Historiography in the Shadows: Diasporas in the Wake of a Digital Revolution

Session Submission Type: Panel

Abstract

“Who wasn’t publishing papers or pamphlets or wasn’t reading them, or was far from the people who did?” Lara Putnam asked her readers in considering how the Digitized Turn impacted illiterate and subaltern social groups. For Putnam, this historiographical shift by the very nature of its archival practices left these groups in the shadow of their published and circulated counterparts. This shadow is most heavy over marginalized populations: slaves and laborers, whose work often anchored the connections across the Atlantic and Caribbean, found in economic and social sources whose output is not so easily read.


Cutting through this shadow, the panel engages this methodological challenge through specific cases within the African and indigenous diasporas of the colonial Caribbean. The use of specific published texts to evaluate the nature of resistance or collaboration with colonial authority often obscures the differences between the authors of such texts and the historical experiences of actors of the everyday. Remedying this reliance, each member of this panel explores narratives of the marginalized with reference to how they challenge or complement the broader stories we tell ourselves of Nuestra América. In these cases, the emphasis on the local and banal attempts to illuminate the tensions between an archive so accessible to historians and the continued difficulties of interpreting the silences that still echo over our historiographies.

Sub Track

• History and Historiography

Session Organizer

• Abraham L Liddell, Vanderbilt University

Chair

• Jane G Landers, Vanderbilt University

Discussant

• Jane G Landers, Vanderbilt University

Individual Presentations

• The 1683 Pirate Attack on Veracruz and African-descended Women - Danielle L Terrazas Williams, Oberlin College

• Belief and Relief on the Seas: Building Hospitals in the Ports of Mexico - Marley-Vincent Lindsey

• Declared Invalid: Disability, Medical History, and Slavery’s Legal Archive - Brandi M Waters, Yale University

• Colonial Trajectories: Africans and Afro-descendants in the Atlantic - Abraham L Liddell, Vanderbilt University