Slavery’s Archive in the Premodern World
Slavery’s Archive in the Premodern World
Center for Medieval and Renaissance Studies, UCLA
Friday, May 7, 2021
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Slavery
is often equated with archival lack and erasure, an assumption perhaps
inherited from the study of the Atlantic slave trade but which might not
hold for the premodern world. For one thing, in the medieval
Mediterranean for example, people could slip in and out of the category
of slavery—anyone could become a slave and many slaves were
manumitted. Orlando Patterson’s concept of “social death” and the
corollary idea of archival absence thus may not necessarily apply. If
anything, the history of premodern slavery has been obscured by the
paucity of scholarly analysis rather than archival absence. Moreover,
most scholarly research has focused on literary sources more than
documentary ones. One aim of this workshop, therefore, is to shed light
on the material, visual, and archeological records of slavery. What
objects and documents have survived? Beyond the recovery of facts, what
can we learn from an archive’s materiality?
Paucity of scholarly analysis in Plain English: The slavery records exist. Of course they do. But white historians lacked interest in writing about the numerous records until very recently. WHY?
Let's guess.
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