Drawing on Arabic textual traditions and foregrounding a liminal time and space constituted
by the experience of administrative detention, of the expired visa, of
deportation, and of repatriation, Muslim slave narratives deserve recognitions as generative
forebears of transnational, multicultural literature in both England
and the United States. Yet these forebears
consistently were marked in their own time and subsequently by an aggressively
racist dialectic of amnesia and surprise. We can detect in their enduring
oscillation between obscurity and legibility, and in our own efforts to
assemble the dispersed traces these Global South Atlantic forebears left
behind in Brazilian, Canadian, English, Jamaican, Panamanian, Trinidadian,
and US newspapers, letters, ledgers, and legal documents, a strategic
archival reticence that vexes even as it structures the archive of the Global
South Atlantic. The transoceanic subjects who deposited their traces in
this archive rendered tangible, against multiple forces of erasure, shared
networks of language, trade, education, religion, and discursive self-fashioning;
and they also defiantly withdrew, at long last, into an opacity
that delimits our own archival task.