Against Recovery?: Slavery, Freedom, and the Archive
A two-day conference at New York University, November 30 – December 1, 2012
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About This Conference
Against Recovery?: Slavery, Freedom, and the Archive is an interdisciplinary conference that aims to foster discussion and debate about how emerging methods and archival practices in the study of slavery and freedom can generate new ideas about black political narratives in the Americas. For decades, a lack of evidence about enslaved and free black lives has presented an overwhelming challenge to historians, while simultaneously rendering slavery studies an exceptionally dynamic field. A new generation of scholars has probed the limits of history writing, adopting creative reading practices to make suppositions about the everyday lives, politics, and interior worlds of enslaved and free people. We bring together scholars whose work asks what happens if we do not look to the archive as merely a space of recovery and vindication, but as one in which we can glimpse the multiple ways our subjects might have fashioned blackness and imagined futures that do not sit easily with more common historical narratives of progress and