Leon Kaplan

No Voice in Death? Slave Suicide and Epistemic Violence in the Anglophone Caribbean

My research project seeks to uncover histories of suicide among enslaved people in the Anglophone Caribbean and engage contemporary public discussion on the subject through a theoretical framework of epistemic violence and Critical Archival Studies. Suicide in the early modern period was a highly controversial issue, subject to both religious as well as legal sanctions on the one hand and openly discussed by Enlightenment philosophers and the emerging discipline of psychiatry on the other. Its occurrence among enslaved people, however, was often preemptively denied in public discussion, as Africans were assumed to be immune to what was commonly referred to as a "disease of civilization". The fact that many enslaved individuals took their own lives regardless often provoked confusion and disbelief among advocates of slavery. Reactions ranged from outright denial to attempts at explaining slave suicide as an aberration caused by superstition, mental defect, or sheer stubbornness. Meanwhile, abolitionists sought to use these cases to further their own cause, sometimes appealing to Christian sensibilities of charity by invoking imagery of helpless slaves having no other recourse than self-destruction and sometimes likening them to the 'heroic' voluntary deaths of martyrs and ancient republicans. Enslaved people rarely had the opportunity to speak on their own terms and this was doubly true for when they took their own lives. My goal is to unearth traces of such enslaved voices and their loved ones by drawing from a variety of primary sources, such as the 1788−1792 House of Commons investigation into the British slave trade, plantation records, planters' journals and correspondences, legal documents, newspaper articles, abolitionist literature, and the few Caribbean slave narratives available to us, while reading them with and against the constraints imposed by the archive of slavery and prevailing historical discourses on race and suicide.

2020–2024
MA in Dependency and Slavery Studies, University of Bonn

2017–2020
MA in Languages and Cultures of the Islamic World, University of Cologne (degree not taken)

2014–2017
BA in Oriental and Asian Studies, University of Bonn

since 2025
PhD Researcher, Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, University of Bonn

2021–2024
Student Assistant, Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, University of Bonn