Throughout African Diaspora history there have been archives, inviting deep exploration into the unknown, the obscured, and the known. Sometimes hidden in plain sight, including Obeah oaths in the narrative of Tacky’s Rebellion and Jamaica’s Baptist War; juridical, birth, and death records compared against oral histories, historical art, and illustration of colonial encounters that include but are not limited to narratives of race, ethnicity, gender, class, dis/ability, sexuality/ies under an array of micro and macro violent technologies (fear, shame, physical, psychological and psychosocial abuse); and the Colored Conventions Project (1830) or the Early Caribbean Digital Archives (2011).
This panel seeks to explore the idea, presence, and importance of archives among us when all too often our archives were oral and aural, normatively shaped, vanished, or erased.
The paper talks about Ethiopianism as the first recognizable religious movement among Protestant Christians of African descent. Significantly, it was a religious movement which emphasize the idea of social ameliration/racial uplift. The paper will make the case that Ethiopianism originated among free black Christians who were conscious of the ways in which racism among white Christians limited the spread of the ideas and ideals of liberal Christianity among peoples of color. For these Christians, releasing liberal Christianity, and its social ameliorative properties from the fetters of white racism became an evangelical goal, with the understanding that there was an onus upon them, as Ethiopianists, to pursue this goal among peoples of African descent. The concern of the paper is with how Ethiopianism grew from its 18th century North Atlantic origins to become the impetus behind African initiated Christian reform movements in the 20th century Atlantic world.
In her 2008 experimental poetry collection, Zong!, M. NourbeSe Philip untells the “story that cannot be told” of the Middle Passage Zong Massacre, in which over one hundred fifty Africans were thrown overboard to ensure insurance compensation for the ship owners. Philip uses the single archival trace of the massacre, the Gregson vs. Gilbert court case, to assault the language and logic that render Black bodies consumable. Murdering words and their false sense, Philip describes herself as a “sangoma,” or a Zulu physical and spiritual healer. She thus reclaims African diasporic ritual practice, opening to an ancestral voice, Setaey Adamu Boateng, who speaks the stammers of the dead through her onto the page. I connect Philip’s sangoma poetics to what Christina Sharpe calls “Trans*Atlantic” Blackness, a mode of living in the afterlives of slavery in which risk and disruptive possibility inhere in the surplus meanings of Black flesh.
This paper examines both the writings of Ursula de Jesus, (1604-1666), a Black woman born into slavery who lived in the Santa Clara convent (of the order of the Poor Clares) in Lima with her ama (owner) for 28 years as one of hundreds of slaves, as well as the visual literacies she demonstrates through written accounts. Ursula’s freedom was purchased by a nun in 1645, and Ursula became a free religious servant called a donada. I argue her writings and the visual literacies they draw on reveal how multiple paradigms of blood were actively circulating in relation to colonial Peruvian understandings of religion. Blood was at once redemptive in a Christian understanding and potentially limiting when understood through racialized colonial frameworks that associate one’s ‘character’ with their bodily composition through fluids like blood.