Meet AAS Fellow Linford Fisher

Past is Present: Describe your current project, its geographical and chronological scope.

Linford Fisher: My current project is a comparative study of New England and a few select English Caribbean islands, primarily Barbados, Bermuda, and Jamaica. It’s really centered on the question of Native American and African slavery from the beginning of colonization up through emancipation in 1834 in the English Caribbean. And in that time frame, I’m interested in the intersection of Indian and African slavery as well as regional difference and different kinds of slave regimes in these various locations. Like others in the field, I’m also trying to understand slavery not in terms of binaries (not just slave and free) but the way that people think about the experience of slavery in different ways at different times on a broader spectrum of unfreedom. People’s conditions change over time, their circumstances change over time. For a vast majority of slaves in the Caribbean, they were either born into slavery and died in slavery or else were enslaved and died a slave. But for others there was a diversity of experiences over time. The project is really an attempt to understand the dynamism, movement, migration of people in unfree conditions. One portion of the book focuses on the way that Native Americans were the subject of an Indian slave trade, whether from New England on the east coast of North America down to the Caribbean or from South America to the Caribbean or in other countless ways being forcibly moved around. So the Caribbean becomes this sort of crossroads of a wide variety of people. I’d like to bring at least some of these different pieces together, primarily with regard to the English Atlantic. I taught a class on Indian and African slavery a year ago, and the number of books and articles that I could have assigned that dealt with both Native American and African slavery in any of these contexts, well, you could list them on one hand. There’s a very small (but growing) literature. And so I’m trying to contribute this emerging literature in a positive way to that.

 

Past is Present: In teaching your classes, you must get a lot of ideas and feedback from your students. Do you deliberately go into a course specifically hoping that your students will help you to contribute to your work?

LF: I think the best teaching is rooted in one’s own research, and I’ve always found students to be wonderful conversation partners. In the class I just mentioned on Indian and African slavery—which was a senior capstone seminar—one thing we did that I really enjoyed was that I had them read the book proposal, and they provided feedback. It was kind of a chastening experience because we had talked so much during the semester about terminology and how to talk about racial difference in appropriate ways. When they read my proposal they had specific critiques of what I did or didn’t do properly, even by my own standards. You can sit in a classroom and theorize this stuff but to actually write the kind of history that reflects the values that we all profess is sometimes difficult.

 

Past is Present: What is your teaching mix like in an average semester? How many undergraduate classes and graduate classes? What is the one class that you teach pretty consistently?

LF: I normally teach a 2-2 load, one lecture course and one seminar per semester, with a graduate class thrown in now and then. My usual courses include a survey class of Native American history; a survey class of American religion in two parts; and a really fun first-year seminar on the material culture of early America; a senior seminar on slavery; and another senior seminar on early encounters in colonial America. Brown is pretty good about letting us teach what we want. For graduate courses, I teach a readings class in early American history that prepares students for their exams, which is always fun, and I’ve also taught “Religion in the Early Modern Atlantic World,” which feels underdeveloped in the field more generally. For that course, each of the students prepared a bibliography on certain topics and annotated that, and we dumped all of that into a website. It became a resource for the field to know what’s out there.

 

Past is Present: Do you teach any of your classes at the John Carter Brown [Library] or just point your students to the resources there?

LF: In almost every course I try to get my students into all of these or at least one of these: the Haffenreffer Museum of Anthropology, which has a display area on campus (the main collections are down in Bristol); the John Carter Brown Library, where we’ll look at images or maps or editions of certain things we’ve looked at (the curators there are really great about pulling out amazing holdings like the Bay Psalm Book); and the Hay Library, which has strong collections related to what I teach. I do this partly to get students into these spaces that they might not otherwise get into. The JCB feels so intimidating to them. They don’t think they’re allowed in, but they are.

 

Past is Present: Would you ever consider doing a field trip up to AAS?

LF: Absolutely! Although there’s this quirky little Rhode Island-ism about distances that makes Massachusetts seem ridiculously far away. But it would be fun.

 

Past is Present: Back to your research. You mentioned that this is a really ambitious project. How do you keep all of your research organized? What is the writing process like for you? How do you keep everything structured and how do you put that down on paper?

LF: It’s not always easy, and I think we are all constantly looking to refine our researching process. For me, it’s been interesting starting a new (second) project from the ground up. In graduate school it feels overwhelming but you have a very structured process that leads you through. You have an advisor and you have exams that put you in the right direction and you have a cohort of graduate students to have conversations with. The surprising thing for me is that the second project feels a little more lonesome in some ways, or solitary. All that apparatus from grad school is gone, so you have to build a support system out of the field and out of your colleagues at whatever institution you’re at and out of friends and out of places like this as a fellow. Either way, the process is the same. I tell my students this all the time. You need to start with a question. It’s not enough to say, “I’m interested in ‘x.'” You have to have something that you’re looking for. Once you have something you’re looking for, then it shapes your research. But one of the challenges for me in this new project is that there are several new historiographies that I’m trying to engage. There’s been a massive explosion of literature on Atlantic slavery, particularly African slavery, along with a separate literature on each Caribbean island that is not familiar to most North Americanists. There are archival challenges too. Each island has its own archive and its own archival process. Some things are available and some are not, you can take pictures at some archives and not at others. In Jamaica it’s very hard. The main archive is in Spanish Town. It’s unsafe and it’s hard to get to, so you stay in New Kingston, about 45 minutes away, and you hire a driver to get to the archive. You have to sneak in and sneak out because partly you’re afraid for your life. And there are also good materials in England at the National Archives at Kew. There is correspondence, admiralty records, and treasury records and so forth. And then you have New England, which has all these little local archives, state archives and city archives that I’m trying to go through as well. Anyway, there’s way more material in these places than I can possibly process, but I have some pretty specific research questions in terms of the intersections of Indian and African slavery, the spectrum of servitude, questions of what it was like to be an enslaved African or Indian, so that helps.

 

Past is Present: Why did you specifically want to do this project? Was its genesis in your previous work? Why did you choose this specific book to write?

LF: Clearly it was the beaches! Okay, not really. It was a combination of several things. I recall going through church records for my first book, The Indian Great Awakening, and found so many instances not only of Native American but also African servants who were brought forward for baptism or church membership. Often it was the ministers who were the ones bringing their own enslaved people. I just remember thinking to myself, “This is the 1740s and there are a lot of them in Connecticut. Why?” I knew a bit about the history of slavery in New England but I was curious to investigate further, not only Indians and Africans together, but also the church as a place where these things were happening. So far, in this second project, the religious pieces of that aren’t so strong. But they’re there because the origins of the project came out of the church records. From there the project opened up as I had more questions about how New England slavery practices differed from those in the English Caribbean. But I also wanted to write this book because I felt there were many questions I and others had that the existing literature didn’t adequately answer.

 

Past is Present: Going back to that first project, The Indian Great Awakening (2012), how are you able to determine what a genuine conversion experience is and what were the challenges of writing that book and reading the archive?

LF: In many ways, that book was a caution against trying to parse genuine conversion; I think it’s not a helpful question for us to ask in some ways. Historians often have this idealized conversion that we’re constantly comparing people to, whether it’s regarding the First Great Awakening or otherwise. This is also true of Native Americans and African Americans. And partly why I think it’s the wrong question is that conversion is so variable in itself. And, as other scholars have pointed out, it is a notion that is steeped in the Western Christian tradition and was not necessarily a category that all Natives were working with. So I propose in the book this idea of affiliation, that people, especially Native Americans, tried out various religious associations and experiences over time. Historians might be interested in the question of conversion, but Natives almost always had a handful of other considerations that might have been more important, such as their community, their land, their political autonomy, their very survival. Each of us is complex in terms of our interior minds and the way we process things. I tried to walk the line between an overly spiritualized view of this process, of believing everything, that they did genuinely convert, and saying it was all just a pretense to gain something else. I wanted to remain aware of the realities of life on the ground and try to understand why people make the decisions they make. It’s a middle ground between a functionalist and a spiritualist view, where we can say that all of this was happening in the context of colonialism under a tremendous amount of pressure. There’s family loss, there’s land loss, there’s erosion of cultural autonomy and life ways that had been important to people. And so these are all strategies for survival on some level. It doesn’t mean they’re inauthentic. It just means they’re immensely complicated and can change year by year and day by day. So this notion of a static, stable endpoint as capital “C” Christian? I’m trying to say that that’s not the only option, that there are people who ebb and flow in their spirituality, especially Native Americans, who are trying to figure out these multiple and overlapping worlds.

 

Past is Present: Who inspires you to do this work?

LF: I am personally drawn to two kinds of works that might seem like opposite intellectual currents. The first are works that tackle the big sweeping questions and huge issues about human life more generally. People like Jared Diamond and Guns, Germs, and Steel and Charles Mann and 1491 and 1493. Mann’s first book, 1491, is a hemispheric history and 1493 contains a global awareness. Guns, Germs, and Steel is asking really important questions about how cultures change over time and the origins of certain differences. I might not agree with his conclusions, but he’s asking really interesting questions. The second kind of works I am drawn to are super micro-historical studies. I think they remain powerful because they’re stories about people and their interior worlds and we can identify with them. So Carlo Ginzburg The Cheese and the Worms is a classic that I think every historian has read and has either mimicked or channeled at some point. But also Natalie Zemon Davis’s The Return of Martin Guerre and Laurel Thatcher Ulrich’s A Midwife’s Tale are other books that do really tight micro-historical work. In my own work I try to move back and forth between the two, to keep a larger context in mind but also to tell stories and to get inside, maybe not people’s minds, but at least their worlds. Other inspiring works are Walter Johnson’s Soul By Soul and Richard Dunn’s recent book A Tale of Two Plantations about a plantation in Jamaica and a plantation in Virginia. He takes plantation slave inventories and brings them to life. He puts flesh and bones on names that are in the register and is able to tell stories and create family lineages and describe in intimate detail plantation life. Another book that came out recently that exemplifies the kind of writing and the kinds of big questions that I’m drawn to is (and everyone’s talking about it) Ed Baptist’s The Half Has Never Been Told. Also Adam Rothman’s Beyond Freedom’s Reach. It’s a super micro-history, but it also tells a larger story. So these and many other books inspire me. I hope all of that comes together in this book. I want my readers to get both an intimate portrait of people’s lives and get a firm sense of what it all means, of the larger picture.

 

Past is Present: How have you specifically come across examples of the individual’s life in the archive?

LF: As with Dunn’s work, I think there are ways to recreate the life circumstances of certain people. There’s a series of depositions in New London County, Connecticut, that describe the experiences of an individual named Indian Ann who is identified as a Spanish Indian, a Carolina Indian, a Mohawk, or a Huron. But there’s a lot of information as a part of the deposition process in terms of her background. [Information like that] is sometimes handed to you, which is great. Sometimes you have to triangulate taxation lists and inventories and wills to recreate these kinds of backgrounds. But there are other ways – historians have been leaning more on other methodologies, such as archaeology, ethnography, and oral histories. The field of Native American studies has long embraced oral history as a methodological tool. For other people, there are more questions about how to value these oral histories and how to weigh them, but I’ve found them quite useful. It’s really difficult for me to think about doing a project and not be in conversation with at least some of the people who are descendants of the people that I’m studying. For the first book it was important for me to spend time on some of these reservations and spend time talking to the people who were descended from the groups I was talking about in the book. I’ve done some of that already with this project. In Bermuda it was kind of humorous. I showed up the first day in the archive and told the archivist that I was trying to find New England Natives, especially Pequots, who were brought to Bermuda. The lady looked at me and said, “Well, I’m Pequot and I’d be happy to help you out.” I had no expectation of that. I did look at stuff in the archive, but she gave me the names and numbers of relatives, so I rented a moped and went up to St. David’s Island and talked to some of those people as well. I still struggle to know how to incorporate all of that into the book, but it’s important not to see these oral accounts as competing but as different perspectives on the same era. Archival accounts have their own biases, too, even if we don’t talk about them as much.

 

Past is Present: What keeps you dedicated to the work? What keeps you going?

LF: A little bit of craziness perhaps. I’m not really sure. In some ways it’s become a real passion and I’m not sure I have a rational explanation for it. Some people have a job and have to go to work. I’ve felt for a very long time that I’m fortunate because what I want to do most days and what I have to do are pretty much the same thing. I really enjoy the archival process, I really enjoy teaching, I really enjoy going out and talking to wider audiences and giving lectures. I really enjoy the writing process, even though it’s difficult sometimes. But it is not always easy to churn out pages of text. I came across a quote recently about this: “Writing is hard for every last one of us. . . . Coal mining is harder. Do you think miners stand around all day talking about how hard it is to mine for coal? They do not. They simply dig. You need to do the same.” It’s the same with writing. You just have to do it. I enjoy the whole package of academia, perhaps because of the diversity of things that is required of me each day. I find it inspiring to talk through issues in the field with graduate students and seeing undergraduates who come from such different backgrounds who have fresh ideas and so forth. But the core of it is the belief that the past has something to offer us in the present. I’m not trying to be presentist, but I do believe that we are doomed to repeat a history that we don’t understand. I want my students not just to think about the relevance of the past (that word has become kind of fashionable) but get them to think critically about the present. And if history is one tool for them for them to think critically about the present, then that’s great. I’m not just sitting in an ivory tower, thinking deep thoughts and writing about some obscure topic. I’m writing about race and power relations and colonialism and conquest and human violence and that’s all in the world we live in today, and I hope they see that.

 

Past is Present: Have your feelings toward your work or your students changed since you had children?

LF: We entered grad school with a child, left with three, and had our fourth during my first year of teaching. My wife, Jo, is really the reason that we were able to hold it all together. My oldest child, my daughter, is thirteen. We have lots of conversations. I email her all sorts of news items and historical stuff and she humors me and pretends to enjoy it. The other day we were talking about new technologies that might allow for further exploration of the galaxy. There’s a new engine that’s been built that might allow for a true type of hypercommuting, Interstellar style. I made some lame remark about how cutting edge new technologies seem compared to studying old things. She was so sweet. She said, “Yeah, but they’re both important.” This is a long way to say that my own children have taught me the value of balance. As an historian, or whatever you do, you can build your own reality where you say, “This is the only thing that’s important.” Somehow being a parent and having these kinds of conversations with kids, along with the craziness of parenting more generally, for me personally, it’s helped me to see my students in a more holistic way. I realize that students will come out of my classroom and they may never catch the history bug, but if I can just give them a vision of a different world that they can carry with them, that would be great. Somehow being a parent has enhanced that perception and sensitivity in me. I guess I also want to be the kind of professor that I want my own kids to have, since they are rapidly approaching college age.

 

Past is Present: Can you say how your work engages with the historiography of race and slavery?

LF: We’re in an exciting moment right now because the field is wrestling with how to deal adequately with issues of the history of race and racism. This project falls somewhere in the middle of a broader continuum of interpretations of race. On the one hand you have people like David Brion Davis who say that the moment Africans were enslaved racialized slavery was born. On the other hand you have people who say that we can’t really talk about racism, capital “R” racism, until the nineteenth century when we have biologically determined racism. What’s interesting to me and what this project is trying to suggest is that ideas about race and the prejudice that comes with it intersect with other kinds of things over time so that it’s not enough to think about skin color alone as the basis for racism. You have prejudice regarding religion, cultural practices, about the way people eat and smell and all these other multisensory perceptions of someone that lead into how you think about them. But all these ideas about prejudice and race and religion and culture intersect with other things like class. There other complications, too. What does it mean when you have this seemingly hemispheric slave regime that at times seems to be race-based and yet at the same time at a lot of these locations–Jamaica is a really great example–you have laws that also protect free, landholding, plantation-owning, slave-owning people of color? In this project I’m trying to wrestle with the malleability of race and race-making, with the way this changes over time and with the ways it’s never as complete as we think it is. There are ways in which the laws surprise us. But even when you have laws that protect black plantation owners, it doesn’t mean that they’re treated the same. There’s an unspoken, intangible element to prejudice in all of its different forms. It’s not clear, actually, how these things emerge and how to gauge them and calculate them. And, stepping back, at times these ambiguities and deeply embedded prejudices reflect our own difficulties in adequately articulating and addressing racial prejudice today, in quite different but still structural ways that shape the nature of this American society we live in.

 

Past is Present: How have the collections at AAS been useful for your research?

LF: The AAS has been an amazing place for me in so many ways. Not only are the archives great, you’ve got a tremendous selection of rare books. You have so many things in one place that you can surround yourself with everything you need for one chapter. But it also has manuscript collections that are really incredible, too. I was just working with the Curwen papers this afternoon and was reminded of how rich they are. There are also some newer acquisitions that are really helpful for my own project. The AAS just acquired the most complete set I’ve seen so far of printed laws of Jamaica. Being able to work through those is really great. The Caribbean newspapers collection has also been helpful for me, so it’s been just the right time to come here and access these resources and think about broader connections with New England. But it’s also the fellows. We’ve had so many great fellows’ talks–I was so inspired by some of the artists in residence in a way that surprised me. Talking with them contributed to the richness of the experience. We’re not just sitting here as a bunch of talking academic heads talking about the past, but we’re also talking with people who are writing novels about the past and recreating printing processes from the past. What that means is that you’re exposed to a different set of questions and ideas that can’t help but influence you. I also like that there are so many graduate students coming here, too. I feel like I’m getting a sampling of where the field is going just by talking to them. I always walk away feeling inspired by other people’s work and writing. I think that’s a clear benefit of fellowships like those at AAS.