This Strange Communion: Slave Testimony and Social Practice in the Afro-Atlantic World

currently under review

This book constellates multilingual archives from the United States, Latin America and the Caribbean, Europe, and Africa to reorient prevailing conceptions of slave testimony. Expanding upon the autobiographical corpus of Anglo-American slave narratives and theories of witnessing delimited by individual memory (e.g. psychoanalysis), it theorizes testimony as a shared, collective endeavor by which the enslaved practiced crucial forms of care, kinship, accountability, and coalition. For enslaved mystics in Brazil, correspondents in Haiti, poets in Cuba, and storytellers in the United States, among others, testimonial expression was indeed a way to forge and foster social bonds amid the violence of enslavement and its afterlives. They did so by gathering together in space, building intellectual and political networks, and imagining radical forms of spiritual union.