#colonial classification

For students of the African diaspora, recovery of history remains a central preoccupation. But recovering histories of slaves and freedpersons also poses a formidable feat. 'Africans'—an invention of the West—became 'slaves' and 'blacks' after they were rendered into commodities and removed from the land of their origins. They subsequently entered the absolutist archive as objects largely divorced from the material and ideological world of any past but that to which their owners ascribed. Can the recovery of history avert the impact of colonial rule on the formation of an archive? **Can historians produce an unmediated past capable of restoring subjects, agency, and narratives when absolutism constructed these very categories? I argue that it is impossible to recover an authentic and unmediated past since the fragments on which historians must rely emanated in regulation.** The genealogy whereby 'Africans' became 'slaves' and 'blacks' serves as a powerful reminder that the history of the enslaved and their descendants—free and enslaved—cannot be disengaged from the dominant historical process. As Franz Fanon, the theorist of black existentialism, observed, 'the black soul is a white man's artifact.' Though commenting on the late modern experience, Fanon understood that discerning a pure 'experience' represented a quixotic quest akin to the act of authentic recovery—arguably social history's defining mission. [Para.] **At best, we can hope to contextualize the African past by delineating how, when, and why specific categories emerged.** Given, as we shall see, the contingent nature of defining 'black' (*negro*), 'black creole' (*negro criollo*), and 'mulatto' (*mulatto*), among other terms, social labels never acquired fixed meanings. The instability informing the classification process serves to question the existence of distinct African, slave, and black identities. Efforts to harness the surviving fragments in order to produce a history of the African diaspora requires careful attention to the overlapping ensemble of texts, traditions, and regulatory practices that constitute a discursive domain, that field of meaning through which specific terms, symbols, and behavior take on and impose significance.