Takeaways from Race and Reinscription

Jennifer Morgan, 2023

On October 19th, 2023, Jennifer Morgan presented a talk surrounding her recent book, Reckoning with Slavery: Gender, Kinship and Capitalism in the Early Black Atlantic. Not unlike Saidiya Hartman’s “Venus in Two Acts,” she explained the problem of the archive and the omission of thousands of women from modern history, but one would be wrong in saying that this is just a restatement of Hartman’s argument. Morgan’s dignified presentation of kinship and refusal is more of a continuation of where Saidiya left off, asking what’s next. Dr. Morgan is a historian and professor at NYU, which shines through her presentation of knowledge through constructive storytelling, writing, traditional history, and at times art history as well. She addresses her position as a historian in the talk, as well as her journey into the world of art history by researching the background of a certain clock depicted in the painting she used to show an example of a woman of color in luxury. At first, I was weary, questioning what the detailed history of a clock contributes to the topic at hand. However, Morgan proved my doubts wrong when she elegantly turned the static clock into an exploration of the emotions and thoughts that lay behind the woman’s eyes. Her venture across the minute details of many mediums of recorded history shows first-hand how difficult it is to find the types of traces she searches for in the archive, and what might be done to further explore their lives rather than their deaths. 

Morgan’s storytelling is especially effective in engaging listeners while uplifting emotions of real people who lived through what is sometimes fictionalized in history books. It was easy to feel shame and disappointment to think some groups need to be made into real history while other groups have narratives in every other history book, show, or movie. However, I don't think this was her goal, as the stories she told acknowledged women that many of us might not have heard of, but needed to hear. She includes the story of Elizabeth Key as one example of how a woman was expected to grapple with the horrible fact that her body was reduced to a product with a price. Showing these women as more than suffering bodies on slave ships and plantations gives them a history and a humanity that is not seen in the archive. The (at most) few lines Morgan was able to uncover about early Atlantic enslaved women provide a stark comparison to the dozens of biographies one can find on white figures in history with a simple Google search, showing there is something to be said about who is given the freedom of autonomy, but also the freedom to tell their story.

Morgan does not directly give Keys’ own story a voice, but she highlights the voice that she had throughout her lifetime by relaying the story of how she petitioned for her and her family’s freedom. Keys fought against the “baby follows belly” legislation, and concluded that America was not a “place of possibility” for everyone. Following her story, Morgan effectively uses questions like “might she not?” and “could she have?” to reiterate that acting as one’s voice is not always the solution, but rather starting from the beginning, aware of the fine line between narrative and factual history. She questions what Keys herself was thinking, doing, and how much she knew about the larger racialized systems at play. Although Keys herself cannot answer these questions, they provide a background and a depth to Keys and her family apart from their death and roles as pawns in early American racialized capitalism. She further elaborates on this point by arguing, “enslaved women appear…through the form and content of archival documents in the manner in which they lived.” This speaks to the elusive mentions, names, and erasure of many of these women, and intelligently calls out the archive without directly mentioning it. Overall, Morgan exemplifies the work that was started by the earliest black female historians, and interestingly stepped around the line between retelling their stories and highlighting the erasure of women like Venus from the modern archive. Moving forward, one might be interested in hearing more from her research into minute, implicit objects and details of history, and the massive amount of information they might reveal about who was not given a story in words. 

Source: Morgan, Jennifer. “On Race & Reinscription: Writing Enslaved Women into the Early Modern Archive.” Edward L. Surtz S.J. Chair Lecture, 19 Oct. 2023, Loyola University Chicago. Academic Lecture. 

Image Source: Enslaved Women and the History of Quantification | Shrouded in Cloaks of Boringness