About This Unit

What survives of most enslaved lives is a line in a ledger, a name in a runaway advertisement, a number in a ship's manifest — records made by the people doing the harm, for the purpose of doing it. This unit asks what scholarship can responsibly do with such fragments. Marisa Fuentes names the method's central discipline: the archive of slavery has a "bias grain," and reading along it — attending to how the document's violence shaped what could be recorded at all — must precede any reading against it. Saidiya Hartman names the method's central temptation and its answer: the archive cannot be made to yield the interior lives it destroyed, but "critical fabulation" — narrative written rigorously at the limit of the evidence, flagged as such — can honor what the record holds only as absence. Between discipline and imagination, the unit teaches learners to read the smallest documents with the largest care.

The unit's second movement follows the fragments outward into diaspora. Tiya Miles reconstructs three generations of Black women's lives from a single surviving object — a cotton sack, packed by an enslaved mother for the daughter being sold away from her, embroidered decades later with their story — demonstrating that things, not only texts, archive love under conditions built to erase it. Brent Hayes Edwards, whose title this unit borrows, shows diaspora itself as a practice: Black internationalism made in translation, correspondence, and print across Paris, Harlem, and the Caribbean — an archive scattered by definition, whose gaps and mistranslations are not failures but the very texture of diasporic connection. The unit closes with the great digital reassemblies — databases of slave voyages, runaway ads, and movement minutes — that put the fragments, and their ethical questions, directly into learners' hands.

Learning Objectives

By the end of this unit, learners will be able to:

• Explain why the archive of slavery is structurally biased — made by enslavers, for enslavement — and what "reading along the bias grain" requires before any recovery work begins.
• Define critical fabulation, distinguish it from both conventional history and fiction, and assess its ethics in a concrete case.
• Analyze a material object or document fragment as an archive: provenance, silences, and the lives it indexes.
• Use a major digital archive of slavery or Black organizing critically: what the database reassembles, what its data structure imposes, and what care its records demand.

Keywords

• Shadow archive
• Critical fabulation
• Diaspora (as practice)
• Fragment / material archive
• Fugitivity
• Reading along the bias grain

Open Educational Resources

• SlaveVoyages (Trans-Atlantic and Intra-American Slave Trade Databases). Explore the database.

Scholarly database (36,000+ documented voyages, with essays and visualizations) · Open access.

The monumental collaborative database documenting the slave trade voyage by voyage — origins, ports, mortality, the names of more than 90,000 Africans recorded in liberated-Africans registers — with introductory essays, animations, and lesson plans. The unit's largest reassembly and its hardest data lesson in one: every row is an atrocity rendered as fields, and the project's own essays model how to hold quantification and mourning together. Learners use it to locate the structural scale behind every fragment the unit reads.

• Colored Conventions Project. Explore the project.

Digital archive and teaching project · Open access.

The award-winning recovery of seven decades of nineteenth-century Black political organizing — the state and national Colored Conventions whose minutes, delegate rolls, and petitions document free Black public life that the standard archive filed under silence. Founded by P. Gabrielle Foreman, the project is also a model of principled digital practice: its memos on naming, data, and descendant communities are assigned alongside the records. The counter-archive to the unit's enslavers' documents: Black people writing themselves into the record, recovered.

• Freedom on the Move (database of fugitive slave advertisements). Explore the database.

Crowdsourced research database · Open access.

A database of tens of thousands of runaway advertisements — notices written by enslavers to recapture people, which inadvertently preserved the most detailed biographical descriptions many enslaved individuals ever received: names, skills, languages, scars, clothing, suspected destinations, loved ones. The unit's purest shadow-archive case: surveillance documents that double as testimony to self-liberation. Scaffolds the unit's practicum case study, where learners read single ads along and against the bias grain.

• "How the Underground Railroad Got Its Name." NPR, February 27, 2024. Listen to the segment.

Radio segment · Open access.

A short segment in which NPR's Juana Summers speaks with journalist Scott Shane, who traced the naming of the Underground Railroad to the writings of Thomas Smallwood, a little-known nineteenth-century Black abolitionist whose satirical newspaper columns put the phrase in print. A compact demonstration of the unit's method at the smallest scale: even a name has an archive, and following its fragments back reattributes the network's most famous term from folk legend to a documented Black author.

Key Scholarship

• Miles, Tiya. All That She Carried: The Journey of Ashley's Sack, a Black Family Keepsake. New York: Random House, 2021. Publisher page.

Book.

From one object — a cotton sack that Rose, an enslaved woman in 1850s South Carolina, packed for her nine-year-old daughter Ashley before sale separated them, embroidered in 1921 by Ashley's granddaughter Ruth with their story — Miles reconstructs three generations of Black women's lives and a method for working where documents fail: reading things, environments, and inherited practices as archives. The sack's embroidered text ends "It be filled with my Love always"; Miles shows what scholarship can responsibly build around ten stitched lines. The unit's most teachable demonstration that the fragment is not the absence of an archive but a different kind of one. (Reads: a single material object against probate and sale records.)

• Hartman, Saidiya. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments: Intimate Histories of Riotous Black Girls, Troublesome Women, and Queer Radicals. New York: W. W. Norton, 2019. Publisher page.

Book.

Hartman's method realized at book length: from sociological surveys, case files, prison records, and tenement photographs — the documents of surveillance — she writes the interior lives of young Black women remaking intimacy and freedom in turn-of-the-century Philadelphia and New York, treating their "waywardness" as social experiment rather than pathology. The book practices the critical fabulation her essay "Venus in Two Acts" theorized: narrative at the evidence's limit, the limit always shown. The unit's exemplar of what the shadow archive can be made to say without being betrayed. (Reads: case files and surveys against their own intent.)

• Cloutier, Jean-Christophe. Shadow Archives: The Lifecycles of African American Literature. New York: Columbia University Press, 2019. Publisher page.

Book.

Cloutier — a literary scholar and former archivist — recasts postwar African American literary history as a history of archiving: with collecting institutions largely closed to Black life, writers such as Claude McKay, Richard Wright, Ann Petry, and Ralph Ellison became their own archivists, and the novel itself served as an alternative site of historical preservation. Drawing on newly recovered manuscripts, including McKay's Amiable with Big Teeth, the book follows literary papers through cycles of repurposing, revision, and fictionalization, and shows how the politics of acquisition shape what counts as literary history. The unit's title concept carried into the literary field: the shadow archive as authors' own practice. (Reads: literary papers and special collections against acquisition histories.)

• Campt, Tina M. Listening to Images. Durham: Duke University Press, 2017. Publisher page.

Book.

Campt takes the most disciplinary images in the diasporic archive — passport photos, ethnographic portraits, convict albums from South Africa to the Caribbean — and proposes listening to them: attending to their "lower frequencies," the quiet refusals and self-possession that survive inside formats designed to classify. Her concept of "stasis" (stillness as charged, not empty) gives learners a practice for the unit's visual fragments. With Edwards, the book also carries the unit's diasporic geography: the shadow archive is transnational, and so are its refusals. (Reads: identification photographs against their bureaucratic purpose.)

• Fuentes, Marisa J. Dispossessed Lives: Enslaved Women, Violence, and the Archive. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2016. Publisher page.

Book.

The unit's methods text. Working from colonial Bridgetown, Barbados — where enslaved women appear in the record almost solely at moments of punishment, sale, and death — Fuentes develops "reading along the bias grain": refusing to treat the enslavers' documents as transparent windows, accounting first for how their violence produced the record's very shape, and only then asking what can be said. Her discipline is the counterweight to fabulation's license; the unit assigns the two together so learners hold both. (Reads: runaway ads, court records, and a brothel-keeper's will.)

• Edwards, Brent Hayes. The Practice of Diaspora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise of Black Internationalism. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003. Publisher page.

Book.

The unit's title source. Edwards reconstructs interwar Black internationalism — Harlem, Paris, the Francophone Caribbean and Africa — through its print culture: little magazines, translations, correspondence, the unglamorous infrastructure through which diaspora was practiced rather than merely felt. His key term, décalage — the gap or stagger that translation never fully closes — reframes the unit's fragments: in diaspora, the missing piece and the mistranslation are not archive failures but the joint-work of connection itself. (Reads: periodicals and correspondence across three languages.)

Case Studies

• Ashley's Sack: An Object Reads Three Generations

Tiya Miles's All That She Carried (2021), with the sack itself and its museum record · Material-archive analysis.

A material-archive analysis in which learners work a single object as an archive: the cotton sack that Rose, an enslaved mother in 1850s South Carolina, packed for the nine-year-old daughter being sold away from her — a dress, pecans, a braid of hair — and that Ashley's granddaughter Ruth embroidered in 1921 with their story. Learners trace the packing, the embroidery as an act of family history-making, the object's survival path into a museum, and what documents Miles could and could not find around it — closing on what the sack records that no ledger could, and what treating an heirloom as an archive risks.

• Reading the Runaway Ad: Along and Against the Grain

Freedom on the Move advertisements, with Fuentes's bias-grain method and Hartman's limit · Primary-source practicum.

A practicum in which each learner selects one fugitive-slave advertisement from Freedom on the Move and produces a two-part reading: first along the bias grain — who wrote this, for what purpose, and how that purpose shaped every recorded detail — then a carefully bounded recovery of what the notice inadvertently preserves: skill, language, kin, chosen destination, the act of flight itself. A closing reflection asks where the recovery reached its evidentiary limit, and whether, with Hartman, anything more could responsibly be written. The unit's method performed on a primary source: learners feel the limit rather than read about it.

Questions for Reflection

1. On Fuentes: "Reading along the bias grain" demands accounting for the record's violence before extracting anything from it. Take one document type — a ledger, an ad, a mugshot, a case file — and describe concretely how its purpose shaped what it recorded. What would a naive reading miss or repeat?
2. On Hartman: Critical fabulation writes at the limit of the evidence and shows the limit. Where is the line between this and historical fiction — and why does Hartman insist the difference matters? Construct one example of a sentence on the right side of the line and one on the wrong side, about the same fragment.
3. On Miles: The sack archives what no institution collected: a mother's love, packed and stitched. What other objects — in museums, in your own family — function this way? Choose one and inventory what it records, how you know, and what is unrecoverable about it.
4. On Edwards: If diaspora is a practice — translation, correspondence, print — then its archive is scattered and staggered by nature. How does that change what "completeness" means for a diasporic collection? Use one of the unit's digital archives as your test case.
5. On the databases: SlaveVoyages renders atrocity as searchable fields; Freedom on the Move crowdsources enslavers' notices. What ethical obligations come with putting such records a click away — for the projects, and for you as a user? Name one design choice you would defend and one you would change.
6. Synthesis across the unit: Fuentes demands discipline: account for the record's violence before extracting anything from it. Hartman licenses imagination: write at the evidence's limit, and show the limit. Take one fragment the unit has put in your hands — a runaway advertisement, a voyage record, a stitched sack, a convention minute — and work it both ways: What does reading along the bias grain establish first? What could critical fabulation responsibly add, and where must it stop? Which discipline was harder to keep, and what does that difficulty teach about why the unit assigns the two together?

Further Readings and Resources

• Sekula, Allan. "The Body and the Archive." October 39 (1986): 3–64. Read the article (DOI).

Journal article.

The source of the unit's title concept. Sekula's study of nineteenth-century photography argues that the honorific portrait and the criminal identification file formed a single system — every respectable portrait taking its meaning from the "shadow archive" of mugshots, medical plates, and ethnographic types against which respectability was defined. The essay grounds the term the unit extends to slavery's records, and gives Campt's listening its historical object: the photograph built to classify.

• Hartman, Saidiya. Lose Your Mother: A Journey Along the Atlantic Slave Route. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2007. Publisher page.

Book.

The first-person predecessor to the unit's method texts: Hartman's journey along the Atlantic slave route in Ghana, where the archive's silence is met not on the page but on the ground — in the forts, in towns that remember the trade differently, in the impossibility of tracing the line back. The book gives autobiographical form to the questions her later work would theorize: what the descendants of the enslaved can and cannot retrieve, and what mourning does where records end.

• Fleetwood, Nicole R. Marking Time: Art in the Age of Mass Incarceration. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2020. Publisher page.

Book.

Fleetwood's study of art made in American prisons — portraits, greeting cards, murals, works produced under scarcity and surveillance — treats the work as an archive of carceral life that official records cannot supply. Her account of "carceral aesthetics" names how confinement shapes what can be made and what can be kept, extending the unit's questions from slavery's records to the present's: who documents the imprisoned, in what medium, and who preserves it. A bridge from the unit's method to the carceral material elsewhere in this project.

• Johnson, Jessica Marie. "Markup Bodies: Black [Life] Studies and Slavery [Death] Studies at the Digital Crossroads." Social Text 36, no. 4 (2018): 57–79. Read the article (DOI).

Journal article.

The critical-digital-humanities reckoning the unit's databases require. Johnson asks what happens when the enslaved become data — when lives that entered the record as property are re-rendered as rows, fields, and visualizations — and surveys the Black digital practices that resist a second commodification. Read alongside SlaveVoyages and Freedom on the Move, the essay turns the unit's tools into objects of the unit's method: the database is itself a document with a bias grain, and its empty fields have histories.

• Sharpe, Christina. In the Wake: On Blackness and Being. Durham: Duke University Press, 2016. Publisher page.

Book.

Sharpe's meditation on Black life lived "in the wake" of slavery — the wake as a ship's track, as mourning, as consciousness — and her account of "wake work": practices of care, annotation, and redaction that tend to Black life inside an anti-Black order. The theoretical companion the unit's methods half-assume: Fuentes's discipline and Hartman's fabulation both labor in the wake Sharpe names. For learners ready for the concentrated theoretical statement.

• The Early Caribbean Digital Archive (Northeastern University). Read the project profile.

Digital archive · Open access.

A digital archive, based at Northeastern University, that gathers early Caribbean texts — travel narratives, natural histories, planters' accounts — and "remixes" them: disaggregating colonial documents to foreground the embedded voices and stories of the enslaved and Indigenous people they contain. Beside the unit's other reassemblies it offers a third model — not new collection or crowdsourced transcription, but the re-editing of the colonial archive itself. The linked profile describes the project and points onward to the archive.

• Bailey, Anne C. The Weeping Time: Memory and the Largest Slave Auction in American History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Publisher page.

Book.

A reconstruction of the largest recorded slave auction in American history — the 1859 sale of more than four hundred people from the Butler plantations, held near Savannah — built from fragments: newspaper accounts, plantation records, weather, and descendant memory. Bailey follows families through the sale and, where the record allows, after it, offering a full worked example of the unit's method at event scale: what fragments can be made to yield about a catastrophe the record barely deigned to describe.