Whose Emotions?

ABSTRACT This article is intended both as a methodological intervention and as a provocation. It calls on us to think very carefully about how, why and (ultimately) if we should do this work of combining the history of slavery and the history of emotions. There is a danger that, without thinking through the ethics of researching and writing about the intimate, inner lives of the enslaved, the field will replicate the extractive nature of transatlantic slavery and contribute to the perpetuation of the very same emotional standards that Black people were subjected to under slavery. Thinking alongside Black Studies scholars and Black feminist theory, this article explores the following questions: whose emotions are we talking about and given the extractive nature of transatlantic slavery, how can we avoid this field perpetuating the emotional standards the regime created? It argues that considering the emotions of researchers and descendants of the enslaved is vital, as is careful consideration of the ethics and limits of the historian’s work.


Introduction
In late January 2022, I saw a Call for Papers (CfP) for a workshop titled 'Slavery and Emotions in the Atlantic World' while scrolling through Twitter.Thinking back to my first reading of the event description, unease, anger, and anxiety swirled around.My emotional response felt at odds with the description that exploring slavery through the lens of emotion was an 'exciting avenue of inquiry'. 1My feeling of unease stayed with me, so much so that I submitted a proposal two months later, having just got off an overnight flight from a research trip in Jamaica.Reflecting now, my emotions stemmed from the central questions I address in this article: in the developing field of slavery and emotions, whose emotions are we referring to?Whose emotions matter?And given the extractive nature of transatlantic slavery, how can we avoid this field replicating aspects of that institution, particularly the extraction from enslaved people for personal gain?
When the CfP discussed emotions, it seemed to be referring to the emotions of people in the past, of people in the archivethe enslaved and their enslavers.The text highlighted that it was 'almost impossible to read testimony left by the enslaved, or sources produced by enslavers, without encountering mentions of acute feelings'. 2However, the CfP stopped short of mentioning the emotions of the researchers who were encountering those documents in the archive.In the final prompt question, there was perhaps a nod to the contemporary resonance that Atlantic slavery still has: 'Does the communication of research about enslaved people's emotions require different forms of writing and/or dissemination?.' 3 But nothing explicit about the relationship descendants may have to the research.Indeed, the vast majority of the papers at the conference were in this vein: they focused on the emotions of people in the past and the various different methodologies and theories that could be employed to make the archive speak.Weaving together these two strands, in her keynote Sasha Turner shared her experience of using Thomas Thistlewood's diaries to reinterpret the life of Abba, an enslaved mother in eighteenth-century Jamaica.Turner explored how this archival work was a deeply emotional experience that affected her as a scholar, mother and Black woman. 4urner's keynote emphasized a problem that struck me as vital to address as the field began to take shape: the study of slavery and emotion surely could not be confined solely to the consideration of the emotions of those in the past.To be a meaningful field, it should also include study of the emotions of the people turning the past into history and the emotions of the living descendants of the enslaved.The importance of this became particularly clear to me on a recent trip to Jamaica.I was there with a group of other early career British researchers, hosted by the University of the West Indies, Mona.Many of the group had Jamaican heritage, and a couple of the researchers had the surnames of the men who had held their ancestors in slavery.This was a trip full of emotion, and these emotions were not solely confined to the past.For descendants, myself included, the emotion of slavery is often very present, particularly for those who hold a dual position of descendant and researcher.Thinking alongside Saidiya Hartman, who sees one of slavery's afterlives as being how Black people inhabit historical time as a 'sense of temporal entanglement, where the past, the present and the future, are not discrete and cut off from one another, but rather that we live the simultaneity of that entanglement'. 5 My experiences of being a historian with Black Caribbean ancestry tally with her observation that this simultaneity of entanglement is 'almost common sense for black folk'. 6While in the Jamaican National Archives in Spanish Town, I experienced a strong sense of revulsion not only at the system of slavery but at the norms of archival work.My research focuses on mahogany and, on that day, I was looking at inventories for pieces of mahogany furniture nestled among the dead's possessions.While scanning the lists of silverware, books and tables, I was faced with the names of enslaved people with their monetary value listed.In that moment it felt obscene to allow my eyes to rush past these people, people's loved ones and ancestors, disregarding them in the hunt for a mahogany chest of draws or tea table.Yet that is what I felt the discipline was compelling me to do.I was supposed to be finding evidence to support my argument about the date of popular ownership of mahogany in Jamaica, not dwelling on the life of Bella (valued at £60) and her child, Cynthia (valued at £5) or the experiences of a man described as old and wheezy.I felt those people there with me in the archive, sitting with them and honouring their lives felt much more important than finding wardrobes.
During that trip to Jamaica, the group's discussions often turned to how much of the research about slavery, particularly British slavery, was not written by Black scholars, how extractive this research can be and the seeming rush among scholars, post 2020, to conduct (or be seen to be conducting) research on slavery, its legacies and race.Beyond the trip, my experiences as a mixed-Black Briton have driven me to argue that it is imperative for the field to engage with the emotions of descendants outside of those who hold that privileged dual role of researcher and descendant.When researchers are studying transatlantic slavery, we are studying an institution that 'established a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone'. 7We are working with a past that, in the words of Christina Sharpe 'is not past'. 8Consequently, the question I am posingwith the emotions of the people in the past, of the descendants of the enslaved, and of the researchers in mindis: how do we avoid replicating the extractive nature of transatlantic slavery and perpetuating the emotional standards the regime created?I turn first to explaining what I mean by that question, before considering why it matters, and conclude by offering some tentative answers.

Replicating the Extractive Nature of Transatlantic Slavery
What does it mean to replicate the extractive nature of transatlantic slavery?Wherever one looks, one finds extraction.The extraction of men, women and children from their homes, families, and the African continent; of their knowledge and labour once the enslaved arrived in the Americas; of land from Indigenous peoples; of natural resources and the soil's fertility; of the cash crops grown by enslaved workers.We see these multiple extractions visually represented in the image used for the Call for Papers on the Royal Historical Society's website: 'Progress of Cotton: #1 Cotton Plantation' by James Richard Barfoot. 9 James Richard Barfoot (1794-1863), Progress of Cotton: #1 -Cotton Plantation, 1840.Mabel Brady Garvan Collection, Yale University Art Gallery, New Haven, CT. Public domain.
In this, the first lithograph of the series, the literal extraction by enslaved people of cotton from the plant is foregrounded.In 'Black Bodies, White Gold' Anna Arabindan-Kesson's emphasizes the human intervention required to create this idealized scene of pastoral abundance. 10The rest of the lithographs in Barfoot's series of twelve depict white workers manipulating the cotton, turning it from raw material to prized refined cotton fabric, ready for consumption.
In contrast, the extractive nature of historical research may not be so immediately obvious.Archival research for historians is 'the bread and butter of their professional existence' and their chief method of data collection, as the laboratory experiment is for the scientist or fieldwork for the anthropologist. 11A simple definition of archival work positions it as 'a type of research which involves seeking out and extracting evidence from archival records'. 12emphasis my own] Many of us will recall being told as graduate students that the only source of legitimacy for knowledge claims about the past was the archive and it was simply a case of putting in enough time to extricate the meaning from them.Stephanie Smallwood shows how the 'quantitative turn' in slavery studies has reinforced this idea of 'archival abundance' and researcher as discoverer-detective of 'self-evident facts' that once revealed could speak for themselves. 13This extractive nature of archival work has been noticed within other disciplines, such as anthropology, particularly when concerned with the colonial archive. 14In the field of slavery and emotions, archival work involves extensive use of source material and attempts to extract from it the emotional and inner lives of the enslaved.In this sense, as historians, to create our papers, books, careers, we are taking from the dead, from enslaved people who have already had so much taken from them.Katherine McKittrick reminds us that the academy is no stranger to this modus operandi: 'The academy needs the figure of the black: we are the analytical sites, the data, the experiment … through which so much scholarship moves.' 15 Here there are striking parallels with Barfoot's 'Progress of Cotton' series.Creating scholarship within the field will, in many cases, begin with extracting raw material from the archives, material that is intrinsically linked with the stolen labour of enslaved people.That archival material will be gradually reworked, refashioned and 'refined', primarily by white scholars, to create scholarship for consumption, mainly by white scholars. 16Without the enslaved, there would be no field.Yet, entering the slavery archive to extract information is not a neutral act.It is one that should be done with caution, care and a practice of accountability.
In her ground-breaking 2008 article, 'Venus in Two Acts', Saidiya Hartman asks, 'How does one revisit the scene of subjection without replicating the grammar of violence?' 17 Hartman recognized that when we use the slavery archive, the source material is permeated with violence: the ledger, the report about the response to an uprising, an inventory.Existing within a violent system, a perpetual state of war, enslaved people almost exclusively generated an archival record when meeting violence: 'the stories that exist are not about them, but rather about the violence, excess, mendacity, and reason that seized hold of their lives, transformed them into commodities and corpses, and identified them with names tossed-off as insults and crass jokes.' 18 For Hartman, to use the slavery archive 'is to enter a mortuary' that risks re-subjecting the dead to violence, to the possibility of again rendering the enslaved as subjects.McKittrick emphasizes that too often Black people are objectified and serve as 'academic data' sought out to 'provide authentic knowledge about oppression'. 19Through her work we are reminded that if we begin with 'black dehumanization and/or social death and accompanying methods of proving abjection or saving the objectified figure', then any 'burst of rebellion against that assigned place is almost (not totally) obliterated'. 20onsequently, it is of vital importance to consider to what end we do this work; do the possibilities outweigh the dangers?Smallwood picks up this thread in 'The Politics of the Archive and History's Accountability to the Enslaved'.Here, Smallwood asks: 'What do we owe to those who already had so much taken from them?' Smallwood's conception of being accountable to the enslaved is exploring 'the counter-history the archive tells only reluctantly'.
For Smallwood, conducting research in the Royal African Company collections in the National Archives at Kew meant looking at the 'supplementary words placed on the margin, outside the ledger's lines' and opportunities to counter 'the artifice of the story the archive wanted to tell'. 21Many articles in this special issue have employed these methodologies, paying close attention to the margins and crossings out, seeking an understanding of the emotions and emotional standards of the time.Historians in the field are accomplished at reading documents written by enslavers and colonial officials against the grain, 'struggling against the assumptions [and] perspectives' that structure the sources in an attempt to challenge the story they wanted to tell. 22owever, in the field of slavery and emotions, meaningful accountability pushes us further than to seek to highlight the fictions of the archive and tell stories that the archive wishes to keep hidden.

Perpetuating the Emotional Standards the Regime Created
As a field, the history of emotions 'studies the emotions that were felt and expressed in the past; it looks at what has changed and what ties together their past and present'. 23While Rosenwein and Cristiani recognize that historians have always talked about emotions, they pinpoint Peter and Carol Stearns work in the 1980s as the foundation of the field. 24The Stearnses proposed the concept of 'emotionology' to counter the idea of basic emotions, which scholars had previously defined as biological and argued did not change significantly over time. 25Using the term emotionology, they instead urged historians to explore the 'collective emotional standards of a society', how society thinks about emotions and their expression. 26As emotionology emphasized the socially constructed, accepted standards of emotional expression, the Stearnes argued that emotions were not static and could be deciphered through an analysis of textual sources. 27Since the 1980s, the number of historians studying emotions has exploded, as has the institutional support for such scholarship. 28hile on the surface it appears that 'studies are only recently beginning to emerge that explore slavery through the lens of emotion', there is something vital in not erasing the contributions of Black people with personal experience of enslavement and emotions in the Atlantic world. 29McKitterick reminds us to avoid the tendency for Black people to be objectified and seen 'only and primarily as an analytical site' rather than as generators of methodological or intellectual frames. 30Black people have consistently fused their articulation of their experiences of enslavement with the discussion of emotion.Often cited as the first Anglophone autobiography by an enslaved or formerly enslaved person of African descent (and a model for later works) 'A narrative of the most remarkable particulars in the life of James Albert Ukawsaw Gronniosaw, an African prince, as related by himself' is a highly emotional text. 31With repeat mentions of fear, despair and joy, Gronniosaw recounts his journey from north-eastern Nigeria to Barbados, New York and England.While different to later autobiographies (often described as 'slave narratives') in that it was written as a redemption story rather than a critique of the institution of slavery or inhumane treatment, it is notable that this foundational text is steeped in emotion. 32With later works, particularly by Olaudah Equiano and by Mary Prince, we see formerly enslaved people writing about how they emotionally experienced the regime.It is outside the scope of this article to explore in depth how writers such as Equiano and Prince experienced and wrote about emotional worlds, but what is relevant is that these early Black writers, particularly Prince, explored the emotional worlds of the enslaved people close to her and how emotional conventions functioned. 33y introduction to the field of slavery and emotions was through the work of conference organizer, Beth Wilson.Her 2021 article '"I Ain' Mad Now and I Know Taint No Use to Lie": Honesty, Anger, and Emotional Resistance in Formerly Enslaved Women's 1930s' Testimony' uses Works Progress Administration interviews to consider how three women spoke about enslavement and responded to the emotional regime they existed within. 34In keeping with much of the field, Wilson draws on theory, in this case the concept of emotionology, to help analyse the women's testimony, recognizing that 'white society placed explicit restrictions on Black Americans' emotional expressions such as anger, which was a practice that developed during slavery as part of an interlocking web of constraints and control mechanisms that enslavers placed on enslaved people.' 35 Wilson argued that the three women chose the rare path to transgress the emotional standards that existed in Jim Crow America and undertook 'a form of "emotional resistance"'. 36hen reading Wilson's work, I saw deep parallels with my own experience as a PhD student.This is not to say that I see my experience of being a mixed-race Black woman in the academy as analogous to living in the time of racial slavery. 37However, one of the legacies of slavery in Britain is the afterlife of the emotional regime that was first constructed in the plantation societies of the Americas and spread across the world.Thinking with Sharpe, it became clear to me that I am working in the wake of the emotional regime that was created during slavery.Unlike Margrett Nickerson, a 90-year-old formerly enslaved woman speaking in 1936 -I am mad now.Yet, on a day-to-day basis, it feels important to lie about the existence and extent of the anger I experience while working in the academy. 38 the Academic Plantation I am far from alone in this.Many early career Black scholars, particularly women, have expressed similar sentiments. 39The hostile environment Black scholars face in the academy is well documented. 40Nadena Doharty makes the explicit link between slavery and Black female academic's emotional experiences in her 2020 article, 'The 'angry Black woman' as intellectual bondage: being strategically emotional on the academic plantation', while considering the structure within which Black female researchers' emotionality is able to exist. 41Drawing on Yancy's concept of the White Gaze, Doharty argues that within academia (and society as a whole) whiteness 'underpins emotionality, the type and range of emotions one might possess, who gets to be "emotional" and, the "spaces" permissible for their expression'. 42n academic writing, we have been conditioned to not talk about our emotions, even when those emotions are incredibly strong and fundamentally shape our academic practice. 43Breaking these conventions runs the risk of our research being dismissed and derogatorily labelled poor quality 'mesearch'. 44For some in the field, if we are to do history 'with integrity', we must separate out the past from the present and leave our identities and emotions behind. 45My experience of trying to write about the emotions that have arisen while conducting my research about transatlantic slavery and its legacies has led to my work being criticized as journalistic, too focused on the personal and lacking in both substance and academic rigour.Considering this feedback alongside Yancy, who posits that Black women 'engaging with their self-defined emotions in race research induces "White fear"' and constitutes a 'threat to White power', the response I received could have been motivated both by ignorance of the long lineage of Black scholars theorizing from lived experience, and from fear that my lived experience would be challenging in some way. 46et, speak to any scholar of transatlantic slavery, particularly those in the field of slavery and emotions, and I would wager they have felt deep emotion while conducting research in the archive.For many years, the discipline has recognized that the present, and the historian's relationship to it, shapes how we interpret the past and construct history. 47The emotions of the enslaved and their enslavers are rarely, if ever, simple facts there for the researcher to discover in the archive; their emotions are mediated, or ascribed, through the researcher.In particular, reading against the grain relies heavily on the historian's interpretation to see beyond 'the artifice of the story the archive wanted to tell'. 48Emotion will play into that interpretation so should we not be transparent about it?To neglect or refuse to do so goes against a practice of accountability to the enslaved whose lives are the basis of the research.We take from them, without bringing our whole selves to the practice.Moreover, the silencing of emotional reactions to the source material encountered in the archive has unequal impacts on scholars of colour.My experience is that there is very patchy recognition from white academics of the emotional toll that doing research relating to race and slavery has on Black scholars.The policing and silencing of emotional expression in academic writing has direct links to the emotional standards of Atlantic slavery.

Existing in the Wake of the Emotional Regime Slavery Created
When working on my paper for the conference I had several crises of confidence.The most significant led me to question whether the paper, and the intervention, mattered.Surely it was a narrow and academic exercise to argue that we should consider the emotions of researchers and descendants when writing about slavery?How was this intervention going to help anyone?Perhaps I should just let people enjoy their conference.But, in the back of my mind, were Hartman's words, an exquisitely written section of Lose Your Mother that shapes all the work that I do: I wanted to engage the past, knowing that its perils and dangers still threatened and that even now lives hung in the balance.Slavery had established a measure of man and a ranking of life and worth that has yet to be undone … black lives are still imperiled and devalued by a racial calculus and a political arithmetic that were entrenched centuries ago.This is the afterlife of slaveryskewed life chances, limited access to health and education, premature death, incarceration, and impoverishment.I, too, am the afterlife of slavery.
It became clear to me that part of that 'racial calculus' was the emotional standards that slavery created and that we are still living in the wake of.Consequently, it felt vital that when the developing field of slavery and emotions engaged the past, it did in full recognition that Black lives, even now, hung in the balance.Drawing on my life experience as a Black woman and former high school teacher, I could see how the emotional standards created during slavery skewed life chances in the present when it came to health and education.
While I was considering whether to withdraw from the conference, news broke that four Metropolitan police officers were being investigated for gross misconduct as a result of a 15-year-old Black schoolgirl being subject to a strip search while at school. 49The search, allegedly to find cannabis, was conducted without an appropriate adult present and while the child was menstruating.She was made to take off her sanitary towel.No drugs were found.A review by City & Hackney Safeguarding Children Partnership concluded that the strip search should never have happened, was unjustified and that racism 'was likely to have been an influencing factor'. 50Experts have emphasized that as horrific as this case was, it is just one example of the adultification of Black children and how this leads to them being treated as criminals. 51In the words of one woman reflecting back on her experiences of school, 'They associated my behaviour as a child with words you would use to describe an adultthey saw me as calculating and disrespectful, not just as a young child struggling [with ADHD].' 52 While 'adultification' may be a new phrase, it is not a new phenomenon.Researchers have drawn a link with how Black children are seen as more adult-like than white children and, accordingly, Black children are presumed to be 'less innocent and more culpable', as well as frequently mislabelled as being angry when they are not displaying anger. 53The consequences of this racialised bias are linked to school exclusion and incarceration. 54To what extent is 'White Fear', as developed in the plantation societies of the Americas, the emotional regime these children are existing in?In her article, Liana Valerio explores the concept of 'The Confidence Script', a 'performative narrative style' which 'publicly asserted unalloyed white aplomb and dominance at all costs, and at all times, regardless of tangible unrest among the enslaved population'. 55ere there were parallels to my years of teaching in multi-racial high schools.Many school leaders I worked with too 'fashioned their worlds in an attempt to maintain the appearance of tranquillity and authority' while masking the fear they felt of the children in their care being unruly or insolent.Gordon Gill's investigation of 'oppositional insolence' in the context of the Deutichem plantation in British Guiana through the lens of emotion highlights that it is 'authority figures in slave societies [who] ultimately held the power to determine what enslaved behaviour was deemed disruptive to the social order'.Here insolence is defined as 'a form of slighting that causes shame for the receiver and pleasure for the sender' and was a form of resistance used by the enslaved of Deutichem, often with severe consequences. 56It is not a stretch to draw a direct line from the plantation societies of the Americas to today's schools.That Black children's behaviour is more commonly seen by (primarily) white school leaders as insolent, disruptive and challenging feeds into the high rates of school exclusion. 57To this day, in their interactions with the state, Black children are very much living in the wake of the emotional regime slavery produced.Adultification, misunderstanding and fear of Black anger have their roots in Atlantic slavery.The developing field of slavery and emotions has a responsibility to elucidate these legacies when researching and writing about the past.
A couple of weeks before I attended the conference, I had my first midwife appointment.Known in Britain as the 'booking appointment', it marks the start of 'your NHS pregnancy journey'. 58Going into my pregnancy I was aware that, until recently, Black women in Britain were five times more likely to die from pregnancy related issues. 59While the inequality is reducing, likely as a result of a campaign led by '5X More', Black women are still almost 4 times more likely than white women to die. 60I was handed a folder to keep my pregnancy paperwork in designed by 5X More.It got me thinking about the role that emotions may play in that deathly inequality.emotional standards by not engaging with the fact that they live on.It places an extra burden on Black women who are researching enslaved motherhood or Black readers to put their feelings to one side.It is hard to remain dispassionate while reading about the risk to the enslaved women's bodies to produce so many 'workers' for others and the entanglements of Black womanhood and medical malpractice.While for some, drawing these links may seem outside the purview of the discipline, several leading scholars in the field emphasize that the field 'studies the emotions that were felt and expressed in the past; it looks at what has changed and what ties together their past and present.' [emphasis mine]. 62Similarly for Peter and Carol Stearns, emotionological history 'has great potential for illuminating aspects of the past and the linkage between past and present'. 63smantling the Regime How do we avoid replicating the extractive nature of transatlantic slavery and perpetuating the emotional standards the regime created?Considering what we owe to the enslaved in death is a crucial element of avoiding continuing the extraction.The enslaved in the archives already had so much taken from them in life.Being accountable to the enslaved and their descendants requires us to act with care.What that looks like to a researcher will differ from person to person.For me, transparency and honesty are central to that practice of accountability.Honesty about who I am and why I come to this work; honesty about who I am serving (my own intellectual curiosity?my community?my career?);honesty about my processes.If I am claiming to be doing something to help someone else or a community, how certain am I that the community want my help or feel like what I am doing is helping?How certain am I that I am the right person to be doing this research, that I am not taking up space and resources that would be better being given to someone else?
When considering transparency as a historian, a central tenet of my practice is that archives are not simply sites of knowledge retrieval but of knowledge production. 64What logically flows from that acknowledgement is that who I am, how I am feeling and how I see the world fundamentally shapes what I find in the archive and how I analyse, discuss and write about it.Developing an archival practice that incorporates elements of autoethnography is how I attempt to be transparent about that process of knowledge production.Here, I am also thinking of my accountability to the descendants of the enslaved.If I am rooting around in the lives of their ancestors, resubjecting them to the violence, using their lives in my research, it is incumbent upon me to be both careful in my interpretation and transparent about how I have come to my conclusions.For me, this responsibility to descendants also leads me to be explicit about the afterlives of slavery, rather than treating my work as merely an academic exercise on a topic from 'bygone days'.
Black theorists have long been engaging with the emotions that slavery and historical research elicit in the present.While heeding the words of Tao Leigh Goffe that a superficial consumption of Black theory is not the way forward, engaging deeply with that theory and considering its implications, particularly its thorough interrogation of how anti-Blackness continues to permeate society, offers the emerging field of slavery and emotions a way forward. 65A hallmark of the field of the history of emotions is engagement with theory.To date, much of the field's focus has been predominantly white European and American history, mirroring the background of the theorists.Black theorists such as Hartman, Sharpe, Fuentes and Carby have theorized and offer ways of thinking about questions the researchers in this special edition are working through.
The emerging field of slavery and emotions has the potential to do things differently from other subdisciplines of slavery studies.The focus on emotions, the creation and perpetuation of emotional standards provides us with the opportunity to consider the afterlives of those standards, particularly how they affect descendants; it offers us a space to consider the emotions we encounter in the process of doing research, our emotions as researchers and those of the people who read and are affected by our work.