The Dissenting Atlantic: Archives and Unquiet Libraries, 1776-1865

In this talk I will discuss a historically situated set of transatlantic relationships, chiefly but not exclusively centred on antislavery communities in Yorkshire, Newcastle and Pennsylvania. Focusing on quotidian and everyday antislavery and abolitionist work, as well as its more familiar public face, I bring together the Black abolitionists, Quakers and others who were part of what I call the dissenting Atlantic. Building on what my book calls the unquiet libraries that contain potential for locating overlooked voices and stories, I also argue for the transformational potential of the speakerly archive. Rather than figure archival absences as absence, loss or silence, a speakerly archival practice focuses on speculative figurations, further developing models of remediation pioneered by Saidiya Hartman and others. The Dissenting Atlantic has just been awarded the Shelley Fisher Fishkin prize by the American Studies Association.