This special issue of Social Text takes as its starting point the generative tension between recovery as an imperative that is fundamental to historical writing and research, and the impossibility of recovery when engaged with archives whose very assembly and organization occlude certain historical subjects. Responding to recent debates among scholars of Atlantic slavery and freedom, it approaches archival silences and secrets not simply as antagonistic to our desire to recover but also as a beginning. The articles gathered in this issue thus foreground methodological experimentation at the boundary of archival impossibility. They develop new approaches--to archival geographies, designs, reading practices, and affect--that illuminate forms of black politics beyond narratives of radical redemption or liberal inclusion
