Introduction

In 1964, Ralph Ellison wrote that “the act of writing requires a constant plunging back into the shadow of the past where time hovers ghost-like” (xvii). Ellison is not the only black writer compelled to engage with a history that is often shadowy and spectral. Scholars have noted the ways that novels and poetry by black international authors often revisit the past to posit alternate narratives of agency, humanity, and empowerment, as a supplement to the meager traces recorded in the archives of the slave trader, colonizer, or court room. In their literary engagement with these archives, creative writers teach us to read the archives of history anew, probing between the documents for stories left untold, questions left unanswered, and freedoms enacted against all odds. Archives of the Black Atlantic proposes a reading between the data of the archive, and the aspirational imaginings of black historical literature. Michel-Rolph Trouillot provides a working definition of history that allows for contingency when he says “In vernacular use, history means both the facts of the matter and a narrative of those facts, both ‘what happened’ and ‘that which is said to have happened’” (Silencing the Past 2). When creative writers engage with history, I will argue, a third interpretation emerges—an aspirational register, positing not just “what happened” or “what was said to have happened,” but rather “what may have happened.” This is a reading of the past for which we may have either no evidence or compromised evidence, and yet which must be imagined as possibility. Many African diasporic novelists and poets allude to or cite archival documents in their writings, foregrounding the elements of archival research and data in their literary texts, and revising the material remnants of the archive. ¹ In the sense that this creative work engages with the past, we might call it black historical fiction and poetry. Exploring this literature opens new perspectives on Atlantic history and culture, generating a dialogue between what was and what might have been.