Between history and its trace: slavery and the Caribbean archive

Abstract

This article engages with the wide‐ranging debate on the ‘archival turn’ by exploring the archive's potential to tell ‘something of the past’. It sets the results of anthropological fieldwork in Martinique on the memory of slavery into dialogue with the theories of Glissant and Ricoeur. The experience of the descendants of participants in a 19th‐century anticolonial uprising in Martinique testifies to a memory bound to the recollections of this primal scene of violence, while demonstrating how access to the archive gives the latter new life, infusing it with the subjectivities that it was meant to suppress.

Voices in a Sea of History: Why Study Language in the Caribbean

“…Beyond the colonialist fictions that Aisha Khan points out underly its role as a “master symbol” of creolization, scholarship on language in the Caribbean presents a labile, unbounded, and fractally spiraling region whose sea—its history—carries its crisscrossing trajectories of encounter across the oceans of the world. The Caribbean has its unifying themes and its contradictions; its archives and collective memories can nonetheless produce “moral economies of suspicion” and internecine antagonism (Chivallon 2016). The region is united by its history of movement, a profusion of linguistic differentiation, and ethnic pluralism, and it is riven by racism, interethnic tensions, economic inequalities, and gender, class, and state violence.…”

‘Edgy’ politics and European anthropology in 2016

“…Reflecting on his own role in these archives, Bell notes how the multiple affordances of the archive have produced internal disputes and fissures that worked against his originally utopian goals (Bell ). Similarly, Christine Chivallon theorises the relation between history and memory through archives on slavery in the Caribbean (Chivallon ), and Elizabeth Edwards shows the utopian affordances of archives at ‘home’ through reflections on British photographic archives (Edwards ). Attention to the decolonial affordances of archives can challenge what we consider material culture and/or an archive, as Fouéré suggests in her account of the film Africa addio as archive (Fouéré ), and De Jong demonstrates in his account of the disciples of Bamba in Senegal, who circumvent official archival understandings of their faith's past through buildings and the cityscape (De Jong ).…”