However, she encountered “the complete absence of material by enslaved women,” who appeared only through the “archival and physical violence” enacted upon them (144).
She started her research into the lives of enslaved women hoping to find individual voices that could illuminate their worlds from their perspectives.
Rather, she challenges the profession itself in bold, broad strokes. To say that Fuentes’ book is a critique of the colonial archives, however, would be missing the point. The resulting portrayal of “the machinations of archival power” exposes the ways in which colonial power structures pervade the archive and, therefore, historical epistemology itself (1). She applies what she describes as “theoretical approaches to power, the production of text, and constructions of race and gender to the written archive” (6). Unlike Stoler’s focus on archival silences, Fuentes meditates on imbalances within the archival representations of enslaved women in eighteenth-century Bridgetown, Barbados. Fuentes’ new book, Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive is so significant. And yet, try looking for the word “archive” or “archival knowledge” in the index of most books and the result might be surprising.Īmong other things, it’s for this reason that historian Marisa J. Monographs always provide a list of consulted repositories, which for early American history can often read like a top ten greatest hits of national and state archives. Despite the popularity of that book, however, historians still rarely discuss their archival methodology. There is also no shortage of books and articles critical of the construction of colonial archives, perhaps the most famous among them being historian Ann Laura Stoler’s Along the Archival Grain.
Near or far, we need those repositories to craft historical narratives about past worlds. It should go without saying that the historical profession depends on archives.
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