Radical Acts: Enslaved Practices of Care and Slavery Archives in 19th Century Brazil and the United States

In the face of the violence of slavery, enslaved people found ways of addressing and alleviating the suffering they and others faced by performing acts of care. This same regime of violence was often perpetuated via the erasure of enslaved people’s voices in formal archives of enslaved people and their descendants’ experiences.¹ Saidiya Hartman developed the device of critical fabulation which uses fiction writing practices, imagination, and counterfactual speculations to challenge the absence of enslaved voices in historical archives.² This article seeks to extend Hartman’s work by offering a new methodological device that I call “critical combination.” Critical combination employs the comparison of archival production and crossing of fragmentary archival evidence to expand Hartman’s method. In doing so, I demonstrate that enslaved practices of care created and maintained connections threatened by the structural violence of slavery, were conditioned by their geographies, and founded in a critical consciousness of oppression without which performing care would not be possible. By examining archives of slavery in the US and Brazil, I use critical combination to address the multifactual—what also happened— and uncover the multiple voices of enslaved people and their descendants to counter the erasures of enslaved perspectives. By using critical combination, this paper finds that archives silenced enslaved people’s experiences due to political and editorial decisions that determined which accounts were deemed “factual” representations of slavery.