Reading the “Memoirs of the

Life of Florence Hall”

Through The Long Song of

the Caribbean Colonial

Archive

Nicole N. Aljoe

1. Introduction

In her field-defining bibliography The Slave Narrative: Its

Place in American History (1988), Marion Starling uncovered a surprisingly large number of surviving
narratives by or about the lives

of enslaved individuals across a variety of archives in the US. Of the

more than 6,000 slave narratives found in the 1940s, only 100–250

of those texts—or between two and four percent—exhibit the formal

structures of the self-written, separately published narrative, such as

Frederick Douglass’s and Harriet Jacobs’s. Thus, the vast majority

of the documents found about the lives of the enslaved in the

archives are either explicitly mediated or fragmentary in some way.

These texts, which often take the form of brief interviews and portraits, are frequently embedded
within other texts, like travel narratives, account books, church records, or histories; or they are

handwritten, isolated on sheets of paper in archives and library

*Nicole N. Aljoe is associate professor of English and Africana Studies at

Northeastern University in Boston. She is the author of Creole Testimonies: Slave

Narratives from the British West Indies, 1709–1838 (Palgrave, 2012) and two coedited volumes,
Journeys of the Slave Narrative in the Early Americas (UVA Press,

2014) and, most recently, Literary Histories of the Early Anglophone Caribbean:

Islands in the Stream (Palgrave/Springer, 2018). Her work has appeared in Early

American Literature

, African American Review

, Anthurium
, The Oxford Handbook

of the African American Slave Narrative (2014), and Teaching Anglophone

Caribbean Literature (2012). She is also codirector of the Early Caribbean Digital

Archive. Her current project is a digital analysis of representations of Caribbean

women of color produced in Europe and England between 1780 and 1840.

American Literary History, vol. 0, no. 0, pp. 1–22

doi:10.1093/alh/ajaa025

Advance Access publication 0 Month 0000 VC The Author(s) 2020. Published by Oxford University
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