Traveling Theory: Mark Leone, Slavery, and Archaeology’s Critical Imagination

Abstract

This article presents considerations inspired by Mark P. Leone’s keynote address at the African Diaspora Archaeology Network Forum convened at the 2012 Society for Historical Archaeology annual meeting in Baltimore, Maryland. Leone’s reflections raised poignant historical and conceptual questions, with relevance for the historical archaeology of African experience and critical scholarship on African diasporas. In a more disciplinary reading, the symposium offered a fascinating look at Leone’s intellectual method and theoretical project, with relevance for the history of archaeological thought.

Keywords:

• critical theory
• slavery
• comparative and contextual analyses

Acknowledgements

I wish to thank Christopher Barton for inviting me to participate in the 2012 ADAN Symposium, and Chris Fennell for encouraging me to publish this article in this journal. I am grateful to Paul Mullins for his enormously useful (and wonderfully sardonic) review of the original submission, which forced me to think more fully regarding the politics of scholarship about slavery. My thanks to an anonymous reviewer for pointing out some omissions in the arguments, especially the question of inclusion in critical theory. Their critical remarks have considerably expanded and improved the scope of this article. I hope that the revised version has done justice to their insightful comments. Many thanks also to Mark Hauser for providing comments on an earlier version of the manuscript. Finally, I owe an enormous debt of gratitude to the participants in the “Anthropology and Critical Race Theory” seminar I was lucky to supervise in the Fall of 2012. Supervision, here, is a woeful misnomer, for I learned a great deal more from Christien Tompkins, Kaya Williams, Karma Frierson, Annelise Morris, Jay Schutte, Nicholas Carby-Denning, and Molly Cunningham than they did from me. The stimulating conversations we had over the course of the quarter are present in almost every line of this article.