On the back cover of Sara E. Johnson's phenomenal new work, Jennifer L. Morgan declares, “This is the book we have been waiting for.” That blurb is no exaggeration. In this beautifully written, brilliantly framed, painstakingly researched communal biography, Johnson makes critical interventions to Black studies, Atlantic history, and comparative literature. She does so by working across visual mediums and alphabetic languages (Dutch, English, French, Kikongo, Kreyòl, Mandarin, Spanish) that are preserved in and omitted from archives in and about the eighteenth-century Caribbean, metropolitan France, and the multilingual book market of Philadelphia.
Each intervention—pertaining to frame, art, and language—relates to the others. Whereas the historiography has long focused on actors like Médéric Louis Élie Moreau de Saint-Méry, a multilingual scholar, proslavery advocate, avid bibliophile, and sadistic violator of human rights—in sum, “a repugnant man”—Johnson shows why traditional biography is methodologically and ethically inadequate for Caribbean history (p. 237). Here, instead,...