Ana Lucia Araujo‘s Humans in Shackles is a history of transatlantic slavery that decentres the US and English-speaking Caribbean islands, highlights Brazil’s understudied importance and foregrounds lived experience. Masterfully combining familiar sources with archival details that show how enslaved people preserved their cultural practices and resisted dehumanisation, this is an essential contribution to scholarship on slavery, writes Jodie Matthews.
Humans in Shackles: An Atlantic History of Slavery. Ana Lucia Araujo. University of Chicago Press. 2024.
At the close of Toni Morrison’s Beloved, the eponymous revenant representing the deepest traumas of slavery’s violence has finally left the house she haunted. After a while, even her recurring footprints are forgotten: “by and by all trace is gone”. She is not simply forgotten but “disremembered and unaccounted for”. Howard University historian Ana Lucia Araujo’s hybrid trade-academic history of slavery makes specific reference to Beloved, the case of Margaret Garner that inspired it, and other horrific instances of infanticide from the Americas in a section that confronts the “combination of motherhood and slavery” as “haunted by tragedy” (323). This is just one example of the way in which Araujo’s book deliberately remembers and accounts for the individual lives, specific communities and broader cultural, social and economic structures touched, formed or devastated by chattel slavery and the Atlantic slave trade.
Humans in Shackles has four distinct but related aims. First, it aims to decentre the United States and English-speaking Caribbean islands in the history of slavery, arguing that this imbalance neglects, in particular, the place of Brazil in the Atlantic slave trade. This attention to Brazil, where slavery was not abolished until 1888, reveals important archival gaps. For instance, despite the fact that around 5.7 million enslaved people boarded ships on the coast of West Central Africa, and that the majority of these people were transported to Brazil (estimates from the SlaveVoyages website), there are no published first-hand accounts by Africans boarding ships on this part of the coast.
Araujo details the ways in which transatlantic slavery ruptured cultural continuities, such as the denial of dignified burial and the consequent severing of links with ancestors, land and descendants
The book’s second aim sees it follow recent work by historians such as Michael Gomez and Herman Bennett in challenging a scholarly image of Africa “as a mere repository of enslaved labour” (6). Instead, Araujo positions the history, memory and afterlives of slavery in the context of a global African diaspora whose connections to the continent of Africa are what Joseph E. Harris calls “a dynamic, continuous, and complex phenomenon stretching across time, geography, class, and gender” (379). It is an obvious point but one that always bears emphasising in any history of slavery: before men and women were captured as slaves, they were “warriors, farmers, healers, and traders, who spoke a variety of languages, belonged to various lineages, lived in several villages, and worshipped distinct deities” (114). Araujo details the ways in which transatlantic slavery ruptured cultural continuities, such as the denial of dignified burial and the consequent severing of links with ancestors, land and descendants (135). She also, in Chapter 17, considers the complexity and diversity of “Africa’s Homecomings”, from deportations following insurrections to planned migration; from the hostility former slaves faced from local communities, to the returnees who would themselves become actively involved in the slave trade.
It is possible to both detail the effects of the Middle Passage and tell stories of solidarity, resistance, revolt and survival,
Third, as its title suggests, the book labours to retrieve as many human stories from the archives as possible, making sure these are not lost in the (albeit consistently shocking) statistics and going some way to undo the ideological work of “a long chain of violent actions that attempted to transform human beings into things” (92). It does this by returning regularly to the themes of cultural practice and religion. It is possible to both detail the effects of the Middle Passage and tell stories of solidarity, resistance, revolt and survival, such as the singing of disembarking Africans in Salvador, Bahia. As Martha Graham described it in 1821: “they are singing one of their country songs, in a strange land” (147). To affirm one’s humanity through culture is to resist dehumanisation, the book asserts. Enslaved people who came from neighbouring regions in Africa rebuilt identities and created community. Though the section “Shipmates as Family Members” sets up the many ways in which family ties were devastated, it also offers insight into the life-saving human bonds that enslaved people forged. A key challenge in meeting this third aim of the book is that, as Araujo makes clear, of countless enslaved people’s experience there is simply no surviving detail; to return to Beloved, “by and by all trace is gone”. Araujo interprets the exceptions – a glass bottle in a Caribbean grave; an iron knife in Barbados – but these remnants of a person’s time on earth are shadowed by the “disremembered and unaccounted for”.
The book’s final central objective, as the example of infanticide, above, indicates, is to make women’s experience of and resistance to slavery a key part of this history. Araujo pinpoints the involvement of women in some of the narratives with which we might already be familiar. For instance, readers may know of uprisings in various locations, and the author draws careful attention to the 1843 Triunvirato Rebellion in which two Lucumí women, Carlota and Fermina, attacked plantations in Cuba. Araujo notes that bondswomen “actively participated in [other] slave rebellions in a variety of roles, but their presence remained less visible than that of enslaved men” (416). However, she also marks the distinct exploitation suffered by women, such as the enslaved mothers who had lost a baby and who were offered for sale or rent as wet nurses (320).
Humans in Shackles is a work of virtuosic scholarship
There are some passages in the book that are a victim of the work’s geographical ambition; the odd example loses its cultural richness when integrated into a continental vision. For instance, Chapter Seven, ‘Plantation Worlds’, has so much to tell us about Brazil that its shift in focus to North America and the Caribbean seems unnecessary. Nevertheless, Humans in Shackles is a work of virtuosic scholarship. It combines familiar sources, such as published slave narratives, with details from archives, such as evidence of slave owners imposing spouses on their slaves from the records of the Portuguese Inquisition (297). There are examples of crystal-clear synthesis of a bewildering array of primary and secondary sources, such as the summary of different models for explaining the life of Black cultural practices in the Americas (transfer and survival from Africa; creolization; the Atlantic model; and the diaspora model).
Humans in Shackles explores the many sites of slavery such as the African coastal fort, the ship, the market, the plantation, and urban centres. Araujo never allows the reader to forget the horrors of the Middle Passage and all that followed; she is particularly skilled in emphasising that none of the social and cultural compensations of human relationships formed by enslaved people erased their suffering. Nearing 700 pages, with more than 90 of these notes, the book is literally weighty but heavy, too, with the pain of millions of enslaved people. It is also, though, full of life: the eyes of photographed and painted enslaved people look out keenly from its pages. Pinkster celebrations, marriages, and hard-won manumissions call out from the archives. Insurrection, revolution and resistance smoke amongst the typeface.
Note: This review gives the views of the author, not the position of the LSE Review of Books blog, or of the London School of Economics and Political Science.
Main image: Shackles worn by enslaved people transported to Brazil on display at the Museu Afro Brasil, São Paulo, Brazil. Photo by Rodrigo.Argenton on Wikimedia Commons.
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