ABSTRACT
This chapter argues for expanding the corpus of eighteenth-century anglophone texts by including the voices of subaltern individuals in our analyses. Focusing on the specific examples of the narrative portraits of enslaved Caribbean laborers that frequently exist as isolated fragments or are embedded within other texts, this chapter highlights the importance and value of considering these voices in remaking Caribbean and eighteenth-century cultural and aesthetic histories. In addition to surveying the progress of the fields that have engaged with mediated and ephemeral archival voices, the chapter also provides suggestions for further work. The goal is not only to shed light on the lived experiences, resistance, and agency of Caribbean people assumed to be silent and powerless, but also to call for more inclusion in our engagements with archives, as well as to confirm the value of engaging with the intersectional complexities and nuances of race and power across the discipline of eighteenth-century studies.
