New World: The Impact of Digitization on the Study of Slavery

Abstract

Last year, an interactive animation of the Atlantic slave trade went viral.1 Provocatively titled “The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes,” the interactive map first appeared as part of Slate’s online course “The History of American Slavery,” relying on the voyages cataloged in the Trans-Atlantic Slave Trade Database to visualize the crossing of 15,790 slave ships from Africa to the New World from 1545 to 1860. The visualization is a powerful one. Slate reported that it was the fourth most shared story on its site in 2015 (Hassler). It’s teachable; it travels easily. But beyond the consensus regarding the power and pedagogical usefulness of this animated map, “The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes” raises important questions about the place of such digital projects in the study of slavery itself. Animated maps like “The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes,” alongside a growing number of digital archives, databases, and other digitization projects focused on slavery, are transforming how scholars study both the history and literature of enslavement. For literary scholars, the digitization of this archive offers unprecedented access to new texts whose forms may even change how we understand the literary archive of enslavement itself. Furthermore, while literary studies has historically stuck close to the slave narrative tradition, scholars are finding themselves inundated with new records and documentation that are changing the disciplinary boundaries between literary and historical approaches. This abundance has resulted in more conversation between historians and literary scholars as well as a return to more historicist approaches to African American writing. But it also raises questions about what, precisely, now characterizes the literary history of slavery. In considering the impact of the digitization of slavery in literary studies, this essay reflects on conversations about slavery and the archive in light of the digital turn. It engages in a reading of “The Atlantic Slave Trade in Two Minutes” to consider what this particular visualization makes possible and what it obscures, and it argues that the forms of ephemerality worrying scholars in the digital age have actually proved central to the forms, politics, and transmissions of black writing since the early nineteenth century.

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