Histoire sociale / Social History

IN THE SCHOLARSHIP ON SLAVERY produced by earlier generations of historians, the victims of colonial slavery have traditionally been treated as "objects" of study. There was little concern with uncovering the historical perspectives of the enslaved. More recently, however, there has been a greater commitment to recognizing them as historical agents who made decisions, had feelings, and pushed back against the system of oppression into which they were forcibly inserted. In part, we can explain these earlier historical interpretations as being influenced by the types of primary sources available. The vast majority of historical records relevant to slavery were left by Europeans whose primary focus was its profitability. For this reason, the historical records are overwhelmingly concerned with counting and assessing the value of enslaved African bodies. There are death and birth records; plantation records that make note of their sex, approximate age, and the names given to them under slavery; as well as records of sale that document the monetary value each enslaved person was deemed to be worth. Most of these records were produced for legal and financial reasons: to pay taxes to the French colonial state; to pass on inheritances; or to record the terms and conditions under which enslaved men, women, and children were sold. Of course, the archives also contain state and legal records. Colonial authorities [End Page 9] were very much concerned with creating laws to control the enslaved. As is well established in the literature, the enslaved often escaped their captors, planned revolts, and undermined the objectives of the planter class by either refusing to work or making deliberate decisions to work inefficiently at their forced duties. In the official documents, the enslaved were considered a "masse servile" and "sans humanité." This is made clear as early as 1685 in article 44 of the Code Noir, which articulated plainly that the enslaved were to be considered property.

Given the heavily biased and problematic nature of the historical records, it seems reasonable to question how historians might gain insight into the perspective of, to use the words of Jacques Rancière, the "incomptés"?¹ What methodologies and strategies should they employ to access the subjectivity of the enslaved—a subjectivity that was far beyond the comprehension of the very colonizers who produced the majority of the primary sources upon which historians are so reliant? Because there are very few historical records left by the enslaved, their voices have often been silenced in the historical record.

For a more recent generation of historians, however, traditional historical methodologies and the general absence of documents in the archives that transmit the voice of the enslaved to the present has both frustrated their efforts and made evident the limitations of the discipline. As a result, there has been an increase in calls for historically grounded interdisciplinary analyses of life under slavery and a reorientation of analytical frameworks that prioritize the experiences and perspectives of the enslaved.² With these methodological considerations in mind, historians have more recently attempted to locate the voice of the enslaved and recognize their role as historical agents, which explains, at least in part, the increasing use of the term enslaved rather than slave by historians. It is an attempt to emphasize that systems of slavery were only possible through continued and consistent acts of violence and coercion. A reading of archival documents to locate the enslaved brings historians closer to understanding their perspective even if there will always be voices left unrecovered.

These kinds of disciplinary limitations in history motivated people from colonized spaces to reimagine the past in various creative art forms. In this sphere, subversive interpretations of colonialism and the barbarisms committed under slavery are not bounded...