Scott's work on archiving as generational knowledge, and
what I might think of as archiving as a form of community-building, right?
And collective preservation.
And specifically as historians of African, and as scholars of African diaspora
cross-disciplines, documenting this sort of will to remember.
And its kind of complexity and
also, its power may be one of our most important tasks.
So, I wanna leave with three questions that came out of our discussion on Monday.
And I think pick up on the themes from today.
Number one, what do scholars do?
This came out of, I can't remember who,
but someone in our discussion on Monday said, what do we do when
it appears to be there is no archive or the perception of no archive?
What do you do with that?
Two, how might we think about the relationship between old and
new archival practices knowing that those terms are a bit ambiguous?
What do we think about the relationship between old and
new media as reflected in today's work?
And then three, I was
curious to know what kinds of spaces and intersections have perhaps emerged in each
of your campus communities in relationship to this work that you're doing.
So, have there been institutional shifts necessary or, happy surprises that
resulted through the work that you're doing on your campuses and
are there any kind of lessons learned you might be able to share beyond any one
of our individual institutions.
Chris.
[APPLAUSE] >> Thank you, Kendra.
I just wanted to say a few things and
then, Let's talk and then, we'll have our discussion.
One observation I wanted to make given that
this is a Mellon seminar in the comparative global Humanities.
Is just to try to make a connection between that larger project and
our discussion today from what are three wonderful panelists have contributed.
And I wondered whether in fact these concerns of slavery and
colonialism are central to the innovative work with in
the digital humanities and within history.
Because these processes, i.e., the processes of slavery and
colonialism, are inherently dependent upon logics of subterfuge,
logics that inherently, intrinsically are always masking,
veiling, obscuring, and disavowing their very existence.
And so, is that the reason perhaps, why when historians or
anthropologists or literary scholars turn specifically or
especially to the themes of slavery and colonialism.
We see in that work, the need, the pressing need,
to come up with new kinds of techniques to visualize,
to reveal, to question these deep crypts of history.
So, that's one observation that I have.
Another question that comes from that, however, is, if the study of slavery and
colonialism.
Or in fact, central, could we say, to a project of the comparative
global humanities because they are, when we think of epistemology,
they are in fact, trying to trace the ways that our naturalized and
normal epistemologies are actually based on subterfuge,
or actually based on a kind of logic of artifice.
Whether the digital humanities as we see it being practiced today
in academia is actually moving this agenda forward in general,
or do we see it as perhaps the project of digital humanities
written large as it's being institutionalized,
as it's being practiced, as it's being taken on by institutions.
Or does it, in fact, tend to collude with disavowal?
So, what I mean is what kinds of texts overall, in general, are being digitized?
What kinds of questions overall,
in general, are being asked through the digital humanities?
And furthermore, what kinds of histories Overall are being potentially
sidelined through the very institutionalization of quote, unquote DH?
And for three scholars who are making such important
contributions to digital humanity practice, but more importantly,
to thinking about the central location of the study of slavery and
colonialism to the way we reinvision the humanities.
I wonder what your views are of that, if this is a problem.
And how you operate within the framework of digital humanities and
the humanities given this kind of situation.
So, that's one question.
Another question relates specifically to the digital humanities for me.
And I very much appreciated the way that Elizabeth defined digital humanities for
us as both a practice of translation as well as
a practice of poesis and these going hand in hand.
If we wanted to drill a little bit more,
we could perhaps say that the digital humanities, or
the work of involving digital languages and meta data in our humanities projects,
always requires the interaction with machine language.
It always requires the translation, or the migration, and
the fragmentation of humanistic material into binary code and
then moving from that binary code to new forms of representation.
And so if we just were to focus on that particular operation of this
necessary involvement with the machine and
we were to draw on McCluen's work, his thesis that in fact, and
of course this kind of Marxist, Marxian kind of critique that more and
more human life becomes the organic material that connects machines.
I wonder how we think of the digital humanities in that terms as a way of
thinking critically about our own involvement.
And then finally, I had a question about, not so much a question but
an observation that in all of your work,
the term that came to my mind over and over again was imagination.
What I saw you all doing was in fact fertilizing our imagination,
to allow us to not just return to things in the past that have been understudied,
but to do what in fact literature does, what poetry does.
Which is to give us a material contact,
almost a tactile understanding of life that is distant from us, right?
So this very interesting way in which the digital and the material are in fact so
interwoven in your work, the digital does not signify abstraction.
You're actually pushing us towards materialization, and
I wondered whether you'd see the practices of the digital humanities,
as it involves machine language, as somehow in a spectrum, or
held within a certain set of other forms of practice that historians and
humanists might use increasingly in order to materialize the past,
in order to expand our imagination.
So what are the cognate forms of practice that go along with these practices?
And would you agree that the digital humanities may,
Part of its power is the emphasis on the visual, on the ocular.
But are there other practices that may be cognate to this that in fact may invoke or
evoke other senses, especially the sense of hearing?
And perhaps there are others that may help to make the past material.
So those are my questions.
>> [APPLAUSE] >> There's a lot there,
so where do you wanna start?
>> You have an idea for where you want us to start?
There's a lot there.
>> There is a lot.
Why don't you [INAUDIBLE] about?
There's so much overlap in the three
projects [CROSSTALK] reading for
absences in the archive at and contra.
And let me just start with what things Elizabeth was saying.
I found really wonderful your passionate statement that,
though the archive that structured by colonialism and
enslavement of human people dehumanizes the enslaved, it's also important for you
to say that they're not absent from the archives and that they can be read in it.
And I think Quebec is also saying that as well.
Despite criminalization, racialization,
exclusion of these migrant peddlers between two powerful empires,
there's a way in which the archive does speak their story [INAUDIBLE]
reassemble but in the engage and create community.
And I think with your photography,
you're definitely saying despite the fact that we are using
the British Colonial Archive to find where the battles, where they were.
The rebels were suppressed.
What the mapping does, is actually give us a full view of their ingenuity,
their cunning, their intelligence of their strategy.
Even though that's not identified in the British Colonial Archive itself.
So I'm gonna paraphrase in a way.
You're all using digital humanity's techniques
to read old archives in new ways.
To what extent is the digital use again, Elizabeth's comment,
does the digital contain both promise and peril?
And what, in your view, are those promises and peril?
>> Maybe we can start by tracing out the way I think of history and
show the effects of that on the way I think of the archive and
archival practice and archival reading.
So we often talk of history not as the things that are out there
that happened in the past but
as the relationship between the present and what happened in the past, right?
There is no past to speak of until you have a question about it,
until you have a need to invoke it.
Which makes us participants, right,
in knowledge about the past fundamentally, always.
I think the same thing about the archive, right?
If we even want a singularize it.
Brent Hayes Edwards, who's been doing a lot of work on archives recently,
doesn't even think we should use the term, the archive,
to refer to any particular set of traces left from the past.
Because they're so many and so varied that there's no way to singularize it and
still understand it.
There's no singular logic to the archive.
I would only add to that that because we are part of the archive,
the archive also includes the questions that we ask of the past, right?
And, as I said, the kinds of tools that allow us to see it, right?
And those tools were changing all the time and the imagination that
we use to see those traces to recombine them to remix them in particular ways and
to make arguments or tell stories based on that to kind of make that concrete.
There's a paper that I love about Masai villages in 19th century East Africa.
And there are no traces of these villages because they were built from cow dung,
all right?
So there's not an archive there that one might wanna use to
know what Masai architecture was like.
But recently, the technology exist, has been created to look at small organelles,
right, in grasses called right?
And a is a kind of tiny organelle that can't be seen by the naked eye, but
it can be seen by the microscope and now can be seen through aeography, right?
And they concentrate themselves in grasses.
And because these houses were built out of cow dung,
the organelles are especially concentrated where the cow dung was placed, right?
So now using these new tools,
looking at the we can see the Masai floor plans from the 19th century.
That was not part of the archive.
Twenty years ago, 30 years ago.
It is part of the archive that we can see now.
Again, the archive is living, changing, we're a part of it.
It includes the way we look at it,
what we'd wanna find there, and the tools we have to answer our questions.
I think just generally, for
me, the archive is also part of the historical process that includes us.
I get less frustrated then by the absences and gaps in knowledge that I find there,
because if I encounter an absence, or what did you say, Kendra?
If there's no archive.
>> It was paraphrasing of a question that a student.
[CROSSTALK] >> If I find that there are no archive,
I ask a different question.
I try to approach it a different way.
If the state document doesn't tell me what I want to know, I find
three more documents from the same time period about the same kind of phenomena,
that may, including the same person's name.
Then I've got a new kind of approach to the subject that I'm interested in that
wasn't in any particular archival source or any particular kind of archival source.
If I'm just looking at the admission records or
I'm just looking at immigration records, I get one thing,
then if I look at shipping records, I'm looking at another thing.
Then if I look at arrest records and court records, I find another thing.
I begin to put those together and triangulate, through my imagination, I can
begin to develop a picture of some things that I just could not have seen before.
So that's why I'm usually an optimist when it comes to archival pracgtice.
>> Can I call up, I want to call up a website
>> [INAUDIBLE]
>> After the first set of answers or
responses, there will be time.
We'll have questions, so you can be thinking about your questions.
>> This is a project called the social networks and archival context.
The reason I bring it up is cuz you all ask so many great questions,
but one of the questions about the kind of structure of the archive that Chris asked,
this is a hugely funded project at the University of Virginia.
What they're doing, is that they're bringing together the existing records in
World Cap and the British Library and the Library of Congress and
so forth and then you can drill down into it.
We could go find out that Ezra McDowell, whoever he is,
has 109 related collections where we can find all of
the collections in which he's mentioned, the Library of Congress and so forth.
Then we can find out who else he
is related to, but guess what?
Guess who's in this collection?
>> [LAUGH] >> I mean, look at this.
>> [LAUGH] >> Every time you do this,
it's the same guys, and they've even tried to generate different initial pages and
the makers of this have tried to put women and people of color.
But if you're just using the same old records over again,
you're just putting them on steroids.
>> [LAUGH] >> You're now saying here's the answer to
everything.
It's all network at all now, we can do it faster.
We can find this stuff quicker, but
you're just finding the same old stuff over again.
The challenge is to say, to get into these questions about how to use the digital
not to just reproduce at velocity with the same occlusions that are there before.
There's a huge danger of that happening, a huge danger of that happening.
It is happening, and it's happening all over because the digital humanity is one
of the things, it's like we can do things really fast, we can aggregate things and
we can count things.
But if the things that you're counting and
aggregating are the same old things, you're just getting more of it.
>> I'll just add to that.
This goes back to the question of
no archives and in my case, what
I came to value was the importance of the singular, not as the singular
presence of one particular person at one particular document, and that's all.
Rather than treating that as an anomaly,
thinking about what does this open up into?
In this case, this was particularly important to understand
the place of women, both in South Asia and in United States in these
peddler and shift jumper networks.
For example, one thing connected to this is I
found a lot of marriage documents that show these
intermarriages both in New Orleans and in New York,
but of course, that tells you just that these people were getting married.
Doesn't tell you anything about the tenor of that marriage, whether that was a so
called happy marriage, whether there was violence in that marriage and that's
a question that I found myself being asked a lot, what were these marriages like?
I don't know, that was 100 years ago, so
there are different ways that I tried to get at that.
For example, in the New Orleans case,
which was much more difficult because it was so far back in time,
I'd have a marriage certificate of a Bengali man, African American woman.
Then I have around the same time a census document that shows them living together
with a child and then the next census document,
I find just the woman living with the child.
So that suggests something.
A lot of these men, there are other indications,
for example, there was a man who I found had married an African American
woman in New Orleans, and then later I found that he listed on, I think,
a passport application that his wife in Bengal.
You start to get a sense of we can't
know exactly what was going on in this household, but you start to get a sense.
Another marriage between Soffer Ali and a woman America Santa Cruz,
who was of Cuban origin from New Orleans,
where every census record that came up, there were three or
four more children, so I think she had ten children.
At one level, if you just look at this as this network of peddlers,
her labor in maintaining this household and
actually two of the eldest sons actually joined the network.
So there's this way that she's reproducing
the economy of that network through her sexual and domestic labor.
Just to get back to the singular document, a couple of other women that
came up in the archives, there was There were no South Asian, names of South Asian
women that came up in the US archives that I was looking at with one exception.
And that was another Bengali man who was applying for a passport.
He had naturalized.
And he was applying for a passport to go back to his village
to take care of sort of wrapping up some family business.
And as part of his application to get a passport
he included a letter that was sent by his wife in that village.
That was basically saying your in laws have cut me off,
they're taking all the wealth, all the produce of your lands.
They're gonna take away the lands, there's no one taking care of me.
And here again, this is the single document of south Asian women,
all of the hundreds of different documents I've looked at.
But it's telling, it's saying something very important.
That her statement when taken together with,
in my case, I looked to feminist historians
of immigration, like.
Who have written specifically about the importance of looking at the women
who stayed home in sojourning networks as being not people who were left behind but
people who were part of that same economic network.
Because since those men were cycling back to their villages.
The women were there maintaining the household and
the lands and taking care of livestock.
So that there was actually a place for that person to come back to, right?
So this partly gets to what you're bringing up here.
But also about if you think of the men that
I've described as sort of existing at the margins of the archive, where you have to
pull all these little bits from much larger archives and put them together.
There are always people at the margins of those margins, right?
And that's where these kind of singular documents become really important.
And just to add to that, is that I feel at least in my work,
I always had to look beyond the archive to understand the archive.
>> Mm-hm.
>> Can we pick up on some of these questions.
I think you're asking about political economy and
the political economy of the digital humanities.
Which I think are really important.
One of the things that I think all three of us share is the concern to find
the stories that haven't been told.
To go beyond the conventional stories that are always already there for
us ad nauseam, right, ad infinitum.
Just kind of collecting and digitizing the same material that we already know.
And, again, that's a political imperative, I think, for all of us.
The political imperative for pouring resources into digital scholarship for
forcing the interaction between our scholarly questions and
impulses and machine language I think is really again trying to descale and
downsize the educational workforce.
Much easier to buy machines with fixed costs than to hire people that need health
care that might get sick, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
It's my own perspective that capitalism has always wanted slaves and
as soon as you had emancipation, you had machines to perform the labor of slaves.
And machines did kind of what slaves were meant to do,
which is they became extensions of the will of their owners.
And I do think that, again, we have to fight that by asking
questions that require more labor, of human beings,
require us to use these kinds of modules, these kinds of archives.
To take digital humanity's products and bring them into classrooms and
discuss them, using the old methods, right, to interpret them carefully.
So read them, use them alongside printed documents, right,
as we've always done in class.
And to resist the effort on the part of the administrators to say well
now that we've got the digital module, or the MOOC, we don't need the classroom.
And we need fewer teachers.
I think we're here to say that this stuff requires more interpretation, more
human labor, and more thought and energy than the machine can provide on its own.
So it's, again, forcing those tools and ultimately I think they can be tools,
they don't have to be a logic with its own practical imperatives that we just accept.
Using those tools to fulfill our purposes as scholars,
right, as people who want to seek a certain kind of knowledge.
And for that, we gotta fight.
Nobody's gonna give that to us, right?
>> Mm-hm.
>> Can I ask a question related to that?
How would you connect that set of tensions with, let's say,
the historiography of slavery in the last half century, right?
>> Yeah. >> So or American history,
for that matter.
Say we're in capitalism, right, that the kind of shift,
general shift, towards, let's tell the story of structure,
to let's move towards kind of individual stories and interior lives.
How do you think this set of questions around media and traditional
humanities relate to what kinds of stories we're telling as scholars?
>> Can you talk about singular stories again?
>> As a person who works in the field of early American
studies and early American literature,
there's a common sense of like, well.
You can't read anything written by a Native American because Native Americans
didn't write.
You can't read anything written by an African American
because there just isn't that tradition.
Tradition, that's not the word I wanna use.
But because to be more explicit because enslaved
people were violently prevented from having
access to the technology of literacy and of print.
So how do you- >> The definition of traditions, yeah.
>> Yeah, right, right.
>> [LAUGH] >> But so
one of the things that's interesting digital media.
And for me, because a lot of my work recently has been on performance,
is how do we, when you turn to performance or you turn to the visual,
there's a better archive there, right?
So, there's a whole bunch of, and
I think a lot of the comments are getting to this.
But that other archive enables you to not only tell different stories,
but to think about the media differently.
So one of the, a piece I was working on recently partly
trying to think about the materiality of books.
It was an essay that was sort of prompted
by an 18th century account of a British
captain on the banks of the Ohio being sold
a volume of Shakespeare by a Ohio Indian.
So it's not the white man giving Shakespeare to the Indian but
the Indian giving Shakespeare to the British man.
So I was sort of saying well what do we do with this?
And then it turned out that I really had to think about wampum right?
And how does wampum work?
And wampum is not, it's a kind of text
that's at the intersection of performance and of text And
of tactile, it has tactile, sonic, visual dimensions.
So this sort of gets to your question too, Kris, about what are these aspects.
So I think that one of the possibilities of digital media is that it kind
of cracks open some of the assumptions about what constitutes literacy.
What constitutes textuality, what constitutes ways
in which we can think about how those stories might be told or produced.
>> Questions?
>> Maybe others have questions you'd like to ask.
[INAUDIBLE] >> I
can jump in on other one of something that Kris's questions brought up and so.
Just thinking about the, well two things.
One, your question about machine language, as to follow on that,
is and in a sense this also goes to build on what Vince was saying.
To the importance of librarians, archivists, etc.,
with a particular kind of specialized knowledge about
how to actually interact with the digital archives.
And I think about this in part because in the case of
the research that I've been doing, one of the most
important units of searching for someone is a name, right?
And the names of South Asian men who were traveling at this time as they
appeared in British and US documents were incredibly mangled, right?
And they were mangled at two levels.
One is by the original kind of civil servant, of Britain or
the US who didn't know what this name was that was being spoken to them,
and scratched down, that they thought was that name.
And then the second level and
in my case I was using a lot of, what's it called?
You know, the commercial archive, geneology site?
>> Ancestry. >> Ancestry, so
then there's this level of, especially with Ancestry documents.
Who, the Mormon Church owns Ancestry.
And my assumption is that the process of- >> Family search?
>> Family search?
No, Ancestry is owned by, yeah, by the Mormons.
And so I have this idea that probably the reason why
they've been able to amass all of these documents.
And they're public documents, but Ancestry owns the digital
copies of them and the databases of all the information that was
culled from them that is then used to search, right?
So there's this second level where the Mormon workers who work for
Ancestry.com are then looking at these mangled names that were scratched in
by British and US officials, and then typing them into databases, right?
So then what you end up with is something incredibly mangled and inconsistent.
And there's certain names for example, the name Abdul, right?
Which can appear both in
these databases can appear both as a first name and a last name.
And it's spelled A-B-D-O-O-L, A-B-D-U-L, like you wouldn't believe
actually the number of different spellings of this name, right, or variations.
So then, how do you then search for
that name in a way that you capture all of those spellings,
that you find all of those spellings as they've been put into the archive?
And, there are, and this is I think something that's not taught very much,
but there are wildcard characters, right?
That someone who's a computer science person would know stars, and
dots, and things like that, right?
And so that you could put abd* and get every single name that's
in the record that all those different- >> [INAUDIBLE]
>> Okay, yeah,
you can do it in Ancestry but not a lot of people know it, right?
But these are the kind of things that from the standpoint of marginalized
peoples as they appear in the archives, these are actually
necessary knowledge of machine language, right.
Which, some of it is knowledge that we can have.
But some of it is knowledge that archivists and
technologists and whoever has, right.
So just to build on what you were saying, that this is also part of the argument
for, not for the replacement of people by machines.
>> Just to maybe add very quickly to that before we go to Patrick.
Laura Putnam has a very good article out recently in the American Historical
Review, where she talks about this process of researching in digital archives.
Where she's worried that, I mean, granted that these new digital databases of
sources have facilitated transnational research, first and foremost.
People can kind of span the globe, pulling things from
various archives using keyword searches in a way they just couldn't have done before.
It was far too expensive.
You couldn't go to all these places, you didn't have the time or the money.
But she's worried about missing just that kind of deep,
archival knowledge that Vivek was talking about, which is when you're in an archive,
you learn to kind of read across the archive itself, to read adjacently, right?
The things that are right next to the thing you're looking for,
not just cherry-pick the thing that you already knew you were looking for.
And you learn a whole lot, right, about that time, that place.
And how that source, that record,
emerged as an artifact of the processes at that time and place that you may not
learn when you're scanning across a whole field of digital archives.
So recommend that recent Laura Putnam article to anybody interested in how it is
they kind of new and old practices of reading relate to
each other in this brave new world of digital research.
Patrick?
>> Yes, and then Kris afterwards.
Go ahead.
>> The question that I have is what's more ethical?
>> Can you say your name?
>> Patrick, Patrick Sylvain.
Wondering if that's a good coming from Haiti the dictatorial society,
where, for example, you have personal icon.
And then, two, the issue of family shame.
That you know that there's a large constituent of information, but
because that particular family contributed, let's say,
in the Europe's occupation, they do not want to have those documents out.
>> Sure.
>> So, and then, the other issue is that what do you use then when you,
after a coup d' etat, for example, someone offers you [LAUGH] some documents,
and you know those documents came from a personal life?
What do you do?
>> Yeah. >> Yeah.
>> So there is some- >> I work on the 18th century.
>> [LAUGH] >> There
is a set of ethical questions about.
Making information public,
in Europe there is a law called the right to not be known,
which, so I see a lot of nodding heads.
So you all probably know about this than I do,
but this question of what it means to not be
present on the internet or through records.
But, it's also something that, at the early Caribbean digital archive,
we've been asked questions about.
We're sort of not far enough along to have any answers.
But, a question in Native American archives has to do with
what does it mean to reveal information that possibly
would allow people to take advantage of you.
With knowledge around land claims, or something like that?
So, this is not to say that,
this is only to kind of amplify your question, [LAUGH] rather to answer it.
But that there are real questions about this.
There's also, I have a colleague who's working on
a Native American archive of the Cherokee language.
And non-Cherokee are not allowed to access it.
So that raises questions around open access and
knowledge production and so forth.
That are at the university level, are difficult as well, right?
How is the university contributing to an archive that
is explicitly not going to be made public.
So these are tricky and
questions have a lot of ramifications in different directions.
>> Yvette didn't mention this, but one of the reasons the Mormons began
collecting all this data on people's ancestry.
Is because that they believe that people could be baptized posthumously into
the Mormon church, right?
So they were gathering all of these people so that the Mormon church would grow and
expand by virtue of incorporating the dead.
So maybe we need a human subject trial as kind of ethical program for
historical search going all they way back.
>> [LAUGH] >> If we are going to be invoking
the dead and using them this way.
>> Well, and just to follow what Vince said earlier sort of jokingly about
working on the 18th century.
Those kinds of questions about timing and
about whether there are people alive that would be affected by the release of
a particular piece of information are really important.
In the case of my project, most of the families who
were part of the earlier history it's about four or
five generations removed.
And in the more recent history of,
say, a man who jumped ship in New York in the 1940s.
There is, for example, one child of one of those men
who revealed to me something about the structure of her father's and
mother's involvement in a kind of jumping ship structure, right?
The kind of beginning point of these networks
where men from that region were able to
go somewhere to someone, and then go off in these networks.
And that's something that I still, she has one sibling.
And so, for example,
before I would use that story I would at the very least talk to the other sibling
to see whether she was also okay with telling that story about their parents.
In some of my other work, for example,
a documentary that I did about taxi drivers in the early 1990s.
There were bits of information that people revealed to me about
those kinds of networks in the present day or in the very recent present.
This is the extent to which I would even mention that right?
In a vague way in a group like this.
So part of it is making those calls,
trying to make those calls and trying to be as ethical as possible.
And also, just at the level of, even if it's not just about what
a particular piece of information might mean to one particular person or family.
There's also the question of, and this is something that I've thought about a lot.
Is when undocumented immigrants and Muslims,
Muslim Americans, are two of the most vilified groups in the United States
right now in public discourse.
And so, are there elements of the stories that I'm telling from 50, 60,
100 years ago that would actually be fodder for
anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim people in the present day.
And so, that's something that I have to really think through in especially with
a more public facing project like the website and the documentary.
Just to maybe tie your question with something Kendra asked a bit before,
just say this cuts both ways, right?
To the extent that the history that we're talking about
matters in the present, literally.
So, for example, as we begin to tie together, right?
The links between capitalist accumulation and the history of slavery.
There are a lot of families who wanna protect their family records,
when they find themselves implicated in slavery.
Cuz now they're afraid that there may be some kind of legal liability even perhaps,
right, as the reparations movement picks up steam.
So that closes off certain avenues to archival records,
that we might otherwise have had, right?
So your question is very appropriate,
because people are very concerned how their past is read.
And how they might be implicated in the documents that they posses.
And that, again, shapes the nature of the archive that we have access to.
>> I just wanted to come in on that to say
Anthony Powell has this work called Hearing Secret Harmonies,
in which it's a study of different ways of knowing.
The way the anthropologist knows versus the way that a historian knows.
Versus the way that a novelist or a poet would know.
And the argument is that, in fact, the poet and the novelist can hear best,
can make that presence more accurate.
In fact, that is the more scientific way of knowing the past.
Because you're not restrained by the complexities of law in the present or
the limitations of the archive.
That the humanist becomes a kind of channel for
the past to speak, and I think that's a beautiful kind of reflection.
And it makes me wonder whether the digital humanities.
But it is not just about the digital humanities, it's the work of historians.
May not necessarily have to be about the work of revealing,
which is a very violent word, right?
But it can be the work, perhaps, of evoking, of hearing, of making present
in our new, Elizabeth used that sense of bringing forth presence.
And that then takes the story more into the community of the poet or the artist.
And what does that mean in terms of how we think of evidence and how we use evidence?
>> So the other word I would use is assembling.
Actually, both Vince's project and
Vivek's project do really interesting assembling work,
like putting the text next to the map, next to the photo.
So part of what's at stake is not showing something that hasn't been shown but
putting it in this new arrangement where something comes forth that hadn't been
there before.
>> [INAUDIBLE] >> [INAUDIBLE]
My question's about representation,
each of you present work that has a strong critique
of the official archives that, first of all,
is a political critique flowing from their archive's colonial nature.
But the archives in each of your cases are hostile to the subjects
that you're interested in, do you also project critiques of knowledge?
All lines of what Vince was talking about, in terms of history and how knowledge is
something that's constructed, that histories are ongoing and so on?
So my question for you is about, in your representations,
I'm thinking in particular about Vince's work but that's actually all of you.
There's something about mapping that, first of all,
anybody who's tried to create a map knows that there are big choices that you make,
in terms of what to highlight and what to leave out.
And then secondly, there's something about maps that's very authoritative,
and each of you I think, represent very compelling histories.
And also, each of you represent these cautions to say, but these are partial,
there's a limit on how definitive they can be, and so on, so my question is this.
In his representations, what do you feel are represented really well,
in the histories that you're presenting, what do you struggle with representing?
>> That's a great question, I try always,
in any kind of representation of the past, to discuss upfront,
the virtues and limitations of what I've said and how I've said it.
So with this map I am trying to invoke the authority of maps,
the authority of literalizing, right, the phenomena that I've seen.
By seeing it, I'm hoping that I can reveal something,
to use that violently, is it violent because of veal is young [CROSSTALK]?
I'm sometimes slow, so yeah, we don't wanna veal it.
>> [LAUGH] >> There is something that
you can understand about that process, something else that you can see,
that has been obscured by putting it on a map and
invoking that authoritative genre form, right?
That comes with limitations, and I'd like to be upfront about
the other kinds of things that we don't see, that we may need other practices for.
I think we can turn this into a conversation with Chris's last question as
well, in saying that each kind of representation may have certain
kinds of genre rules that makes it intelligible, recognizable, communicable.
And there is a virtue in history genre rules,
one of the foremost of which is that we prioritize the timeline.
In order to know something that happened in the past, we assume that time
moves forward in an unilinear, non varied metric, always forward.
If things that happened at one point in the past can, and often do affect things
that happen later, but things that happen later don't affect what happened before.
That is both obvious but also unnecessary,
because there are lots of ways of thinking about time, time can be circular,
time can be recursive, time can be imminent, as in God's time, right.
A genre rule for us to oral representation is we are assuming that time is fateful,
that it moves forward, and that's how we can understand a process.
And how a process plays out over time by privileging sequence, again,
that's a folkway, but it's a folkway that turns out to be extremely useful, right.
Cuz I could say,
Barack Obama's not a legitimate president because he was born in Kenya,
in order to answer that question satisfactorily,
it can't just be my coherent reflection on how I feel about Barack Obama.
Based on what I saw, I need to find the birth certificate and
know where in space and time he was actually born to answer that question
satisfactorily, that's what history can do for me.
A poetic description of Barack Obama's heritage
could just as easily be a white nationalist description, as my own.
And so I think history is useful for that, but it doesn't do anything,
those genre rules offer a service and they have their limitations.
>> Sara, [INAUDIBLE] description.
>> Hi, I'm Laura Wood, I'm a librarian, not a historian,
and one of the things I was really struck by is the language,
the terminology that is part of what you all are using,
the archive, as your primary terminology today.
So I was really struck by it because in my training,
in my background, archives are, that's a technical term.
There's a difference between what might be a record,
what might be referred to as evidence, what might be referred to as artifacts.
Other terms that refer to the pieces of that trail, but that the archive,
the process, the practice of archiving is something that
is imposed on that set of records, that set of evidence,
artefacts, whatever other terms you want to use.
So I just wanted to ask if you thought there was any significance that
I'm not catching in your use of the term, the archive,
in a variety of different contexts today.
Both, to refer to things that have been purposely collected and
also things that are simply let potential,
such as scientific record through grass of molecules.
So there's an application at the archive for all of those things, and
that really strikes me, in part because, from my background, and
there are others who are actual archivists in the room.
There is a difference between the potential of the collection and
the actual access to it, or commitment to preserve it.
And that may be partly built into the difference between
the historian who need to work with it and
the librarian of the archivist doing some of that commitment [INAUDIBLE].
>> Sarah.
>> Yeah, I am Sarah [INAUDIBLE] apology and so
as of [INAUDIBLE] historical [INAUDIBLE] conversation,some archive were real.
One of the things that is really striking is that the conversation so
far has been mostly about representation and exposure, revealing or
moving through or representing movement.
But I haven't heard a mention of, maybe I missed it,
of analysis or of argumentation or of theory,
maybe I'm too much .That when we're
talking about Sort of more better just or you were all of a graph presentation,
has to be some kind of arguments that is embedded in that process.
And I know in all of your work that theorizing, making arguments and
analysis is something that is intrinsic to what you all do.
So I'm wondering in this conversation about how media, but
also technologies of as well as exposure are allowing for
new ways of talking about analysis.
Or actually making it harder to talk about analysis and argument?
>> So I have an answer I think that responds to both questions.
>> [LAUGH] >> So one of the things that's been
really exciting about the early Caribbean digital archive is that we've tried
to kind of build it from the ground up and so we've been building an archive, right.
And then we've been trying to figure out what it is that we're building and
what it is that we wanna do, right.
And one of the big issues then is how do you categorize things.
And what's the unit that's being categorized, right.
So, if you're used to looking at the Codex as the thing, and
then the example I gave earlier of an embedded slave narrative.
So let's say we want to call the embedded slave narrative
the archival unit rather than the book itself.
Then we have to establish a whole separate metadata for that unit.
And we've also done some enoding of these texts and
we've tried to develop new kinds of encoding for the text that
have raised these really interesting debates and questions.
So we wanted to encode the names of unknown people,
well unnamed people in the text.
So when the text said there was a slave woman, we've developed a code,
not for a name, but for an anonymous person code, right?
But then we get into these very tricky questions, so.
If we want to encode the identity of a person,
we wanted to say have some sort of a race category
and then we said well, are we interested in race?
Are we interested in nationality?
And if you're thinking about the Caribbean than you have to,
the question of whether it's a creole identity is significant as well.
And then we felt as soon as we started employing those categories we were sort of
imposing categories that we didn't really believe in.
And so, so we ended up using, creating a tag called Ascribed racial identity,
so that we could use the identity that was ascribed by the text and demonstrate that.
And rather than, sort of, translate it into a contemporary term which would then,
sort of, authorize that term in a way that,
and ratify it in certain ways that we didn't want to.
So in any case there's this constant question about
what's emerged as the the excitement of metadata [LAUGH].
Which maybe for librarians doesn't sound strange, but for
me it took me awhile to get my head around that.
The, because this question of how you,
how you categorize things starts to make a huge amount of difference.
So then, as we're building the archive, one of the dangers, then,
is that interest or that excitement that we have had in doing that, that the people
that then use the archive, they don't get that because we've already done it, right?
So it seems to me that one of the values of an archive is actually, or that
we're trying to build into the archive, is asking people to make their own documents
about the materials by curating it and recurating it in the way that they want.
So one of the things that we're doing is allowing people to create their own
collections.
So to say I wanna create a subcollection on the topic of such and
such or I wanna create a subcollection.
And that putting things together is Arguing, right?
And so I think that, That the archive, in a certain way, is an argument.
And then, the question of how you allow people to keep making the argument as
opposed to shoving your argument down their throat.
Within an archive is also a question that we've grappled with and
we're trying to think about in terms of allowing, inviting people to curate and
re-curate their way through what we have there.
>> Okay, thanks Smith, just a little [INAUDIBLE] I guess, for instance,
because it seems to me that sometimes this afternoon,
were using it as a kind of good place to go when things get murky somewhere else?
And just to remember that a lot of violence occurs in the literary spare and
And the literary itself has made an archive.
If you think about the post-colonial development about what those strange
people do over there.
So just to say that.
>> That's great. >> I do think that I would,
I mean, you might find this fanciful, but
I think that the present does affect the past.
I think there's clearly a historical linear timeline,
but part of the power of reading and interpretation is that
the simultaneity of the past [INAUDIBLE] in the present.
>> Yeah.
>> Yeah. >> In a way we understand.
>> As an actual existential matter.
Absolutely.
But the genre rules of history in some ways require us, suggest to us
that in order to analyze how a sequence, how a process unfolds overtime, right?
What we want is inscriptions that are produced as close as possible
to the time and place on the timeline as we can.
Put those together so that we can see, aha, now I know that this guy is coming to
New Orleans at this moment and Charleston at this moment.
And New York at this moment.
And then he's in London in this moment.
And then he's in Dhaka another moment.
I put that on the timeline and I could get a sense of how people are moving around.
And then maybe that'll tell me something about why they're moving around.
This is a historical analysis in a nutshell.
I thought it was a good brilliant demonstration of it.
Why they're moving around, right?
If I don't assume that the timeline matters at all,
then I can't actually perform that analysis,right?
And so what I'm saying is that does certain kinds of useful things for us,
historical thinking, that other kinds of thinking that invoke other temporalities
may not do as well in that particular case, right?
But if I want to think about, you know, your ethical, religious values,
not necessarily need that particular timeline at all.
>> But I think what you're saying is there's so
many different ways to think about time.
>> Yes. >> Some think in millenia,
some think in minutes, some think theologically, so.
>> Yeah, and historians use timelines, of >> [LAUGH]
>> That's all I was saying.
>> [INAUDIBLE] >> [LAUGH]
>> [COUGH]
>> And that is effective for
some purposes. What I tried to do in my book,
which was about the way people relate to the dead, right.
Which obviously invokes all kinds of
temporalities. >> Exactly.
>> Le's say, what happens if we take
that experience of time, which as varied as you suggested, and
then put that on the timeline to see how people's different sense of temporality
when they invoke these relationships Shapes a process over time, right?
So it's what I called it was a materialist history of the supernatural imagination.
So if I'm going to tell a materialist story, which again, fixes time and
space in those ways.
I've got timeline, I've got coordinates.
Then I can invoke all these different kinds of temporalities in that
particular story.
That's not the only story one can tell about death and the dead and
religion, obviously, but it does tell us a materialist story about
change over time and the struggles which provoke certain kinds of changes.
But I think would be harder to do using a more poetic framework.
>> Can I just, this is really, really fascinating and
I'm picking up on a few comments.
Here and around the construction of categories cuz that's something else that
historians are kind of invested in or have been historically.
And I wonder about this new kind of shift towards how the represent history.
Cuz for me whether I'm writing a paragraph for
research, or whether I'm telling a story to my son.
I'm able to The fact that in history you can tell stories allows me to
actively narrate in a way that doesn't reaffy categories, right.
So you're able to say, this person was enslaved from age ten to 30,
but not after age 30 and not before age ten.
And this person was designated in records as black or
as mulatto, but only until this year, after which such and such, right?
So story offers a lot in terms of specificity,
and offers a lot to understanding the past.
So I wonder what you think in terms of digital humanities and mapping and
all these, in terms of what you're talking about?
Are you forced into kind of a rehashing of categories or
are you able to find space within the new media to do that same kind of work?
>> I think that core humanities
in the digital humanities is this work or reframing categories actually.
Because thing about technology is that it
It works on rural based, in rural based ways.
And what the humanities can say is well why did you put that rule there?
Why can't we do it a different way?
And so that kind of thinking is in very large terms,
I think is absolutely vital to our technological future because we need to
question every time that there's a presumptive there's a category.
Every time a category gets naturalized or put into a machine language
then we need to say is that the way we want it to be and how did it get there.
And do we want all of that.
So I think that part of the thinking through
how the categories work is that is the work of the humanities.
>> And I think as you suggested in the way you tell stories to your child,
to denaturalize those categories,
one of the best tools is watching them transform over time, right?
Say it wasn't always like this and
then it became like this and it won't always be like this.
In the future right?
Kind of situate those things in time is to do part of the work of denaturalization.
Very effective. >> So
we wanted to take one last round of questions.
So we can ask a couple of questions and then our panelists can speak to those.
>> Mema, did you have one?
>> No. >> Were
>> History department.
I had a question related to sorta the ethics of accessing archives.
And specifically if you're working in archives,
National Archives of post-colonial nations and the kinds of,
if you're dealing with subjects such as policing for instance.
Which is what I was interested in.
And looking at the transition from the guru to the period.
When you access the accessing from the side, it's very
impossible if there's any privilege they need to be accessed in those archives.
And there's also an expectation built around that access and
how you navigate that even though you don't explicitly saying that I'm
going to do certain things that will help you.
You don't say that.
There's an expectation, and how do you work around that end?
That was just the question that I had.
>> Okay. >> [INAUDIBLE] apology but [INAUDIBLE]
chat. And just to sort of echo some of what was
saying and thinking about national library of Jamaica.
And it seems like a space where you, or any archive, right,
where you just walk in and you can do some work.
But actually, there's a relationship that you
have with the archivist who can tell you why things are missing, right?
I constantly, I work in them we get stories about why certain documents
are missing, who pulled them out and for what reason right?
So even these absences are,
I mean the archivist can be the person to tell you why they are missing often right.
And that you have to establish a particular of relationship in
order to sort of work in particular spaces, but
also to get certain kinds of information from those spaces.
Yeah.
>> I mean, [INAUDIBLE].
>> Let's see if there's any more, because I think this might be our last round.
Yes, please.
>> My name is Tyler Schwab.
In early Christianity, the case of Clarrow's interesting to me.
It was exciting to think about telling her story, not under Edward's his name.
But that made me wonder in what ways we are limited by the fact that her story
is mediated through him.
So beyond that specific instance, then, how do we attention between the fact
that a lot of evidence mediated through elite perspectives while also wanting
to tell stories differently, otherwise we don't have those.
How do we deal with that tension?
>> And I have a questions, it's similar to archives.
But like for example,
if you're perpetually archiving documents that were not in English into English.
There are a lot of things missing.
And when you are collecting those kinds of things,
I think the gaps are gonna widen between the original and the archived.
And especially digital archived, the point is it's more accessible to people, and
people of general public, they're not used to.
As we say, the or extensive explanation and stuff like that.
So if you are around it.
Many of these questions, I think,
underscore what you were saying about the instability of the archive.
That it's not singular, that it's multiple,
that it's constantly changing.
That it changes with human engagement with it.
Evidence.
>> Yeah, specifically regarding this question of access and
how one negotiates with archivists.
I remember doing some research in the Methodist missionary archives in SOAS,
in London.
And I was actually in the Methodist archives and
was looking at their activities in Jamaica in the late 18th century.
But of course a lot of these Methodist missionaries moved around.
This was this was the School of Oriental and African Studies.
They had a great library upstairs and
I wanted to look at some of the missionary history and see what these
people had been doing in Africa and the Orient before they got to Jamaica.
So [COUGH] I went to the archivists and I asked them if I could
go up into the stacks and look at some books that they had there.
And he looked at my letter from my university that said I was
researching the British West Indies.
And he said, but this says you're researching the British West Indies,
and this is the Oriental and African States library.
>> [LAUGH] >> I said, that's easy to explain.
>> [LAUGH] >> A lot of missionaries who were in
the British West Indies were also in the Orient and Africa, so can I go up and
find out what they were doing?
And he looked at me and he said, this is the visual-
>> [LAUGH]
>> [INAUDIBLE]
>> So, yeah that can be a problem.
>> [LAUGH] >> Just add to that in terms of
digital archive and this goes back to what I was saying about
ancestry.com, and that is,
this also gets to the question of what constitutes an archive?
And I'm probably guilty of throwing around the term the archive a bit too much,
and a bit too in not a very well defined way at times.
But part of what I was,
when I mentioned the idea of the archive culled from the archive,
that's what I felt,
the work was in this case because there wasn't a single archive
that you could go to that is the archive of South Asian Muslim peddlers.
>> [LAUGH] >> So, right?
>> [LAUGH] >> That it is.
>> [LAUGH] >> Well, now it's on my computer now,
literally, it is.
But the thing is that I don't own it, right?
And this is part of the problem of accessing the digital side.
Because, like I was saying, those images, which I could liberate and,
for example, one of the groups that I am an academic advisor for
is the South Asian-American digital archive,
which is an incredible project where Summit Malik,
who's a colleague of mine and others, have been collecting.
Because again, there is no single archive of South Asians in the United States.
And so, they've been collecting all of these documents and photographs,
either from other archives or from personal collections, etc.
Some of them, it goes all over the country with a special scanner and setup.
And they'll set up in someone's home for three days and just scan, scan,
scan, right?
But the idea is, it's a public digital archive.
So now, if you are say, a high school student of
South Asian descent growing up in the US, you can actually go to this archive and
find out about a history that you're connected to, right?
And I would love to do the same with these hundreds of documents that I have,
but I can't because of these rights issues, right?
So, that part of the digital side of what I'm doing in
terms of the storytelling and creating a site where members of
these families can actually have admin access to put up,
create their own stories and put up photographs, etc.
Which is the other half of this which hasn't been built yet.
To me that is about creating an archive that didn't exist before and
as something public, right?
That is not, where I'm not gonna have to explain,
where as anyone coming to visit is not gonna have to explain to a gate keeper,
why they should be looking at that website.
Or you won't have to have a subscription of $80 a month to be,
to access that archive.
As imperfect as it always is that still like one of the possibilities of digital
archives is to get around some of those obstacles.
But then, again, it does go back to, Chris I think one of your first questions
about what gets digitized and what does not.
When I was working on this project I was going maybe a third to actual archives and
going through the traditional archival process of finding things in indexes,
sometimes in bound indexes and pulling them up.
And then, two thirds or so was digital archives, and
I think that that ratio is probably gonna change,
it might've already changed, for say a young graduate student right now.
Well, hopefully you all are still going to the physical archives.
But as more and
more of people's archive engagement is an engagement with
a computer screen during running searches, there are less and
less archives certain archives that are gonna be part of the conversation because
they haven't been digitized yet, because there's not money to digitize them or
because they haven't even been collected into an archive, right?
>> And less money to travel to the other- >> And
less money to travel, yeah, less money to travel to the others.
Well, why can't you just go to this site and this site and do your search, right?
>> I didn't want us to get away without directly addressing
the librarian's question.
And it's certainly true that
the term archive has now kind of escaped its traditional meaning as a collection
right in a particular place maintained by particular people for particular purposes.
And now kind of abroad and terrifying the land as the universe of all inscriptions
from the past which might give us, yield some answers to history.
And I think in that context, and now that that has happened,
I tend to like to talk about the archive if I use the term versus the repository.
And I kind of use repository now in the way that we used to use archive.
Just to maintain that distinction between, again, the particular place,
the particular collection and, again,
the universe of inscriptions which one might use to write the history.
>> Yeah, I wanted to respond to the question about the mediated voices.
It is true what you say, and
this is something that literary scholars have worked on a lot.
But the flip side of it is that Bryan Edwards' voice is mediated too.
The notion that the sort of pure,
authorial intent is already a fiction because that voice has
to go to an editor, and a publisher, and a book distributor, and so on and so forth.
So, what Edward says in terms of what he thinks can get published and so
forth, there's already a complex history of mediation there.
And so, to say that the voices of
enslaved people aren't, not that this is what you're saying,
but aren't somehow real because they're mediated is to miss the fact that
any public published voice is already mediated in different ways.
And so, the important thing is to think about how those mediations are working
in all directions, and not a kind of binary between the mediated and
the un-mediated voice.
>> Thank you so much for speaking to us Vince, Ubek and
Elizabeth about the archive and unarchives, and how they're produced,
and how they're read and the communities that they participate in.
And what our callings are as humanists and
historians as we move into new terrain.
So thank you very much.
This was so stimulating, so rich, and beautiful, really,
three beautiful presentations.
Thank you so much.
>> [APPLAUSE]
