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The Slave Trade as History and Memory: Confrontations of Slaving Voyage Documents and Communal Traditions
Ralph A. Austen
| THE publication
of the Du Bois Institute transatlantic slave trade dataset represents
a major landmark in the kind of historical research that an earlier
generation of scholars would have described without inhibition as
"objective." The value of these documents lies not only
in their scope but also in their provenance. They are the working
records of the very phenomenon we wish to understand, created for
the purpose of managing the immediate business of slave commerce
rather than shaping its image among contemporary or future critics.
Much of this documentation has already been used to produce some
of our best accounts of the slave trade, and there can be little
doubt that future historians will gain immense advantages from the
Du Bois Institute dataset's present expansion, collation, and accessibility. |
1 |
| By
contrast, African and African-American memories (or oral traditions)
of the slave trade are unambiguously subjective. Their very existence
depends on the concerns that subsequent generations bring to the
topic at ever increasing removes from the actual events in question.
The content of these accounts often diverges radically from the
data found in contemporaneous records (as well as from accepted
notions of plausibility), and oral traditions have not, up to now,
provided the basis for much historical research on the slave trade. |
2 |
| Despite—and
in part because of—the vast gap between these two categories
of sources, their confrontation is a necessary element of any attempt
to evaluate the place of the Du Bois project in the broader historiography
of a topic as sensitive as the slave trade. The type of historical
work most closely associated with the Du Bois Institute dataset—the
seemingly neutral effort to establish the quantitative dimensions
of Atlantic slave traffic—has been the subject of widely publicized
controversy ever since the publication of Philip Curtin's pioneering
work. Much of this debate remains intrinsic to the Du Bois Institute
project of establishing comprehensive and reliable slave trade statistics
and methods for analyzing them. But in relating such work to other
systems of knowledge about the past, issues of scholarship inevitably
become enmeshed in rather different discourses of memory and racial
politics. |
3 |
| The
evocation of "memory" may seem like the least likely basis
for resolving such questions. Memory is itself a rather vague term,
covering everything from individual psychology to numerous variants
of collective self-representation through narratives about the past.
The definitions used here are, in the growing, but poorly defined,
field of "history-memory" studies, somewhat arbitrary.1
They fall into three categories that derive from the salient areas
of confrontation in slave trade historiography, particularly with
regard to the genealogy and contents of the DuBois Institute dataset:
memory as empirical historical source, memory as moral consciousness,
and memory as racial politics. |
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