Yet, there are particular challenges and difficulties involved in conducting microhistorical research and writing on these subjects. Archival records hold limited material in enslaved people’s unmediated voices. As Marisa Fuentes has argued, coloniality, white supremacy, and state violence organize and contour many other records, including in the way many enslaved individuals are represented primarily as recipients of acts of violence. In addition, methods, such as Saidiya Hartman’s “critical fabulations” or use of oral traditions, embraced by some historians of slavery to work around these challenges have been received with skepticism by other scholars working with a more traditional written archive.

This panel centers some of the approaches, challenges, and promises afforded by microhistorical methods to the study of slavery and enslaved people. Michael Dickinson’s paper uses Henry “Box” Brown’s life story to center the experiences of forced separation and black plight in the context of 19th century Richmond, Virginia. Duangkamol Tantirungkij’s paper argues for the critical importance of territorial circuit and county court records towards understanding enslaved people’s role in shaping the struggle over the repeal of the Northwest Ordinance. Eduarda Lira de Araujo’s paper examines a network of healers and diviners in 1880s Rio de Janeiro, to chart out their visions of Black freedom and efforts to shape their conditions of life. Michael Becker’s paper uses a struggle between enslaved men Bungy and Quashie over the produce of a provision ground to investigate the critical importance of access to adequate food in shaping the internal power structure of enslaved communities in Jamaica. Collectively, spanning a variety of geographies and chronologies, the papers employ a range of interpretive strategies that suggest the range of promise and challenges of microhistorical study of slavery.