Abstract

In the spirit of Papa Legba (a Haitian lwa who is the arbiter of the crossroads between the human and nonhuman worlds), this essay examines the challenges and opportunities presented when using a digital humanities approach to archiving early Haitian sovereignty, a critical but often forgotten part of the story of the making of the modern world-system. Abdul JanMohamed and David Lloyd have written about “archival work, as a form of counter-memory” that is “essential to the critical articulation of minority discourse.” However, because archives, like other kinds of texts, reflect the worldview of their creators, the archivist working to articulate “minority discourse” must be careful not to reproduce patterns of domination or cultural exploitation. For Haiti, this means that we must work against the idea that the abundant historical resources now made readily (and often freely) available by various digitization projects, represent a “new frontier” for research, an idea that encourages the notion that the country is “open for business” on a variety of levels. Instead, by using the metaphor of the crossroads, this essay demonstrates how a multimodal approach—involving content, context, collaboration, and access—can allow for alternative ways of (humanely) archiving black sovereignty.