{"title":"Localizing the Narrative: The Representation of the Slave Trade and Enslavement Within Nigerian Museums","authors":"Faye Sayer","doi":"10.1080/21619441.2021.1963034","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2021.1963034","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This paper explores the interpretation and presentation of the transatlantic slave trade in Nigerian museums. It focuses on two contrasting case studies, namely the government-funded Slave History Museum (Calabar) and the privately run Seriki Faremi Williams Abass Slave Museum (Badagry). To investigate the complex and conflicting national and local narrative frameworks by which the slave trade and enslavement are presented to the public, this study focuses on qualitative content analysis of museum displays in addition to visitor observations. Comparative analysis of these museums suggests that this historically complex and emotional heritage cannot be understood in isolation from wider local, national, or global narratives. The paper explores the importance of taking a humanizing and empathetic approach to the presentation of the transatlantic slave trade in museums. I also consider how future practice might include ideas of localization and personalization to decolonize “official” slave trade heritage narratives in Nigeria and beyond.","PeriodicalId":37778,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage","volume":"10 1","pages":"257 - 282"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-08-18","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45904204","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“To Rise from the Darkest Ignorance”: Black Texans’ Engagement with the Politics of Racial Uplift","authors":"Nedra K. Lee","doi":"10.1080/21619441.2021.1932387","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2021.1932387","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Black newspapers are an important yet underused source for historically contextualizing African American sites. The Black press helped shape notions of African American identity and community through philosophies of racial uplift that promoted a vision of Black achievement and citizenship. Although sociologist E. Franklin Frazier criticized the Black press as elitist, I suggest that non-affluent African Americans were also invested in tenets of racial uplift. To demonstrate this, I examine five Black Texas newspapers and oral histories in conjunction with artifacts recovered from the Ransom and Sarah Williams Farmstead, a postbellum site in Travis County, Texas. The evidence suggests that emancipated Blacks, even in seemingly remote rural communities, mobilized around principles of racial uplift through education, consumer behavior, and religious devotion. I use the newspapers to contextualize the archaeological evidence and highlight the overlaps between messages of racial uplift in the Black press and the actions of the Williams family.","PeriodicalId":37778,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage","volume":"10 1","pages":"232 - 256"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-06-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/21619441.2021.1932387","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45072036","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction: African Cities and Urban Slavery in Historiographical Perspective","authors":"E. Mcdougall","doi":"10.1080/21619441.2021.1977489","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2021.1977489","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This introductory essay explores the rich historiography lying at the intersection of African urban and African slavery studies. How does the study of slaves, former slaves and those of slave descent in urban environments help us understand emancipation in Africa? How have those experiences of historical and contemporary emancipation shaped African cities? Case studies from Gambia, Mauritania, Niger, Tanzania, and Madagascar address these questions. Contributors question long-held assumptions about cities providing autonomy, anonymity, and prosperity to those of slave origin. They suggest that interconnections between the rural and the urban are both material and ideological; moreover, memories and traditions travel the same migration paths as people. Thus, life histories tracing individual trajectories are key to revealing the humanity of urban slavery. As important as recent cultural studies are, however, labor—what people do, why they do it, and who they do it for—remains central to the urban “post-slave” experience.","PeriodicalId":37778,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage","volume":"10 1","pages":"1 - 45"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-05-04","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"46686228","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“Take Heede When Ye Wash”: Recognizing the Labor of Enslaved Laundresses on Southern Plantations","authors":"Karen E. McIlvoy","doi":"10.1080/21619441.2021.1908774","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2021.1908774","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Laundry represented a significant portion of the domestic labor on nineteenth century plantations. However, despite the ubiquity of their task, enslaved African American washerwomen have been neglected in the historical study of plantation labor. By situating archaeological interpretations of enslaved labor within the historical context of laundry, archaeologists can better incorporate this oft-overlooked chore into interpretations of female labor on Southern plantations. Using this technique, this article explores laundering at Poplar Forest, Thomas Jefferson’s retreat home and plantation in central Virginia.","PeriodicalId":37778,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage","volume":"11 1","pages":"130 - 155"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-04-08","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/21619441.2021.1908774","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"49337684","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Sharing Hidden Histories: The XRchaeology at Miller Grove, a Free African American Community in Southern Illinois","authors":"Kayeleigh Sharp, M. R. McCorvie, M. Wagner","doi":"10.1080/21619441.2021.1902706","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2021.1902706","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT XRchaeology at Miller Grove is a web-based collection of new media components, including digital storytelling, geographic information systems, virtual tours, three-dimensional objects, and web-based virtual reality presentations. XRchaeology contributes to revisions of traditional narratives about free African Americans and the network of escape routes referred to as the Underground Railroad (UGRR). This project focuses attention on potential African American “conductors” in the UGRR and resituates African Americans as the agents of their own freedom. XRchaeology emphasizes that freedom was achieved across a continuum shaped by social, economic, and legal biases and anti-immigration sentiments. The XRchaeology application is designed for both traditional learners and non-specialist members of the public, as the project facilitates self-directed learning and evidence-based inquiry for all interest levels.","PeriodicalId":37778,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage","volume":"12 1","pages":"5 - 31"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/21619441.2021.1902706","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44972014","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Archaeology of Enslaved Women’s Resistance in the Great Dismal Swamp","authors":"C. Goode","doi":"10.1080/21619441.2021.1894539","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2021.1894539","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Under the conditions of corporate slavery in the Great Dismal Swamp, enslaved women transformed the mechanisms of capitalist exchange into resistance. Archaeological evidence from Dismal Town, a late-eighteenth-century corporate plantation, shows that enslaved women consumed ceramics and clothing adornments that signaled social equality. Their participation in mass consumption was an act of resistive consumption that allowed them to imagine and enact a life outside of slavery, despite their being considered as commodities and exploited for productive and reproductive labor under harsh conditions by the Dismal Swamp Company.","PeriodicalId":37778,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage","volume":"11 1","pages":"156 - 180"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-31","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/21619441.2021.1894539","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"44884265","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"“But I Am Confident: God Will Not Leave Us This Way”: From Slavery to Post-Slavery in Nouakchott’s bidonvilles, Mauritania","authors":"E. Mcdougall","doi":"10.1080/21619441.2021.1878794","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2021.1878794","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT This article analyzes the urban growth of Nouakchott, capital of Mauritania, between 1960 and 2016. Growth was shaped both by in-migration driven by recurrent droughts, and by the end and subsequent transformation of slavery. Living in Nouakchott’s poor, unplanned bidonville neighborhoods influenced how slaves and slave descendants saw themselves, especially in relation to former masters. Some joined impoverished but non-servile cultivators and herders working in the informal economy. Others used Islam to claim their former masters’ continuing protection. Still others used the urban environment to negotiate new social roles and relationships. Since the 1990s, bidonville life has also shaped how hundreds of thousands of voters expressed themselves at the ballot box. In 2007, this power extended to electing the President himself. This history illuminates how the intertwined transformations of Nouakchott as an urban living space and slavery as a social institution explain Mauritania’s contemporary “post-slave” identity, tensions, and political volatility.","PeriodicalId":37778,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage","volume":"10 1","pages":"161 - 190"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2021-03-29","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/21619441.2021.1878794","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"48794572","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"To be Welcome without Reservation: Seeing a Future for Archaeology at Mount Clare","authors":"Teresa S. Moyer","doi":"10.1080/21619441.2020.1850057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2020.1850057","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT The Mount Clare Museum House in Baltimore, Maryland has potential to offer a new approach to community service in Baltimore inspired by archaeological findings, but one that is different from a traditional historic house model. Facing challenges surrounding relevance and institutional survival, the site as a museum sits at a crossroads. The site managers of Mount Clare, a former plantation, historically erased and muted Black histories. However, those histories now drive the rejuvenation and reinvention of the museum. The move of the archaeological collections to the city’s control opens possibilities for more connected archaeological and community service program with the people who live around and use Carroll Park.","PeriodicalId":37778,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage","volume":"12 1","pages":"56 - 78"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-12-16","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/21619441.2020.1850057","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43136277","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Pasts Lost: The Wye House Plantation as a Place of Haunting","authors":"E. Pruitt","doi":"10.1080/21619441.2020.1840835","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2020.1840835","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Much of what we know about the Wye House Plantation in Talbot County, Maryland in the nineteenth century comes from the writings of Frederick Douglass, who was enslaved there. His descriptions of the landscape serve as a starting point for thinking about the past experiences of the enslaved people within this place. The terror and violence that the landscape represented in slavery conjures up not only the events of the past, but also the ways that trauma echoes throughout generations. Using Douglass’ autobiographies, archaeology, landscape studies, the works of Toni Morrison, and ideas about the hauntings of place, there are ways to think about this plantation as a landscape of irreparable loss, but also of return and resolution.","PeriodicalId":37778,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage","volume":"11 1","pages":"74 - 92"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/21619441.2020.1840835","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43572404","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Plantation Roads and the Impositions of Infrastructure: An Archaeology of Movement at Good Hope Estate, Jamaica","authors":"H. Bassett","doi":"10.1080/21619441.2020.1840834","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/21619441.2020.1840834","url":null,"abstract":"ABSTRACT Studies of plantation surveillance have provided important understandings of the material dimensions of elite power and control over enslaved people. These studies have emphasized inter-visibility of managerial housing and the living/working spaces of enslaved people, as a panoptic strategy to enforce self-discipline. This emphasis on inter-visibility of living and working spaces, however, assumes a static population, rather than a complex, industrial society in motion. Using Space Syntax analysis, cartographic records, historic travelers’ accounts, and landscape documentation, this study addresses surveillance and planter control through a mobilities approach, elevating the status of road networks, while identifying the plantation as a carefully orchestrated landscape of movement. I demonstrate how understanding the manner in which movement is limited or itinerated, and for whom, represents a productive avenue of research at the intersection of inequality, control, and mobility. This approach is developed through a distinct archaeology of infrastructure.","PeriodicalId":37778,"journal":{"name":"Journal of African Diaspora Archaeology and Heritage","volume":"11 1","pages":"48 - 73"},"PeriodicalIF":0.0,"publicationDate":"2020-11-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"https://sci-hub-pdf.com/10.1080/21619441.2020.1840834","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"45817955","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}