Papering Over Slavery: Cuban Passports and the Archives of Mobility
Papering Over Slavery: Cuban Passports and the Archives of Mobility
What can we learn about the histories of slavery and migration despite, or through, the silences and distortions of archival documents? David Sartorius draws on decades of research in Cuba to explore the histories of documents themselves--in particular, the passports that authorized people to come and go from the island during the nineteenth century. Alongside an illegal transatlantic slave that avoided paper trails, an emerging passport system stoked anxieties about who needed or wanted to be documented--anxieties that shaped the meanings of race and gender and that still persist today. Attention to these "documentary histories" foregrounds the epistemological and political stakes of considering mobile subjects, especially the enslaved, as co-creators of the archival record.
David Sartorius teaches in the Department of History at the University of Maryland and is the author of Ever Faithful: Race, Loyalty, and the Ends of Empire in Spanish Cuba.