Speaking of Suffering: Legal Testimony and the Interior Lives of Enslaved People in Colonial New Granada

This paper explores the potential of legal testimony to archive black interior life under slavery. It examines court cases from colonial New Granada (Colombia), and juxtaposes Afrodescendants’ efforts to escape slavery through legal manumission and attempted suicide. Slaves’ individual experiences shaped their subjectivity, goals, and strategies for holding colonial institutions accountable for “the gratuitous violence that structures black being” (Sharpe, 2015). Through their legal testimony, they rejected the value system imposed on them, one that characterized their attempts to survive slavery –or not –as pathology or deviance indicative of their inferiority. Their testimonies made their suffering known, by detailing the impact of bondage on their physical and mental health, and countering the notion that their personhood existed solely for their owners’ consumption. Ultimately, the paper demonstrates the potential in legal testimony to reveal aspects of slaves’ interior lives that often go undocumented. It also highlights the ways that colonial authorities worked to render slaves’ inner lives inconsequential. In their testimonies, often mere fragments of the surviving documentation, Afrodescendants articulated their own notions of selfhood, dignity, and the kind of life worth living.