Creole Testimonies: Slave Narratives from the British West Indies, 1709-1838

• Published in: Caribbean Quarterly Vol. 59; no. 3/4; pp. 186 - 188
• Main Author: DUNKLEY, D. A.
• Format: Book Review
• Language: English
• Published: Mona University of the West Indies 01.09.2013; Taylor & Francis Ltd 01.12.2013
• Subjects: 19th century; Creoles; Diaries; Historians; Narratives; Slavery; New York; United States > US; Europe; British West Indies; Suriname; Chicago Illinois; Jamaica; Baltimore Maryland; Latin America
• ISSN: 0008-6495; 2470-6302

New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. xii + 185 pp._ in this detailed book, Nicole N. Aljoe, who teaches English at Northeastern University, has provided us with a needed "full-length analysis" (2) of the narratives of enslaved people in the Anglo-Caribbean. [...]as Aljoe has stated, the narratives "convey an understanding of subjectivity that is not singular or unified but rather relational, changeful, and complex" (56). For historians, the act of reading archival records in an imaginative way has appeared in the work of the Annales School since the early twentieth century, and later in the scholarship of many social and cultural historians, such as Steeve O. Buckridge's The Language of Dress1 and my own work Agency of the Enslaved.1- Admittedly, other historians still do regard the use of the imagination with great scepticism, and prefer to adhere to nineteenth-century Rankean certitude.