Sites of Slavery

Tillet Salamishah Tillet

Description

More than forty years after the major victories of the civil rights movement, African Americans have a vexed relation to the civic myth of the United States as the land of equal opportunity and justice for all. In Sites of Slavery Salamishah Tillet examines how contemporary African American artists and intellectuals-including Annette Gordon-Reed, Barbara Chase-Riboud, Bill T. Jones, Carrie Mae Weems, and Kara Walker-turn to the subject of slavery in order to understand and challenge the ongoing exclusion of African Americans from the founding narratives of the United States. She explains how they reconstruct "sites of slavery"-contested figures, events, memories, locations, and experiences related to chattel slavery-such as the allegations of a sexual relationship between Thomas Jefferson and Sally Hemings, the characters Uncle Tom and Topsy in Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel Uncle Tom's Cabin, African American tourism to slave forts in Ghana and Senegal, and the legal challenges posed by reparations movements. By claiming and recasting these sites of slavery, contemporary artists and intellectuals provide slaves with an interiority and subjectivity denied them in American history, register the civic estrangement experienced by African Americans in the post-civil rights era, and envision a more fully realized American democracy.

Sujets

• Sociologie, société et politique
• USA
• États-Unis
• Migration

Informations

• Publié par: Duke University Press
• Date de parution: 26 juillet 2012
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9780822391869
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Sites of Slavery

    

Citizenship and Racial Democracy in the Post–Civil Rights Imagination

Salamishah Tillet

D u k E u N I v E R S I  y P R E S S Durham & London 2012

© 2012 Duke University Press All rights reserved.

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾ Designed by Jennifer Hill. Typeset in Dante by Tseng Information Systems, Inc.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the University Research Foundation at the University of Pennsylvania, which provided funds toward the publication of this book.

For my parents,

Volora Brîdget Howell

and Lennox Ignatîus Tîllet,

who thoughtfully

nurtured my îmagînatîon,

and for my partner,

Solomon Steplîght iv,

who patîently watched the

words unfold

The paradox is American, and it behooVes Americans to Understand it iF theY woULd Understand themseLVes.

EDuND ORgàN, Amerîcan Slaery, Amerîcan Freedom

xi

1

Ac k n o w l e d g m e n t s

       

I n t r o d u c t I o n Peculiar Citizenships

19o n e Freedom in a Bondsmaid’s Arms ŚaLLY HeminGs, Thomas Jeferson, and the ersistence oF AFrican American MemorY

51t w o The Milder and More Amusing  Phases of Slavery Uncle Tom’s Cabînand BLacK Śatire

95t h r e e A Race of Angels (Trans)ationaLism, AFrican American ToUrism, and the ŚLaVe orts

133f o u r What Have We Done to Weigh  So Little on Their Scale Mnemonic estitUtion and the Aesthetics oF aciaL eparations

169e p I l o g u e The President’s House, Freedom,  and Slavery in the Age of Obama

179 195 217

n o t e s B I B l I o g r A p h y I n d e x