Paper Archipelagos: Writing Movements in Cuban Slave Society

Scholars have argued that the nineteenth-century proliferation of written forms such as travel accounts and passports constituted the literary and legal genres of modern, long-distance, global circulation. This essay will explore what those conventions are presumed to have left out: written accounts and legal documentation of enslaved Africans’ forced and willful movement. No less constitutive of Atlantic modernity, the transatlantic slave trade and the subsequent mobility of Africans and African descendants have certainly left a paper trail. This paper will attempt to relate these seemingly isolated kinds of writing, juxtaposing archival accounts and published travel accounts about movements to and from Cuba during its zenith as a slave society.