Publisher's Synopsis
"The Suicide Archive explores how aesthetic works help us to recognize self-destruction as a practice of freedom and fugitivity in extremis while grappling with the difficulty of writing about this profoundly tragic act. Doyle D. Calhoun reads archival materials, scientific texts, police files, and legal proceedings together with literature, film, and oral history, theorizing a notion of "suicide archives" as plural, fungible formations that keep alive unscripted histories of loss. Throughout the book, Calhoun shows how enslaved Africans reclaimed their stolen bodies through suicide, articulating a demand for Black freedom at and beyond the moment of their death. At the same time, the book shows how literary and visual art addresses the inherent inexpressibility of suicide and the limits of "entextualization." Ranging from the eighteenth-century French Atlantic to modern-day North and West Africa, the study charts a genealogy of anti-co
