Shattering Slave Life Portrayals: Uncovering Subjugated Knowledge in U.S. Plantation Sites in South Carolina and Florida

Abstract

There is an ongoing dialogue about slavery that is moored to ideological, social, and physical remnants of plantations. Scholars are active participants in creating and interpreting representations of postbellum plantations as public heritage sites that shape national memory. What tools and theoretical approaches can inform how we interpret, analyze, and represent characterizations of plantation life today? In this article, I talk about the historical moment in which plantations existed (transatlantic slavery), descendent interpretations, and ways in which descendent memories instruct reconfiguration of systems of categorization today. Research conducted in the three postbellum plantation communities in the U.S. South that are referenced in this analysis-Boone Hall and Snee Farm in South Carolina and Kingsley Plantation in Florida-inform this discussion. [African diaspora, plantations, slavery, national heritage]Each generation assumes the central place of that signifier of slavery, the greathouse, as something to be argued about, as perhaps something over which there has been an argument for as long as anyone can remember, and that something of moral importance about "who we are" depends-not on whether, because we must-but on how we read it.-David Scott, Refashioning Futures: Criticism after Postcoloniality

Decolonizing Ways of Knowing: Heritage, Living Communities, and Indigenous Understandings of Place

“…African labor and ingenuity became central to the economy, craftmanship, and foodways that developed in the South. Their skill set was, in fact, the basis for the region's dominance in the exportation of rice from the 17th to the 19th centuries (Carney 2001;Jackson 2011;Jackson 2012). See Figure 11.…”

Heritage, Tourism, and Race

“…These heroic stories privilege pilgrims, pioneers, and homesteaders; plantation owners; military heroes and presidents; freedom seekers and explorers. They neglect the tech nological, cultural, moral, gendered, and racial histories and tensions of engagement with diverse communities (Jackson 2011a(Jackson , 2011b(Jackson , 2014Finney 2014;Shumaker 2009). At issue, however, is not only a need to focus on the history and heritage of African Americans within the national story but also the fact that U.S. policy and legal codes were based on exclusion, which was manifest even in sites like the national parks, designated for public use.…”

Expanding Heritage Horizons through the Cheltenham: A Diaspora Project

“…The project ultimately completed oral history recordings with Brazilian, Chinese, French, Italian, Polish, South African and Zimbabwean participants, in addition to broader cultural narratives being recorded with the religious communities of the Cheltenham Hindu Temple, Mosque, Synagogue, and Syro-Malabar branch of the Catholic Church in Cheltenham. These environments of cultural practice were of particular value in the identification of ' diaspora spaces' (see Jackson 2011, Scott 1999and Sigona, Gamlen, Liberatore, and Kringelbach 2015, environments in which diasporic heritage narratives could be engaged with, and shaped by those communities, but not answerable to or visible within the controlling influences of the local AHD.…”