Toward a Middle/Passage Methodology

The chapter reads the Middle Passage in terms of its central function, Conversion, arguing that both blacks and Indigenous peoples have undergone a Middle Passage. It shows that Indigenous enslavement is a recursively generative context for black enslavement in the Americas. It reads Indigenous labour back into Caribbean history as the first Atlantic and a parallel, contiguous, and continuous mode of work that strategically undoes the telos of the Atlantic proper. Working at the limits of Atlantic Studies and dominant Middle Passage narratives, this chapter continues to develop a method for a new Caribbean labour history by reading together black and Indigenous forced labour as its starting point. The chapter brings the interrelated considerations of Conversion and the labour-work dialectic to bear on an analysis of Atlantic epistemologies that constrain a recovery of Indigenous labour. It shows how to pursue an alternative focused on movements and relation.