‘Runaway’ Ads as Records of Life Writing: Ariadne's Story

This article explores the methodological and epistemological issues of using colonial records of violence from the Caribbean as a starting point for life writing about the enslaved. It does so through the case study of Ariadne, a 12-year-old Barbadian enslaved girl, whom we briefly encounter in a ‘runaway’ ad, placed in the Barbados Mercury, and Bridge-Town Gazette in January 1807. Meant to serve as an implacable tool for ensuring her identification and capture, the ad offered detailed dehumanising and intimate information about Ariadne, her family and support network, as well as the rewards for her capture. This article explores Ariadne’s ad as an archival record, thus not only focusing on its informational content, but also on the sociotechnical aspects of its creation, preservation and transmission. It contextualises the ad by examining the ways it has been preserved and is made accessible to us today and the multiple communities coalescing around it. Finally, this article examines how what I call ‘record-keeping or archival dependencies’, i.e. the practices, processes, actors and infrastructures that sustain and provide access to the historical record, shape knowledge production about the past, define the limits of what is retrievable and affect life writing about the enslaved.