Nicholas Sy, assistant professor at the Department of History, University of the Philippines Diliman and External PhD candidate, Radboud University //
I have a stack of paper about slaves. It is as tall as my suspicion that paper entrapped them. I tried to think of a metaphor for this problem with the colonial archive and thought of a papier-mâché model. So one Christmas with my parents, I printed every deed of sale I had from the Spanish Philippine archives, soaked them in strips in a bowl of glue and water, and then sat to negotiate with my frustrations. The result was something that multiple valued mentors have gently said is too meditative for my dissertation. But it remains part of the thought process behind the arguments in my dissertation, so I thought I would share it on our project blog:
Humans, like perhaps land, are not naturally defined as property. They exist in the world by default. But the uneven relations of power present in colonialism attempted to define both land and humans with words on paper. This process was and is true for various relations of power. It was especially crucial to the relations that produced enslavement. This process involved articulating the right words “esclavo” (slave) in the right sentences “esclavo habido en buen título” (slave possessed under legitimate title). It involved writing those articulations into documents and folding those documents into rectangles, transportable from the auction block to the shipyard, farm, monastery, or home. It involved a slaveowner opening these rectangles, smoothening them, and filing them together.
One document on its own is in its way an archive, however it is in compiling documents together that the weight of similar documentation reinforced the validity of any single document. The document also derived its validity from its adoption of the words, phrasings, formulations, and seals of empire. And then these documents that defined people were filed, alongside documents defining things like land and horses. People can speak but land and horses cannot contest their nature as objects or possessions. The slaveowner’s archive presented all three, land, horses, and people together and asks us to consider their equivalence. All are objects. Implied comparibility is perhaps the glue holding the papier-mâché archive together.
Like my soaked and now drying model, these documents froze time. They are good at capturing moments of enslavement. But they are very limited in how they capture the lives they attempted to define; or how real people attempted to define themselves over the course of their lives. We as historians rarely have access to the things the colonial archive did not think it owned. It only takes a thin layer of archival paper to cover a person, narrowly fixing their definition. And from today’s vantage point, we often only see that papier-mâché layer. Its shell is rigid. It looks human. Perhaps human enough to sell. For historians, it looks human enough to analyze. And we analyze it despite knowing that it is hollow. We recite what the contracts say, and in reciting them make them real in our repetition.