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Fascinating thread from @agordonreed on the language we use, the word choices we make, when writing the histories of enslaved people. Her example comes from writing the lives of Sally Hemings and her family. @profgabrielle @DainaRameyBerry
A starting point when it come to word choice is an understanding of the terms used by our subjects and those around them. How did enslaved women speak of and about themselves? What sorts of words, categories, and concepts did they rely upon? How did that change over time and why?
That is just a beginning. We write to convey meaning to readers, including other historians - employ terms already in use, with established meaning so as to join that on-going conversation. And sometimes we depart from existing word trends to underscore an interpretive departure.
Our readers include non-specialists. Our word choices also speak to them - and it’s worth considering how some terms ( especially those of a remote past ) might mislead, distract, unsettle or otherwise disrupt a readers overall engagement with our ideas.
A useful example is the term “colored.” 19th c. African Americans debated how to name themselves: African and colored were the two often considered suitable. Still, in my writing I can’t use “colored,” unless it’s a quote - to 21st c. ears the term has a degrading connotation.
The term “slave” itself was ubiquitous in the 19th century, today an analytic shift has taken us from a phrase like “a slave” to “an enslaved person.” This also denotes a political shift in the usage of non-specialists. (I can count on being called out here when I used “slave.”)
And then there was the over-dinner debate I had after a lecture earlier this week. “What precisely do we mean, as legal historians, by enslaved?” There was some disagreement around the table. All to say, how we use troubled words to tell good history is a permanent debate.
And as scholars of slavery, we struggle over which terms to use because we’re trying to have a shared exchange. I want you to understand my words, and I yours, so we can talk across broad swaths of time. (We might use the same terms, but be talking about very different matters.)
I suppose that I’ve been influenced by Jacques Derrida’s insights into how in writing and speaking our dependence upon words and language makes us vulnerable to the traps that are inherent in the use of words. No word or phrase can ably capture what it was to be enslaved.
So thanks again to @profgabrielle for “convening” us - historians of slavery - through this crowd-sourced reflection on writing about enslavement: words, language, and the stakes in the choices we make. Read more here: docs.google.com/document/d/1A4…
I should have said “community-sourced” above. Just learned this from @profgabrielle’s document. Onward!
