(In)Dependent Selves: Interdisciplinary Perspectives on Life Writing, Slavery and Dependency

This book brings into conversation perspectives from the disciplines of history, literary studies, archival studies and religious studies, and explores the entanglements of life writing and dependency studies. It demonstrates how life writing offers a vital entry point into the lived realities of dependency across time and space. Personal testimonies, autobiographies and archival traces serve here as contested sites of self-representation, revealing as much about the structures of dependency – such as slavery, serfdom, indenture, captivity, debt bondage and coerced labour – as about strategies of resistance, agency and relational and communal self-fashioning.

Contributors engage with a wide range of case studies from North America, West Africa, the Caribbean, Central Asia, Mughal India and Tibet. Together, they probe archival silences, editorial interventions and the interplay between autonomy and dependency that unsettles simple binaries of slavery and freedom, voice and silence, life and death. Uniting this interdisciplinary inquiry is the shared affiliation of its authors with the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS), a research hub dedicated to investigating asymmetrical dependencies in global historical perspective.

The book is designed for advanced undergraduate students, graduate researchers, and established academics interested in the intersection of personal narrative and historical analysis. It will prove particularly valuable for scholars examining questions of agency, resistance and self-representation within contexts of structural inequality. Additionally, the volume serves as a crucial resource for historians, literary scholars, and social scientists investigating the global dimensions of dependency relationships and their documentation through personal testimony.

The chapters in this book were originally published as a special issue of Life Writing.

Pia Wiegmink is Professor of Slavery Studies at the Cluster of Excellence “Beyond Slavery and Freedom: Strong Asymmetrical Dependency in Premodern Societies,” located at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies (BCDSS) at Bonn University, Germany.

Jennifer Leetsch is Junior Professor of Anglophone Literatures and Cultures at University of Trier. Previously she was a postdoctoral researcher at the Bonn Center for Dependency and Slavery Studies, University of Bonn.