Saturday, January 4, 2025: 5:30 PM-6:30 PM
Trianon Ballroom (New York Hilton, Third Floor)
Session Abstract
The archive was never what its most fervent champions desired it to be. Despite its appearance of stateliness and decorum, much of its inner life betrayed any sense of propriety, good taste, or decency. The noisiness of everyday life intrudes unwanted. The rumblings of kingdoms and dynastic rivalries, imperial conquest, revolution, peasant and slave rebellions, religious conflict—none can be contained or constrained, so unbecoming. For students of slavery as for students of medieval Europe, the archive is punctuated with less than majestic matter. Though loath to admit it, it is a rowdy, boisterous place. It cannot help itself. Here, enslaved people who are not supposed to be “seen,” often portrayed as invisible and silenced, are spectacularly visible. This address pays homage to the spectacular visibility to be found in “paper tracings.” Disregarded by those who left them, these tracings spill out of archival folders and boxes stuffed with the letters, diaries, and papers of slaveholders, merchants, and bankers. Here, unchecked by the expected decorum, enslaved people run away and give themselves revolutionary names like “North Star.” Here, a refugee given the option of working as a domestic servant for a northern white family chose “to do for herself.” I want more, many more documents written by the enslaved. In their absence, I linger in the archives where they are, with “paper tracings” that leave far more than “trace.”
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