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Enslaved by the Church, Sold for the Republic: The Untold Story....
- Nathan Marvin
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Description: I submit to the CDHC Steering and Program Committees a proposal for a presentation on a project-in-progress: a companion website to my research designed with ESRI StoryMaps: https://storymaps.arcgis.com/stories/68ea1822adba48acadb2848f40b29048. This project narrates the circumstances under which a community of bondspeople, claimed as property by the Catholic Church, was reenslaved and sold by agents of the First French Republic in 1793. This project has three purposes: 1) to make a scholarly intervention (many historians have examined the nationalization of Church property during the French Revolution but none has sought to understand what happened to the thousands of men, women, and children claimed as property of the Catholic Church during this moment); 2) to demonstrate the global scale of slaveholding by the Catholic Church in the early modern period, from the Chesapeake to Japan, using interactive maps; and 3) to provide a space for gathering news and other media related to the movement for justice and reparations among descendants of those enslaved by religious organizations. My presentation also seeks to interrogate the benefits and limitations of quantitative and spatial/GIS methodologies for conveying histories of slavery. As Jessica Marie Johnson observes, the data many DH scholars of slavery use as primary sources derive from documents designed to commodify human beings, and we risk reproducing their logics if we approach them uncritically. What steps can we take to mitigate this? How can we use DH methods to center the perspectives of the enslaved rather than their enslavers?