ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses the memorial 'counter-actualities' of the 'wooden life-worlds' of slaves. It looks at the nature of memory studies and what this can tell us about the experience of the middle passage of slavery. The chapter raises significant methodological problems in making visible that experience when that experience was largely unrecorded. The first-hand accounts are few but important but there are also other ways one can think about social and collective memory and the documentation and observations of the slave ship by abolitionists, slaves, masters, and governments. The question of the memory of trauma in communities and individuals is central to understanding the specific experience of slavery. The 'predicaments of local subjects' lie in the loss of that 'previous cultural state' the marks of which only continued in memory. But the geographical shift is a fracture in their worlds, the actual world they are traversing and their own life-worlds and consciousness.
