In Articulo Mortis

The Suicide Archive begins in Guadeloupe, in 1804, in the wake of the reestablishment of slavery in France’s colonies (1802), with the trial of a dead man. Drawing on the bare archival trace of the suicide of an enslaved man named Azor, whose act of self-destruction was tried publicly as a criminal offense, the introduction examines the paradoxes of suicide under slavery in the French Atlantic World. Across a variety of sources—legal documents, colonial insurance policies, medical treatises, abolitionist tracts, reports from ship captains—this chapter demonstrates the extent to which Europeans worried about and dissertated on slave suicide and how vehemently and violently enslaved people were willing to die by their own hands and on their own terms. The introduction lays out the wide historical and geographic scope of The Suicide Archive and introduces its major theoretical concepts: “suicide archive,” “suicidal resistance,” and the “rhetorical force of suicide.”