Reconstructed Slave quarters at Carter’s

Grove

•http://sombra5.lbbhost.com/cartersgrove.html

The Life of Carter’s Grove

• Nostalgia

• http://www.cartergroveplantation.com/about.html

Slavery at Monticello

Mulberry Row today

Slavery at Monticello

Slavery at Monticello

For the museum to continue to these intact spaces for redundant toilets, break rooms, and storage is frankly outrageous (Chappell 199:251)

The Death of Carter’s Grove

• http://www.architectmagazine.com/industry-news.asp?sectionID=1006&articleID=652474

• To see sites themselves as artifacts both about and of the making of the African Diaspora

African Archaeology

• Shephard, Politics of Archaeology in Africa• 3 sorts of politics

– Inadvertent: implicit colonialist, nationalist, and imperialist politics revealed in the results

– Crisis in resources and illicit trade in artifacts– Overt politics

• In academic conflicts, esp. apartheid, WAC

• Through an engagement with memory and identity

African Archaeology

• Shephard, archaeology and colonialism • Draws on Mary Louise Pratt:

– Science and conquest

– Deployment of enlightenment, specifically Linnaean, categorization of nature as a “finite totalizing order”, including indigenous and ancient people

– Pratt calls this an anti-conquest, couched as discovery

– Perhaps also a post-conquest: appropriation and displacement of indigenous knowledge with universal scientific knowledge

African Archaeology

• Shephard, archaeology and colonialism

• Knowledge and power– The ability of colonial powers

and settlers to assert their conception of Africa as superior to the native African

– Based in archaeology:– “The architecture at Great Zimbabwe …

strikes me as the product of an infantile mind, a pre-logical mind, a mind which having discovered the way of making or doing a things goes on childishly repeating the performance regardless of incongruity” (Thompson 1931)

• North American pyramidal and effigy mounds

• Early archaeologists concluded they were built by an imaginary race that preceded the savage Native Americans– Vikings, Lost Tribes of Israel

• The Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints (the Mormons) believes that Jaredites came to America about 2000 B.C. building a thriving civilization that was destroyed in a great battle at Hill Cumorah. They were followed by the Lamanites and Nephites who became the Moundbuilders. The Lamanites became red-skinned to mark their sins. Warfare broke out, with the Lamanites eventually winning. Mormon people are rightful heirs to Nephite cultural dominance

Moundbuilders, race and archaeology

African Archaeology

• Shephard, second colonization • Non-African archaeologists still set the agenda for

research• Research treats rural African cultures as timeless

survivals from the deep African past• Illicit looting of artifacts driven by largely

EuroAmerican collectors market

Roots Tourism

Roots Tourism• Saidiya Hartman, The Time of Slavery• Critical of African American roots tourism

– Based on the construction of a timeless Africa as unchanged since the slave trade

– Staged encounters with the past, a return to place they have never been

– A fantasy of origins and the simulation of intactness, despite slavery and the real histories of African America and West Africa

– A mourning of the dead by taking their place• Need to know how “slavery” and “Africa” are

employed among in the connections between pasts, presents, and futures

• Look more carefully at separation vs. integration

Roots Tourism

• Osei-Tutu, Transnational construction of the Diaspora in the face of Africa itself

• Who has the right to represent the monuments?• Ghanaians claim they do:

– Rehabilitated castles into tourism destinations with thriving resource-based tourism industry attached (e.g., comparable historical and modern sites, tropical forest and water eco-tourism)

• African Americans felt excluded – Highlighted whitewashing and commercialization

as a debasement of the site’s solemnity and origins

Roots Tourism• African American ethnocentrism

– Elide African history of castles after the slave trade– Don’t recognize themselves as outsiders, despite being

called as such: • Oburoni; foreigner, white person• asika fo amba ntem; rich ones who came too late

– Assertion of their spiritual return– Also charity: providing tourism revenue; educational gifts;

African American Association of Ghana classroom storming

– African Americans are looking backwards while Ghanaians are looking forward

– Af Am accepting if not embodying a conception of heritage that denies the African American/Diaspora present history in favor of origins

Beyond Heritage• Writing about fact and feeling

in public archaeology:• In reference to the politics of

making sites in the contexts of African Diaspora communities– People without history– Race and racism– Exclusion– Poverty– Signification– Community knowledge and

inter-subjective engagement and imagination