get lost in conventional documentary readings of the archive.

While

they go on to explain how “Memoirs” offers a “rich narrative of

enslavement” (210), the bulk of their analysis is focused on elements

outside of the text: the physical properties of the document, owner

Johnston’s various writings, contextual data about transnational

slave ports, maritime history, and trends in enslaved populations.

The amount of data and forensic information certainly indicates that

the historical archive was not meant to encode the nuances of Hall’s

voice or memories of her experiences.The archive was instead meant

to document the power of the establishment and the data that would

be useful to its perpetuation. So, inevitably, Hall’s perspective and

voice become attenuated and overwhelmed by that data, confirming

that historical findings alone cannot account for the nuanced narration of memory that the text
communicates. If we are interested in

limning the parameters of Hall’s life and psychology, we must consider more imaginative possibilities
than traditional archival analysis

makes manifest.

Because “the chief source of information” about enslaved

Black women in the archive consists primarily of such “archival

fragments” that are often “[c]ryptic and incomplete” (qtd. in Browne

and Sweet 210), increasingly, some historians are reconsidering

these “textual splinters.” In his close analysis of Thomas

Thistlewood’s more than 10,000-page journal of his over 40 years as

an overseer in Jamaica, Trevor Burnard provides glimpses of the nuanced articulations of power by
enslaved women that challenge the

narrative’s detailed representations of the violence that Thistlewood

and other white men enacted against enslaved plantation workers.

Burnard tracks such sexual predation, but his analysis also registers

information about how some enslaved women, including

Thistlewood’s enslaved wife Phibba, refused to submit and on occasion escaped punishment.
Extending this work over the last several

years, historians of the colonial-era Caribbean have encouraged reconsideration of the lives of the
enslaved. In Dispossessed Lives

(2016), Fuentes argues that historians of enslaved peoples must read

“along the bias grain” of the archive and consider the importance of

highlighting the imbricated texture of the voices of the past, impacted by the dynamics of power (7).
Her work builds on that of

other scholars of women’s history who have also forwarded a more

dynamic conception of the archive and the voices within. These new

perspectives facilitate “methodologies for creating new archives,

find[] new meanings by reading documents ‘against the grain,’ [and]

weav[e] together many layers of information to reveal complexities”

(Chaudhuri et al. xiii).

Grounded in such historical analysis of the myriad ways in

which sexual power circulated in the nineteenth-century colonial

The ... archive was

not meant to encode

the nuances of Hall’s

voice or memories of

her experiences. The

archive was instead

meant to document

the power of the

establishment and

the data that would

be useful to its

perpetuation.

6 Reading the “Memoirs of the Life of Florence Hall”

Downloaded from https://academic.oup.com/alh/advance-
article/doi/10.1093/alh/ajaa025/5992443 by Jamia Millia Islamia University user on 22 November
2020

world, Jenny Sharpe focuses on sections of Mary Prince’s narrative

detailing her affiliations with powerful white men (46). These episodes exist in tension with the
narrative’s stated purpose of constructing a sympathetic portrait of a woman completely victimized

by the system of enslavement. For Sharpe, by choosing with whom

she affiliates, Prince articulates a kind of power. Because although

her narrative manifests evidence of how the system constrains her, it

simultaneously conveys how she maneuvers despite these bonds.

Similarly, Burnard’s analysis of Thistlewood’s journal highlights

how a text that includes details of the violent oppression of enslaved

Afro-Caribbean women and men also contains the sanctioned discourses of imperialism and colonial
enslavement, along with resistance to those discourses through documentation of explicit

challenges to those dominant ideologies.