Morgan, Jennifer L. "Reading resistance in the archive." Throughlines. www.throughlines.org/suite-content/reading-resistance-in-the-archive. [Date accessed].
Reading resistance in the archive
A methodology for finding enslaved women's perspectives in the archive of slavery
Historian Jennifer L. Morgan reads the archive of Atlantic slavery against the grain to recover what its authors worked to bury: the everyday resistance of enslaved women. Drawing on plantation ledgers, colonial infanticide law, and slave owners' own accounts from Jamaica to New York, Morgan shows how enslaved women fought the logic that reduced them to reproductive labor and marketable goods. In doing so, she models the practices of reading the historical record critical to finding the traces of enslaved women's refusal.
Morgan's approach models a skill that reaches well beyond early American history. Learning to read primary sources critically—to notice who gets counted, who gets blamed, and whose humanity the record works to deny—prepares students to interrogate any archive, from the 17th century to the present. For teachers of early modern literature, history, gender studies, and Black studies, Morgan's approach opens direct conversations about power, evidence, reproductive labor, and the resistance that shaped the Black Atlantic. It's a starting point for a question that matters in every classroom: whose stories does the record preserve and whose must we work to hear?
Further learning
Recommended
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