Project Description
Our Mellon-Sawyer Seminar honors the 500th anniversary of the first transatlantic slaving voyage known to have sailed directly from Africa to the Americas by focusing on how public histories emerge from the interaction between academic researchers and descendent communities at four historic sites where enslaved people lived and worked. The four sites—a former plantation outside Houston, a maroon village in Jamaica, a series of quilombos (maroon communities) in Rio de Janeiro, and two slaving forts in Ghana—represent important aspects of the history of Atlantic slavery and, just as important, they remain sites of vibrant community engagement today. We have organized four workshops, one dealing with each site, in which a range of scholars from different disciplines (from both the Humanities and the Social Sciences) will come together with representatives of the local communities to assess what we can know about, and how we can make sense of, the material, textual, and oral traces of the experiences and cultures of the enslaved people who lived and died there. A basic tenet of these workshops is that the reconstruction of these difficult pasts require not only a range of resources (material, archival, oral) but also interlocutors, and that by bringing local communities directly into these debates and discussions, we can truly begin to decolonize historical narratives.
The workshops cross disciplinary boundaries and include archaeologists, art historians, historians, museum studies scholars, and others. There are significant differences in the ‘archives’ of these fields: archaeology focused on the material record; historians, literary scholars and others on the textual/written word; art historians on the visual and built environment. None of these scholars, of course, entirely ignores the other but, despite general recognition that material and cultural approaches can and should be complementary, disciplinary pressures subtly direct most scholars to focus on one approach or the other. By centering our workshops on specific sites, and by bringing together scholars studying the cultures of the enslaved at those sites from different angles, we engender a set of deep and clearly-focused discussions about the complementary insights that different disciplines offer into Diasporic cultures, and, more generally, into the cultures of subaltern groups.
Sites
The historical sites on which we focus offer an ideal opening to deeply embedded communal historical traditions. In each place, local communities have deep-rooted interpretations of the place of bondage and oppression in their own histories. Our workshops bring together representatives of these communities with scholars who are studying the material and textual traces of the communities to engage in prolonged conversations about what those who lived in these places before emancipation experienced.
- Houston – Throughout the nineteenth century, thousands of enslaved people lived and worked on Brazoria County plantations. The story of plantation life is often told through its owners, and historical and archaeological research at these sites is needed to better approach the difficult and challenging narratives of enslaved people. The Texas Historical Commission, in partnership with Rice University, is currently working to develop these sites into nationally significant cultural destinations that utilize the rich historical and archaeological records to document the role of African Americans in settling and developing Texas.
- Jamaica – Nanny Town, a Maroon Settlement formally recognized by the British Crown in 1739, occupies a central place in Jamaican national history, as indicated by “Nanny the Maroon’s” appearance on Jamaica’s $500 bill. The Maroon Heritage Research Project of the University of the West Indies has excavated portions of the site and historians and anthropologists have written extensively about the Nanny Town Maroons.
- Rio de Janeiro – By far the largest port of slave disembarkation in history, Rio’s Valongo Wharf is presently a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Dozens of communities in the city as well as in the interior claim descent of runaway slaves. Scholars from the Present Pasts project have already initiated work with these communities. Rice University recently joined forces with them through its ImagineRio mapping project, but much more can be achieved through the Mellon-Sawyer Seminar.
- Ghana – The points of departure for most enslaved Africans was a series of coastal castles in present-day Ghana. These have been the object of historical, anthropological, archaeological, and heritage research since the 1980s. With recent increases in African American ‘return’ tourism, debates about historical reconstruction and interpretation are common in Ghanaian communities in and around the castles. This workshop will focus on the well-studied Cape Coast Castle and Osu (Christiansborg) Castle, the site of active historical and archaeological research.
Goals and Objectives
In part, we seek to answer classic “academic” questions about how these communities’ histories inform, confirm and alter the ways we interpret the cultures of African-descended peoples in the era of slavery. Engaging with representatives of the communities that include these sites help us, however, to foreground questions about how the answers to these “academic” questions can contribute to and benefit from the communities’ understandings of their own histories. The interchange between academic and communal ways of thinking about the past enrich both, and in doing so, offer an example of how to move beyond narrowly academic studies of the past to engage intellectuals who too often feel excluded from the academy. The resulting dialogue offers important new ways for the histories of these places to be presented to the broader public that visits them. Finally, the lessons learned from this seminar will be organized into an anthology of essays for publication.