Against the Silence of the Sea: Voicing the Histories of Maritime Slavery

The 'Against the Silence of the Sea' project emerged from a different kind of encounter than I had previously worked with – one with silences and gaps in the historical record. While working as part of the Abolition Songs and its Legacies network, I began to explore the ways maritime slavery is remembered (or forgotten) in music. What happens when there are no songs preserved in the archive? How do we write about musical histories that were shaped by violence, silence, and survival?

That inquiry led to the development of 'Against the Silence of the Sea', a monograph that rethinks the Atlantic slave ship not just as a vessel of horror and incarceration, but also as a space of cultural, sonic and performative life. The maritime world, especially during slavery, is often imagined as a void – an in-between space connecting plantations and ports. But, in fact, ships were densely layered environments where music, sound and ritual were used both to enforce discipline and to resist it.

Through four interlinked chapters, the book weaves together performance theory, sound studies, diaspora theory and spatial analysis to offer what I call a ‘hydrographic epistemology’: a way of knowing shaped by drift, motion, echo and improvisation.

Some of the key questions I ask include:

• How can we listen for enslaved voices in maritime space, even when the written archive is silent?
• What did shipboard soundscapes actually feel and sound like, from the rhythms of forced labour to the improvisational strategies of survival?
• In what ways were ships cultural worlds – liminal, violent, but also sites of memory, identity and sonic resistance?

The work engages deeply with theorists like Christina Sharpe, Paul Gilroy and Saidiya Hartman, and contributes to ongoing conversations about how to study contested pasts through performance, sound and embodied knowledge. I’m currently preparing a monograph proposal, and the manuscript is scheduled for completion in late 2026.

If you’re a scholar, artist or educator working on Black Atlantic studies, maritime history or the sensory humanities – and especially if you're interested in how performance can serve as historical method – I’d love to hear from you.