Traditional and Contemporary Caribbean Slave Narratives (TCCSN) Database
About
Throughout the African diaspora, slave narratives have allowed scholars and broader audiences to interrogate the role of the “archive” and the voices it preserves and privileges. Within the Black Atlantic, narratives of formerly enslaved Black people recount the atrocities perpetuated by colonialism through the Transatlantic Slave Trade, and the ways the system of slavery capitalized on Black bodies. These efforts inevitably silenced Black voices and centered white, Eurocentric experiences. This anti-Black colonial regime, thus, survives in the archive. Gathering primary sources across the Caribbean, the Traditional and Contemporary Caribbean Slave Narratives database (hereafter, TCCSN) collects, curates, and textually annotates a corpus of eighteenth to nineteenth century traditional slave narratives available in the public domain. The TCCSN aims to establish a counter-archive for Black Caribbean voices.
While other similar endeavors like the Early Caribbean Digital Archive (ECDA) do similar and important archival work, the TCCSN includes two key interventions: the inclusion of contemporary Caribbean narratives and the incorporation of a video game. Despite the fact that Caribbean literature scarcely focuses on the slavery setting, the impact of slavery is felt throughout Caribbean literature. TCCSN establishes a through line between early and contemporary Caribbean slave narratives. By including include contemporary Caribbean texts, we aim to reveal that the Caribbean slave period provides an important source of artistic and political inspiration for the emancipatory aims of contemporary Black Caribbean writers.
Simultaneous to our effort to establish a counter-archive is our understanding that full recovery of this archive is inherently impossible due to the violence of the colonial regime. Therefore, TCCSN includes an experiential component in the form of a video game. The Archivist is a point-and-click game that is meant to explore the inherent impossibility of recovering voices that have been violently suppressed and erased in the colonial archive. The central gameplay loop is reading through colonial-era documents, which will be gathered from primary sources collected on the TCCSN database. The player will try (and fail) to fully recover the lives of the enslaved in the eighteenth-century anglophone Caribbean through their engagement with the colonial British archive. The goal of The Archivist is to educate players on how the colonial archive upholds Eurocentrism and white supremacy and allow the player to experience the affective horror of reading through the archive of the enslaved. How do you recover Black and indigenous voices that have been erased? The Archivist aims to explore, but not answer, this question. The TCCSN database and The Archivist will invite new ways to explore Caribbean slave narratives and offer an invaluable and unique pedagogical resources for scholars interested in Caribbean Studies as well as 19th-century British Studies.
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