Roots in the Air: How Black Women Unsettled Archives of Atlantic Slavery

The archive of Atlantic slavery performs, at every turn, the anxious lie of its authority. Roots in the Air counters this official fabulation with its critical mirror: the freedom practices of enslaved Black women who refused to stand still inside the fictionalized records of their lives.

Using a literary-historical lens, Nihad M. Farooq highlights how the everyday actions of Black women—including rumors and rituals, letters and testimonies—exposed the failure of these static records to capture women who moved as roots in the air, unsettling official documents of captivity and surveillance.

Working at the intersection of archival history, Black feminist thought, and literature—from legal documents and colonial orders to the works of Harriet Jacobs, Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead, and Fabienne Kanor—Farooq insists on alternate understandings of diasporic movement beyond the frame of archival capture, offering a vital rethinking of Black women’s agency through the power of the unverifiable.