Miranda Spieler , Slaves in Paris: Hidden Lives and Fugitive Histories, Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2025. Pp. [xi] + 242. $39.95 (ISBN 9780674986541).
Year: 2025
Type: book-review
Abstract: A current wave of micro-biographies of enslaved individuals in the Francophone world (and beyond) marks a distinct historiographical turn.All of these studies address the historian's dilemma of, on one hand, using the archives produced by enslavers, which inscribe people as property and are suffused with the denigrating attitudes of elites, and, on the other, the near absence of historical documents that record authentic, unmediated voices of the enslaved.Some historians seeking to recover the experiences and subjectivities of enslaved people scour legal records and newspapers for oral testimony, sometimes acknowledging the distorting influence of power on these transcriptions.1 Others-working, for the most part, outside the field of scholars who study the Francophone colonial world-offer nuanced theoretical meditations on how archival silences elide, and indeed reflect, the essential physical and epistemological violence inherent in modern slavery.Still others (myself included) have incorporated speculation-the "perhaps, might have, is it possible that?"toconsider possible motivations and perspectives in their lives.2 Miranda Spieler's Slaves in Paris offers a considered methodological stance to the historian's dilemma, declaring that she will "not speculate about my subjects' thoughts and feelings.Wary of ventriloquism, I leave the task of
Source: Law and History Review
Author: Sue Peabody
Language: English
Subfield: Anthropology
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: bronze
OpenAlex ID: W4417180797
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