Paper short abstract:

What were the politics and imaginaries of enslaved African plantation managers? I propose a scalar relationship between agency and archive to trace the silences and attestations of fragments, urgent as we face environmental collapse and Florida laws intent on distorting Africa-Diaspora history.

Paper long abstract:

This paper problematizes the power of archival silencing in histories of enslavement by examining the narrative fragments in Arabic and English from the 1830s and 40s of Bilali Mohammed and Salih Bilali; enslaved African Muslim plantation managers each of whom organized upwards of 500 enslaved growers of rice and cotton for absentee planters on Sapelo and Saint Simon’s islands off the coast of Georgia. By tracing Bilali and Salih’s narratives of violent displacement from Futa Jallon (Guinea) and Jenne (Mali), and by confronting the pro-slavery and African colonizing projects of the Americans into whose hands these narratives passed, my aim is to historicize African knowledge and practice as important nodes in creating the Atlantic world technologies and ecologies which defined modernity. I seek to conceptualize these historical actors’ accounts of Koranic learning in Africa and complex managerial and community leadership in America in relation to the politics and economies of mangrove and highland rice geographies. Ultimately, I pose a series of questions about how methods rooted in scalar imaginaries might be mobilized to hack the archive and see, as Edda Fields Black has described it, the underlying operations of inheritance, innovation and borrowing at work in the African Atlantic world.