The subject of slavery has long been positioned at the center of scholarly work on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century African Diaspora culture. While scholars have turned to questions of resistance and rebellion in studies of the United States and the Caribbean, typically our methodological and disciplinary boundaries have siloed scholarly work from disparate disciplines. This structural limitation not only prevents cross-cultural analysis, but forecloses opportunities to study individual colonies or nations in their regional or global contexts.
One example of a diffuse archive concerns eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Black diasporic uprisings and rebellions. The list of such rebellions ranges from the Haitian Revolution at the end of the eighteenth century to later U.S. American revolts led by Denmark Vesey and Nat Turner, as well as uprisings throughout the Caribbean contemporaneous with U.S. rebellions. Scholars working on these events have questioned the extent to which these movements were connected to one another, influenced international activism and abolitionism, or prompted rebellions in other locations. Because these rebellions coincided with the international rise of print culture and circulation, many of these events received media coverage capable of being tracked in digital editions of periodicals. Such a study remains to be done, in part because of the challenges presented by such a wide-ranging archive.
The RAD Project will use data and data visualizations to study the patterns of discourse of Black rebellions; how rebellion writing moved across boundaries and places in nineteenth-century print culture throughout the Atlantic world; and the means by which Black rebellions demanded equality by drawing from global literary, political, religious, and legal culture.
The larger goal of the RAD Project is to build a centerpiece scholarly digital site that foregrounds rebellion as a critical field of study on the African diaspora and the cultures of Black resistance movements in the nineteenth century.
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