New Orleans in 1803, by J.L. Bouqueto de Woiseri. Wikimedia Commons.
Ali Moussa Iye, Chief of the History and Memory for Dialogue Section of UNESCO, recently wrote on this forum about the “wall of silence around the [European] slave trade and slavery across the world” and points out that “it is difficult to understand how a tragedy of this scale could be ignored and silenced”. One of the glaring reasons for these silences is the muteness of the archive, and the dearth of evidence produced by the enslaved themselves.
Indeed, in a recent article in The New Yorker about the movie ‘Twelve Years a Slave’, Annette Gordon-Reed posed a question that is familiar to historians:
