Review of Lindsay and Sweet's "Biography and the Black Atlantic." (2013)
Eds. Lisa A. Lindsay and John Wood Sweet, Biography and the Black Atlantic (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013), pgs. 384.
Lisa Lindsay and John Wood Sweet served as editors for a collection of essays surrounding how scholars can discover, write about, and use biography as a means of exploring the Black Atlantic World in the 18th and 19th centuries. The concept of using biography, or perhaps more accurately, microhistory, to understand the contours and deviances of the experiences of African descended peoples in the Atlantic world are not only needed, but essential in order to create a more accurate and truthful narrative of the past.
Divided into twelve chapters and three sections (mobility, self-fashioning, and politics) these essays reflect careful and detailed scholarship that largely avoids over generalizing or mythmaking. Importantly, the authors note that by looking from the bottom up and in different archival locations, large historical narratives look very different. But perhaps most importantly, it demonstrates that scholars can construct stories out of the fragmented archival records that exist across the globe. Rather than rely explicitly on one source base, these authors illustrate how much breadth and depth archival holdings across the globe may offer.
There are several powerful chapters, though each essay offers something important to the study of the Black Atlantic. The first section largely explores the methodology of tackling a biography of an individual in the Black Atlantic, with some narrative included. In Chapter 1 Joseph C. Miller argues for the need for a qualitative assessment of the Black Atlantic world and not only a quantitative one. While numbers of various aspects of slavery can be useful, these far too often are abstracted and lose the humanness that pervaded both slaveholding and enslavement. By examining the stories of individuals, it becomes clear that humans acted in “baffled ways.” No where is this more clear than in the Black Atlantic. Simplistic narratives rarely fit across the entire basin.
Martin Klein in Chapter 2 adds a brief exploration of possible archival methodologies and locations that have often been underutilized in exploring the Black Atlantic. Importantly, he adds a caution to how we approach the narratives of all people. He gives humanness to Black peoples by allowing them to lie, manipulate information, and misdirect readers in their writings. Equiano’s narrative is a case in point. Claiming to be from Africa, the evidence largely suggests that he was in fact born in South Carolina. An intriguing insight from his survey of Africa was noting his surprise that finding in travel narratives most slave traders were “petty (small time) traders.” This meshes well with evidence shown by numerous scholars of the presence and expansiveness of slavery in Africa during the establishment of the Atlantic World.
Sheryl Kroen’s essay was interesting, though her lack of discussion about the genuine Soviet threat and its force in influencing those creating a Robinson Crusoe narrative in 1950s Britain hampered her work. This essay was less strong, and seemed rather to reflect what she accused the academics who founded the Atlantic world scholarship of doing, seeking to stabilize a political order through their writings. Early Atlantic historians sought to aid in the building up of a cross-Atlantic alliance that resulted in NATO. Today, I couldn’t help but ponder how Kroen’s essay reflects what I have seen frequently in the academy; a focus on tearing down longstanding Western institutions, including capitalism, religion, and traditional morality to name a few. I do not say this lightly, but far too often, as illustrated by her writing I have noticed that historians apply a sharp pen to those in the “Western tradition” but also write glowingly of Karl Marx (who benefited off the exploited labor of British factory workers) and the Soviet Union. Kroen’s silence on the Soviets and romanticization of Marxist historians who she frames as coming to the rescue of historical truth I felt tells more about her and her world view, than it does of the history. Truth can come from these historians, but I found her framing problematic.
Chapter 4 is a particularly fascinating essay as Jon Sensbach details his efforts to trace the life of one Moravian woman and her journey across the Atlantic world. One argument that needs to be understood by all historians is the danger of creating a “Black Founding Fathers’ narrative.” Personally, I am not opposed to viewing the Founders with admiration. That being said, what Sensbach is arguing against is a blind hero worship that focuses exclusively on male leaders and frames their actions as perfect. While it takes significantly more work to discover the lives of those outside of the realms of power, Sensbach argues that the colonial archives are “far from tapped out.”
Cassandra Pybus traces Jane Thompson, a formerly enslaved woman out of Virginia and details how she came to important ideas that often are overlooked in broad narratives. Perhaps one of the most important points of this chapter was illustrating the power that a microhistory has in reworking broad narratives.
In Chapter 6 Juaquim Ricardo notes the role of enslaved people in Brazil owning slaves themselves. This essay was careful and fascinating, though I do wish the author had done more to trace African connections to Brazil, as I believe this would help strengthen arguments of creolization in the Atlantic World.
Lloyd Kramer explores a fascinating story of one African American man who was a traveler across Europe and who produced a history of his time on the Continent. His idea of the enslaved determined to make the best out of a bad situation illustrates something that I think too often is forgotten. People, while pushing for freedom, also found joy (or this case riotous pleasure) in life that complicates narratives that frame the entire existence of enslaved people as wretched and miserable. This is not to condone, or to suggest that slavery was not brutal. But, perhaps by allowing the enslaved people to have the complexity of human emotion, we can move one step closer in understanding the worlds of those who were enslaved.
Chapter 8 illustrates the dark underside of the tracing real histories in the Black Atlantic world in the modern academy. Vincent Carretta, who famously questioned the reliability of all of Equiano’s narrative, pushes back on his accusers of being a racist, liar, and bad historian. Tracing his experiences and the process of archival research, his narrative is brimming with accounts of academics attempting to pressure him to lie about what he found, suppress the information, downplay it, or walk away from it entirely. Repeatedly, the reader will find scholars of the Atlantic world unwilling to accept or believe the evidence presented them. Furthermore, the threats of violence and the calls to destroy his career reflect academia’s modern construction. As one who has been cautioned in pushing back on ideas too much in my own career, I find it refreshing to see this in print.
Chapter 9 confronts another incorrect narrative in the story of James Vaughan finding his family based on their tribal marks. The careful primary source documentation does much un-mythmaking, a difficult task, but one that is so essential throughout the historical profession.
Jane Landers details a fascinating narrative of African maroons who aligned with Spain during the early 18th century. This narrative does much to show how politics and military necessity helped in the growth of Spain’s antislavery policies. However, I do find that religion and culture are downplayed too much in explaining Spanish willingness to listen to appeals from enslaved people.
Chapter 11 by Roquilnaldo Ferreira is a well written chronicle of an African Brazilian slave trader in Angola and his efforts to foment a rebellion in Angola in order to bring the colony under the direction of the empire of Brazil, which had recently broke free from Portugal’s control. Truly, fact can be more odd than fiction.
Finally Rebecca Scott and Jean Hebrard detail an important narrative that highlights the complexity of generational memory and importance in influencing the contours of how people of African descent navigated their lives in the Atlantic world.
The afterword by James T. Campbell is a fitting conclusion and one idea of the Black Atlantic being more about “routes” rather then “roots” I think is incorrect. The connections between people and their pasts is so important as they traverse the varied routes of the Atlantic world. One small issue with this volume was the lack of African culture explored throughout its pages. I feel that many of the complexities of the Atlantic world would make more sense with not just narratives of individual adventures, but the cultural world of the Black Atlantic is also better inserted.
Overall, this was a ground breaking and fantastic book. The authors decidedly broke from much of the previous two decades of work on the Black Atlantic and have offered another option in exploring these important narratives. The past scholarship will not need to be cast off, but this new approach offers an exciting and more accurate way, in my opinion, of exploring the “maelstrom” of the Atlantic world.
Robert Swanson