Hall, Kim F. "BIPOC lives in the English archives." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/bipoc-lives-in-the-english-archives. [Date accessed].
BIPOC lives in the English archives
Helping students make Black history more accessible online.
This assignment asks you to investigate online databases in search of BIPOC who lived in England between 1500-1700. Imtiaz Habib notes in Black Lives in the English Archives that some of the difficulties he encountered when looking for Black lives were beginning to be somewhat alleviated by increased digitization of catalogs and archives themselves. With the celebrations of the abolition of the British slave trade in 2007 and the later interest in what is known as the Windrush generation, UK scholars and activists have been working for decades to make Black history more accessible online. You will be able to take advantage of their labors to help us think in concrete terms what it meant to live as a person of color in early modern England. The most centralized database is British History Online, but you might come across other local databases or databases devoted to slave trading.
This is an exploratory assignment, which means you will be assessed on the thoughtfulness of your approach and the clarity of your write-up rather than on the specific outcome. Your paper should include answers to the questions marked with an asterisk. Given that some of the questions are about process, I advise you to take notes during or immediately after your search sessions.
Who is the person you found? What can you tell about this person from the document you discovered? What did you want to know that you couldn’t find out/What context did you need for greater understanding? What in the archive or in your search caught your attention? How did the document connect to other things you read or experienced this semester?
What search term/s did you try? What archive did you use? Did you look at other sources besides your original document (for example, a map of early modern London, a scholarly book on the Black presence)?
What problem or challenges did you encounter in your search? (For example, when I was looking for examples of Black history digital archives, the most promising sites had broken or inactive links and it was a big letdown.) Was there a challenge you felt you didn’t overcome? How did that make you feel? Was there an obstacle that surprised you? Why?
Where can the "document" (or record of the document) be found? Is the original archival document available for download? Is there a transcription?
What did you learn from your search? (This might be covered in earlier questions.) What perspective did this exercise give you on Habib's book?
Further learning
Blackness and Shakespeare's sonnets
Shakespeare’s works at large, and early modern literature more broadly, all deal with constructions of race. Shakespeare’s sonnets are especially fruitful for considering how the languages of fairness and darkness are used in nuanced ways to develop particular understandings of race.
Recommended
Othello and Barbary's blues
Justin P. Shaw is interested in how appropriation can mean theft as well as “making something new.” Using a framework of Black music and the history of appropriation of the Blues to shed light on Desdemona’s memory of Barbary’s song in Shakespeare's Othello, Shaw asks the question: where is the line between tribute and theft?
