This post is part of Reflecting on Imtiaz Habib’s Black Lives in the English Archives: An Online Symposium, organised and edited by Rebecca Adusei and Jamie Gemmell. The blog series is introduced here. The blog series was launched on Friday 19 Mary 2023 at the London Metropolitan Archives to tie in with their new ‘Unforgotten Lives’ exhibition.

Jyotsna G. Singh

Jyotsna G. Singh is Professor in the Department of English at Michigan State University.

Special thanks to Rebecca Adusei and Jamie Gemmell for generating “the multi-event symposium, bringing together scholars working at the forefront of early modern Black history and premodern race studies” to discuss the vital importance and continuing legacy of Imitiaz Habib’s path-breaking text. These non-competitive and generative scholarly conversations of the symposium (blogs) will, I hope, serve as a model for future exchanges committed to activism and social change.

Personal Reminiscences

Imtiaz Habib and I were regular SAA (Shakespeare Association of America) friends for many years, from the late 1990s onwards, till his untimely death in 2018. At every meeting we caught up with long chats, which in his native Bengali, one would call Adda – a popular term for “hangout,” or extended conversations among small groups, often verging into cerebral arguments, yet also producing a unique conviviality. We would often discuss the history of the Sub-continent, from the colonial period through the violent partitions and their lingering effects. Imtiaz’s memories stretched a generation before mine and he vividly recalled the birth of Bangladesh in violence, the assassination of Sheikh Mujib-Ur-Rehman and continuing national divisions. Thinking of him today, in that Adda modality, I imagine his happy bemusement and slight disbelief at the belated attention his book is currently receiving. He would be vigorously engaging with each blog post in the Symposium in his honor, approving, challenging, or even interrogating the different perspectives. We would all be enriched by his brilliance and critical rigor, but above all, by his intellectual generosity.

In July 2018, Imtiaz finally seemed to getting the deserved recognition for his book, being invited a key speaker in a conference in the UK, in late July, entitled “On Belonging: English Conceptions of Transculturality and Migration, 1550-1700.” I received a strangely urgent sounding email from him, stating we must meet in the UK. I was in London and planned to attend the conference, but various other commitments came in the way and I could not follow up (regretfully) to his subsequent invitations for meetings. And finally, when we scheduled to meet, he sent me a note saying he was feeling unwell and “tired.” On August 27th, he passed away. This blog is my imagined Adda or conversation with Imtiaz that was not to be. The urgency in his tone was perhaps an intuition of his demise. I will never know.

A more tangible impact Imtiaz had over my intellectual life was in encouraging my postcolonial credentials beyond early modern studies. To this end, in the early 2000s, he urged me to direct the dissertation of one of his graduate students from Old Dominion University, Krishna Manavalli. His department did not have a Ph.D. program and he (in his warm forthright manner) directed her to work with me. Her research interests focused on nineteenth-twentieth-century class struggles – with a focus on South India. I was hesitant and unsure of an area outside my period, but Imtiaz convinced us both to work together. Krishna Manavalli taught at Illinois State University as Associate Professor and is now a Professor at Mysore University, in India. She has published internationally and more recently, her work in translation studies between Kannada and English has been widely recognized. Krishna is an acclaimed public intellectual in the humanities in India. I then understood with Imtiaz the value of cross-disciplinary work across periods, especially for mapping colonial trajectories. Following Krishna, I ventured into other Postcolonial dissertations and further interdisciplinary journeys. For this I am grateful to Imtiaz.

Habib’s Archival Turn

The title of Imtiaz’s book is both compelling and prescient (written in 2008); it draws our attention today to the term “Black Lives” and why they matter, as the world is learning of the “untold” stories of discrimination and injustice experienced by them. Why did his book receive scant attention until recently?  In 2018, while writing Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory, I could not track any substantive discussions. But for me, its historical significance was apparent, evoking, “both the range of non-British ‘others’ who were residing in and around London at the time, while showing intersecting, proto-colonial trajectories of England’s expansion from Africa to the East Indies, to North African and Ottoman territories”.[1] Thus, it importantly “refigured our understanding of England’s racial demographic,” while adding to our “archival resources” about the presence of “black lives.”[2] In the end, I found one critical reviewer engaging seriously with the book; she acknowledged Habib’s use of a wide-ranging archive covering varied documents and other material objects, but suggested that 122 of the 448 records were “uncertain” in terms of their “ethnic clarity”.[3] Such an epistemological investment in “factual” certitude was preemptively countered and rejected by Habib in the book itself, when he stated: “To aspire to definitiveness in a detritus of personal, mercantile, legal, and governmental minutiae … because of the accidental, discontinuous, and impossibly dispersed nature of the survival of such details…  [is impossible since they only allow for a] perpetually incomplete recovery”.[4]

Habib’s riposte undermines claims of veracity typically held by colonial archives – such as documents produced by the trading companies and state agents – and which aim to buttress acts of governance with violent effects. Habib’s book, as Rebecca Adusei and Jamie Gemmell remind us, throws light on the archives produced in the “imperial metropole,” rather than only in the colonial centers. Following this argument, it is not hard to see how Habib’s archival “detritus” disrupts and complicates colonial archives “both as documents of exclusion and as documents to particular configurations of power”; thus, viewed in relationship, these two sites of archival knowledge via Habib’s book enable us to imagine the “black lives” at the heart rather than the peripheries of  empire.[5] For instance, following Stefano and Trinculo’s fantasy in The Tempest – of carrying Caliban to England to be displayed like the “dead Indian” –  Habib’s narratives help us to imagine how the British Isles may have been “peopled” with many Calibans, including some who may have even escaped direct servitude in England.

The ‘Many-headed monster’ blog: An ‘Affective Community’

Habib imagines the subjects of his ‘Black Lives’ not as “stray individuals, encountered by few or none”, but rather in terms of a black community, even though their lives were “scattered.”[6] They are meant to denote “a group of people bound by a common history of direct or indirect English enslavement, benign or brutal, and having common ethnic and cultural characteristics”.[7] As contributors to the blog series launching off of Black Lives in the English Archives, what kind of community are we creating? Each blog entry offers a rich engagement with a different discipline and its attendant practices, ranging from gender studies, indigenous studies, and historical forays into black lives in other periods and settings, the eighteenth century, and the Scottish milieu, among others. The fragments of black lives that Habib assembles into narratives seem to have a powerful affective charge. As Hannah Crawforth notes, they seem “to leap off the page, bringing the lives they recount to life.” The community emerging from the ‘Many-headed monster’ series seems to be united by the shared positionalities and perspectives of “early modern Black history and premodern race studies” – with an implicit solidarity with US-centered, presentist Black scholarship. While the blog offerings have been rich, what seems to be missing is any sustained engagement or dialogue with postcolonial theory and history. Habib himself states his approach as marrying the “pragmatism of traditional history with… postcolonial theory in particular” and in Chapter five, entitled “Indians and Others: The Protocolonial Dream,” he charts the presence of “East Indians” as a large group “among people of color present in the archives”.[8]  Overall this chapter describes a “complex heterogeneity of the records of Indians, Americans (who may also be known as ‘Indians’), and other peoples of color,” producing a varied demographic terrain.

Imtiaz Habib’s book, I believe, calls for further conversations between pre-modern race studies and Black history and postcolonial theory and history, two scholarly endeavors that inexplicably seem to have staked their own territories, constituencies, and agendas in the Anglo-American academy. While the “Many-Headed monster” symposium has brought the  imperial metropole and colony within the same archival frame, it needs to include the considerations of early modern globality as well as voices from today’s Global South within a postcolonial context. This effort, I believe, would produce an “Affective Community,” as defined by Leela Gandhi, based on solidarities across transnational, cross-racial, and cross-religious boundaries.[9] Emerging from Derrida’s theory of friendship, Gandhi offers a new model of the political in which friendship across difference is a crucial resource for anti-imperial, anti-racist transnational collaborations.  Africans and East Indians must have encountered each other in England. Imtiaz Habib’s book certainly brings them together via a common history. We should try to do the same.

Click here to see all the posts in this series.

[1] Jyotsna Singh, Shakespeare and Postcolonial Theory (London: Arden, 2019), 68.

[2] Singh, Shakespeare, 68.

[3] Miranda Kaufmann, quoted in Singh, Shakespeare, 68.

[4] Imtiaz Habib, Black Lives in the English Archives, 1500-1677: Imprints of the Invisible (London: Routledge, [2008] 2020), 13-14.

[5] Ann Laura Stoler. “Colonial Archives and the Acts of Governance.” Archival Science, 2, 2002: 96.

[6] Habib, Black Lives, 14.

[7] Habib, Black Lives, 11.

[8] Habib, Black Lives, 10-11, 239.

[9] Leela Gandhi, Affective Communities: Anticolonial Thought, Fin-de-Siecle Radicalism, and the Politics of Friendship, (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2006), 1-15.