Please use the search box above to engage with the Archival Justice for the Enslaved Project. For example, you can search a specific topic, country, person, or search only for files in a specific language. If you would only like to engage with digitized sources, please write the word "digitized" in the search box. If you would like to explore all 51 new descriptions of archival files about racialized slavery in Rare Books and Special Collections, please write the word "description" in the search box. As you engage with the project, please do take the following trigger warning into consideration.

Trigger Warning

As a trigger warning for descendants of enslaved people, the archival sources of the history of enslavement of the African Diaspora tend to be framed by the gaze of the slaveholder and to silence the intellectual production of the enslaved. These manuscripts systematically evidence imperial sexual violence, painful exploitation and torture of enslaved persons, the influence of scientific racism in the Atlantic World, and the use of hateful language as violence, including racial slurs. Examining the silencing of public memory about racialized slavery is in itself triggering, since many archival sources that affirmed the intellectual production of the enslaved were destroyed or appropriated with the intentions of depersonalizing the enslaved and keeping Black resistance movements in the margins of History. The reimagining of archives is urgent because the legacies of the history of racially-premised slavery propel contemporary structural racism and the policing and exploitation of communities of the African Diaspora around the world. The primary sources in the archives might be misgendering people, and Firestone Library of Princeton University stands in Lenape territory and within an institution with historical ties to racialized slavery.