Jenny Shaw's 3 favorite reads in 2024

My favorite read of 2024 is Sara Johnson's "Encyclopédie Noire: The Making of Moreau de Saint-Méry's Intellectual World" It is a creative, audacious, intellectually challenging, and beautifully written work of history, one that challenges our conventions about how to approach archives, sources, and the so-called "great men" of history. Moreau was an enlightenment era polymath, a lawyer and philosophe who left a vast archive that scholars of the eighteenth century French world (especially those of the Caribbean) have found indispensible to understanding the Age of Revolutions. Johnson's fabulous innovation is to write a collective biography about the people around Moreau - the enslaved women, men, and children, and free people of color - whose labor provided him the opportunity to have the life of the mind he craved, and whose knowledge (among that of many others) he colonized. To shade in their lives, Johnson plays with content and form - the literal fonts and typeface of the book changes; she collaborates with artist Luz Sandoval to create new ways of seeing the people around Moreau, as well as the man himself; and she invites us to consider the daily violence experienced by enslaved people by reformulating how we encounter the brands on their bodies, or the sounds they heard coming from their enslavers mouths. Most of all, we leave the book with a knowledge and new appreciation for the people around Moreau, the very women, men, and children whose presence and experiences he worked so hard to erase.

This book important for how it challenges readers to rethink the history of Saint Domingue (Haiti), for the questions it poses about constitutes intellectual history (or indeed an intellectual project), and for what it reveals about the deeply embedded and co-constitutive relationship between slavery and enlightenment era thinking. But in addition to these significant contributions, Johnson's book forces us to reckon with how we understand the practice of history. Every chapter, every illustration, every methodological turn was a revelation. I first read this book with graduate students in a course on Comparative Slavery. And then I read it again with a different group of graduate students in a Methods and Theory class. In between, I've revisited it several times myself. You would have to go a very long way to find a book as thought-provoking, generative, and inspiring as this book. Go read it immediately!

I've been reading, and re-reading, Jennifer Morgan's "Laboring Women: Reproduction and Gender in New World Slavery," since it was published in 2004. It completely transformed the field of slavery studies by doing something, that in many ways, seems so simple - it paid attention to the ways that enslaved women performed both production and reproductive labor, and then explored what the implications of that double-bind are for our understandings of slavery itself. Every time I re-read this book I find something new, or realize that Morgan covered something that I'd forgotten was in there. If you want to understand the intersections of gender and enslavement, or the ways that enslaved women's reproductive capacities are the foundation on which systems of slavery are based, then this book is a must-read. Quietly, and with what seemed like little fanfare at the time, Morgan's work changed and entire field. You cannot write about slavery without engaging this text. And I learn something new every time I open it up.

Trouillot's "Silencing the Past" is another book that I've been reading for over twenty years. Beautifully written, and with a compelling argument about how silences permeate the archive at every level and thus distort the kinds of history that can be told, Trouillot's text turned my world upside down when I first read it back in 2002. As he expertly takes us through how Columbus Day, the Alamo, and Sans Souci (the man and the palace in Haiti) find their place in history, and are (mis)remembered, or commemorated differently according to place and time, he peels back the layers of power in the archives. And he does so in clear and compelling prose that makes this book impossible to put down. Perhaps the most brilliant innovation is Trouillot's clear demonstration of the dynamics at play between "what happened" and "what is said to have happened." I don't think it is possible to walk away from this book without having one's understanding of history completely upended.