5. Black Atlantic Acoustemologies and the Maritime Archive

On the surface, the slave trade’s systematic documentation—in the form of ship’s logs, insurance documents, sales legers, and account books—appears to record the erasure and suppression of African voices, cultures, and resistance. This chapter proposes, however, that there may be something in these records that we have failed to hear. By understanding the writing of the Middle Passage as an early audio technology—rather than simply a history of exploitation—we can think about sound as a new language of resistance particular to the pathways of the Middle Passage and embedded in the writing itself. In these accounts, the deadly notes of an enslaved cargo communicating and acting in mass interrupt the deadly marks of the official record. Maritime writing thus records the conditions of the Middle Passage from two perspectives: the calculated master narrative at the surface of the record, and the sounds that erupt from the depths.