Writing Black Mobility Against the Archive: Ledger, Letter, and Map in Hill, Danticat, and Brand

Abstract

This preprint examines how Black mobility is represented through documentary forms in Lawrence Hill’s The Book of Negroes, Edwidge Danticat’s “Children of the Sea,” and Dionne Brand’s A Map to the Door of No Return. Focusing on the ledger, the letter, and the map, the paper argues that these texts transform documentary forms historically associated with classification, administration, and exclusion into literary counter-archives. Drawing on New Historicism, archive theory, and Black Atlantic studies, it explores how literature preserves dimensions of Black experience that official records often omit, including memory, loss, displacement, voice, and belonging. The analysis engages with scholarship by Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Ann Laura Stoler, Paul Gilroy, Christina Sharpe, Saidiya Hartman, and Katherine McKittrick. The paper concludes that these literary works do not replace the archive, but expose its limits and demonstrate how narrative can preserve forms of experience that official documentation cannot fully contain.