The Documents
“Kinship and Belonging: Reimagining the Place of Black Life in the Louisiana Colonial Archive” recasts the story of Africans and people of African descent through the experiences of enslaved and free people of color in colonial Louisiana. In 1719, the first documented slave ships from West Africa arrived in Louisiana. In 1803, the United States purchased the Louisiana Territory from France. In the century between, Black and Black-Native people navigated the French and then Spanish colonial legal regimes to secure their freedom and wrest back control over their futures as revealed in the documents contained within this colonial archive. This struggle appears in an archive fraught with imperial impositions, violences and dispossessions, silences and erasures. Despite the fraught nature of the archive, the extant manuscript sources of colonial Louisiana are a deep and rich resource for Black peoples’ political practices, resistance to slavery and oppression, alliances across race and status, and strategies for securing joy and forming community.
Explore a sample of the documents below.
