Challenges the archive of Atlantic slavery through the movements and refusals of enslaved Black women

The archive of Atlantic slavery performs, at every turn, the anxious lie of its authority. Roots in the Air counters this official fabulation with its critical mirror: the freedom practices of enslaved Black women who refused to stand still inside the fictionalized records of their lives.

Using a literary-historical lens, Nihad M. Farooq highlights how the actions of Black women—from rumors and rituals to letters and testimonies—exposed the supposedly static record of Atlantic slavery as a failed hushing of movements, large and small, that could not be stilled. Farooq invites readers to imagine these women—moving across oceans and woods, through words and whispers—as roots in the air, grounded not in archival stasis, but spread across and beyond official documents of capture and surveillance. Roots in the Air thus prioritizes the power of diasporic dispersal and fragmentation, revealing how enslaved women of this era refuted and unsettled the petrifying logic of plantation life and its records.

Working at the intersections of archival history, Black feminist thought, and literature—from legal documents, confessions, and colonial orders to the works of Harriet Jacobs, Toni Morrison, Colson Whitehead, and Fabienne Kanor—Farooq insists on alternate understandings of diasporic movement beyond the frame of archival capture. In doing so, Roots in the Air offers a vital rethinking of Black women’s agency through the power of the unverifiable.