Slavery Sites:
Commemoration, and Controversies
Wednesdays, 11:00 – 2:00 pmRoom 18, Temple Buell Hall
Instructor: Rebecca Ginsburg
LA 587, section RG/Afro 598
About the Seminar
The physical traces of American slavery are all around us—in the fields in which enslaved people once labored, in the mansions and townhouses in which they served their owners, in the ruins of slave cabins where they raised their own families, and upon the courthouse steps on which they were sold. This interdisciplinary seminar examines some of the theoretical and practical issues that bear on official and unofficial efforts to record and commemorate slavery through the preservation and interpretation of sites and objects associated with slavery.
Some of the issues we’re likely to want to stick our teeth into over the course of the semester are: Why remember slavery? Who should get to decide what gets commemorated and how it gets commemorated? What are the potential audiences of slavery-related preservation or commemoration efforts? Why preserve sites at all, let alone sites associated with slavery? Why commemorate? What is it that individuals or societies do when they commemorate or when they remember? Is there a useful role for forgetting? What can physical sites and material traces do that written texts cannot, if anything? Is there a thoughtful role for the internet and other new information technologies in commemorating slavery? How can sites of slavery acknowledge diverse viewpoints and multiple perspectives? Should they?
Because we currently have only three students registered for the seminar, I would like to approach the schedule and course of readings with great flexibility. Below, I have indicated some general topics that I believe we should cover and some texts that relate to those topics. I would also like for us to consider as a group your suggestions for topics and readings.
I ask that we begin the semester by spending a week or two discussing the Atlantic slave trade itself, to make sure that we share a more or less similar understanding of the mechanisms, geographies, and history of the institution. This will give us a good foundation for spending the rest of the semester considering issues and theories related to the commemoration, memorialization, and preservation of slavery-related sites. I also propose that we consider visiting a nearby site that commemorates slavery. One possibility is the Mary Meachum site in St. Louis.
Seminar Format
I’ll start each seminar session by writing on the board the questions, points, and issues from the readings that each participant wants us to focus on during that period. Please come to the seminar prepared to share your ideas in that respect. As a group, we’ll decide where to spend most of our time, acknowledging that tangents can often lead to worthwhile insights, so being open to letting our discussions be a little loose.
Each student will also turn in a weekly reflection paper and complete an individual project, the scope and assignment of which we’ll determine together. Your individual project should be commensurate with your academic level, with your personal intellectual interests and goals, and with the number of credits you are taking the seminar for. Possible projects include a research paper, an annotated bibliography, an evaluation of an actual commemorative site, a design proposal for an commemorative site, a precedent study of commemorative sites, and book reviews of key texts that are important to you, to name just a few ideas.
At the end of the seminar I will ask you to submit a Portfolio. Please see detailed instructions on the Portfolio below.
Requirements and Grading
· Weekly attendance and active participation. Please read all assigned readings thoroughly before the class meeting and come prepared to participate energetically in class discussion. With such a small number of students in the seminar, we each need to carry our weight.
· Weekly response papers. These should go beyond summarizing the readings. Do not simply report what the author says. Instead, use the opportunity of the response paper to engage in critical reflection of one or two points the author raises, draw out the implications of her or his position, or consider the connection of the reading to your own work or to previous readings. Please do not view these papers as license to “bash” the readings. Each of the authors has something to say and deserves sympathetic and careful attention. Please feel free to include your personal reflections and responses in your papers. Much of the material we’ll be reading this semester is disturbing. There is no reason not to explore the emotional side of slavery, as long as you do so in conjunction with critical readings of the assigned texts.
· Course Portfolio. Your final grade in this class is based entirely on your Portfolio, which should be tailored to your individual interests and position.
Readings
I’ve ordered four books for the seminar. You can get them from the campus bookstore or your favorite alternate book source, or order them from the library:
Stephen Small and Jennifer L. Eichstedt, Representations of Slavery: Race and Ideology in Southern Plantation Museums (Smithsonian 2002)
Gert Oostindie, Facing Up to the Past: Perspectives on the Commemoration of Slavery from Africa, the Americas and Europe (Ian Randle 2001)
James and Lois Horton, Slavery and Public History (New Press 2006)
Saidiya Hartman, Lose Your Mother (Farrar 2007)
Schedule
January 16 Introduction, and some background on slavery
January 23 Background: Slavery and the Slave Trade
January 30 Small and Eichstedt, Representing Slavery
February 6 Some Helpful Theory
· J. John Lennon and Malcolm Foley, “Interpretation of the Unimaginable: The U.S. Holocaust Memorial Museum, Washington, D.C., and ‘Dark Tourism,’ in Journal of Travel Research (1999) http://web.ebscohost.com.proxy2.library.uiuc.edu/ehost/detail?vid=4&hid=106&sid=07907253-ee82-4f94-963c-a1a0a96cf891%40sessionmgr104
· David Thelen, Memory and American History, The Journal of American History 75 (4) (March 1989)
· David Lowenthal, “The Timeless Past: Some Anglo-American Historical Preconceptions,” The Journal of American History 75 (4) (March 1989)
· Paul Connerton, “Social Memory,” in How Societies Remember (1989)
February 13 More Theory
· John Urry, “The Tourist Gaze,” in The Tourist Gaze (1990)
· John MacCannell, “Sightseeing and Social Structure,” in The Tourist (1976)
· Charlene Mires, “In the Shadow of Independence hall: Vernacular Activities and the Meanings of Historic Places,” The Public Historian 21 (2) (Spring 1999)
February 20 Public History and Slavery
· Patrick Hagopian, “Race and the Politics of Public History in the United States,” in Grey Gundaker, ed. Keep Your Head to the Sky: Interpreting African American Home Ground (1998)
· Faith Davis Ruffins, “Mythos, Memory, and History: African American Preservation Efforts, 1821-1990,” in Ivan Karp et al, ed., Museums and Communities (1992)
· Ira Berlin, “American Slavery in History and Memory and the Search for Social Justice,” The Journal of American History 90 (4)
· Edward A. Chappell, “Museums and American History,” in Theresa A. Singleton, ed., “I, Too, Am America,” Archaeological Studies of African-American Life (1999)
February 27 Horton, Slavery and Public History (2006)
March 5 Hartman, Lose Your Mother (2007)
March 19 No class. Spring break
March 26 Slavery Sites in Africa
· Edward M. Bruner, “Tourism in Ghana: The Representation of Slavery and the Return of the Black Diaspora,” American Anthropologist 98(2) (1996)
· Patience Essah, “Slavery, Heritage and Tourism in Ghana,” in Slavery, Contested Heritage, and Thanatourism (2001)
· Sandra Richards?
· Oostinde’s chapters on Africa
April 2 Slavery Sites in the Southern U.S.
· Steven Hoelscher, “The White-Pillared Past: Landscapes of Memory and Race in the American South,” in Schein, Landscape and Race in the United States (2006)
· Barbara Burlison Mooney, “Looking for History’s Huts: An Exhibition Review of Extant Slave Housing,” Winterthur Portfolio (2006)
· David L. Butler, “Whitewashing Plantations: The Commodification of a Slave-Free Antebellum South,” in Slavery, Contested Heritage (2001)
· Jean Muteba Rahier and Michael Hawkins, “ ‘Gone with the Wind’ versus the Holocaust Metaphor: Louisiana Plantation Narratives in Black and White,” in Thomas J. Durant Jr. and J. David Knottnerus, eds. Plantation Society and Race Relations: The Origins of Inequality (1999)
April 9 Some Specific U.S. Sites
· Elli Lester Roushanzamir and Peggy J. Kreshel, “Gloria and Anthony Visit a Plantation: Hisotry into Heritage at ‘Laura: A Creole Plantation’,” in Slavery, Contexted Heritage (2001)
· Michael A. Chaney, “Touring the Spectacle of Slavery at Magnolia Gardens Plantation,” Southern Quarterly 40(4) (2002)
· Eric Gable, et al, On the Uses of Relativism: Fact, Conjecture, and Black and White Histories at Colonial Williamsburg,” American Ethnologist 19(4) (1992)
· Samuel F. Dennis, Jr., “Seeing Hampton Plantation: Race and Gender in a South Carolina Heritage Landscape,” in Schein, Landscape and Race in the United States (2006)
April 16 Slavery Sites Elsewhere
· Oostindie, Facing Up to the Past (2001), remainder
· Graham M.S. Dann and Robert B. Potter, “Supplanting the Planters: Hawking Heritage in Barbados,” in Slavery, Contested Heritage (2001)
· A.V. Seaton, “Sources of Slavery-Destinations of Slavery: The Silences and Disclosures of Slavery Heritage in the UK and US,” in Slavery, Contested Heritage (2001)
· Marge Dresser?
April 23 field trip?
April 30 Specific Controversies
· Slave for a Day
· Sleep in a former slave cabin
· Slave auctions
· Adam Goodheart, “The Bonds of History,” Preservation (September/October 2001)
· Christopher D. Geist, “African-American History at Colonial Williamsburg,” CRM, No. 8 (1997)
· R. Emmett Tyrrell, Jr. “Stinging Portrayal of Slavery,” Washington Times, July 10, 1999
· Dan Eggen, “In Williamsburg, the Painful Reality of Slavery,” Washington Post, July 7, 1999
Portfolio
Your portfolio is your record of your accomplishments in this course. It should include all your written work, your reflections about the material, and your assessment of your intellectual engagement with it. In other words, I want you to use your portfolio to think about both what you learn over the semester and how you learned it.
Of course, each student’s portfolio is going to be different, but at a minimum each portfolio should include the following elements.
1. Cover Page. This should contain complete information on the course, e.g., name, date, title, institution, etc. as well as a table of contents with page numbers of items included in the portfolio.
2. All written work you submitted during the semester. I encourage you to annotate your previously-submitted work with comments about, for instance, how you might approach an issue differently now, how your thinking has changed (or not), pieces of writing you’re especially proud of and why, etc.
3. Your individual project.
4. Analytical Essay. This is a 5 – 7 page essay that summarizes your intellectual development in the course. I advise you to write it only after reviewing all your class notes, your weekly response papers, your project, and the readings, and talking to classmates and friends about the class. The essay is not an evaluation of the class. It is a self-evaluation, and should be personal and critical. You might consider the following questions:
(Many of these are from Patricia Hill Collins’ website. You can view her syllabus at: http://www.bsos.umd.edu/socy/People/Faculty/Syllabi/socy729B_pcollins.pdf)
a. With hindsight, how would you assess the corpus of work that you completed for this seminar? What patterns do you see in your own work? Would you do any of the assignments differently, if you could do them again? If so, how?
b. How did the course readings and discussions shape your thinking? About commemoration and preservation of slavery sites? About other intellectual interests, (e.g. your proposed dissertation topic, papers in other classes, your personal biography)?
c. What did you learn about yourself as a learner this semester? Did you try different ways of approaching the material during the course of the semester? What worked best for you? What worked least well?
d. What are you not sure of at the end of the semester that you may have thought you knew earlier or, perhaps, didn’t know that you didn’t know? At this point, what do you want to understand better? Why? Do you have any burning questions?
5. Optional: any additional materials you feel are germane. These might include research papers or projects from other courses, poetry, fiction, photography (your own or others’) that illustrate how the course impacted your scholarship and/or intellectual production. Make sure you indicate why you are including this material. (You will probably want to refer to it in your essay.)
Slavery Sites Syllabus
Spring 2008
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