Commemorating Slave Resistance

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It's been almost a year since I visited St. Simons Island in Georgia to see the new historical marker devoted to this site, but for some reason, every time I sat down to make a post about it, I couldn't bring myself to do it. Nearly all of the content I post here should come with a trigger warning-- any story of resistance is necessarily a story of horrible oppression-- but this one hits a little harder. Igbo Landing (also spelled Ebo or Ibo) is the location of an 1803 shipboard revolt and a mass suicide of Africans who were bound for enslavement and took to the water in chains rather than allow themselves to be sold into bondage. Below you can see the marker, which was unveiled in May 2022, and a photograph I took at the Historic Harrington schoolhouse, which displays an artist's rendering of the Igbo insurrection by artist Diana Dee Williams. The marker is in a nearby park, but the actual site where the event likely took place on Dunbar Creek is on private land and inaccessible to foot traffic.

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A central feature of my argument about the ways that we commemorate enslaved resistance concerns opacity. Here are some photos I took of a monument in Savannah in Franklin Square which celebrates the "chasseurs volontaires de Saint-Domingue," a legion of Black ("mostly free") men from the French colony that would subsequently become the nation of Haiti. Inside this monument, there seems to be another one that celebrates not these troops' aid of revolutionary forces in the American battle against British forces known as the Siege of Savannah in 1779 (as the monument purports), but rather the Haitian Revolution itself. Is this a subversive celebration of the self-emancipation of the enslaved or is there an unfortunate implication that the Haitian Revolution is merely indebted to its American predecessor in the monument's admission that "Several veterans of the campaign became leaders of the movement that made Haiti the second nation in the Western hemisphere to throw off the yoke of European Colonialism" ?

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In the summer of 2020, en route to document the removal of the Confederate monuments in Richmond, Virginia, I stopped in Savannah, Georgia to see a monument that I had read was an acknowledgement of slavery. I didn't know what to make of this sculpture on the waterfront, which shows a family in modern dress, standing atop a pile of chains. The iconography on the base, of hands clasped in chains and then, freed from chains, clasped in prayer, was oblique, but not in the purposeful way I'm documenting in my book Monumental: Commemorations of Enslaved Resistance (under contract with the University of Minnesota Press.) Some time later, I came across a reference to the artist James Kimble, who was motivated by his disappointment in the Savannah waterfront monument to create his own work, called The Black Holocaust Memorial. The article cited above states that Kimble's "image distinctly contrasts the African-American Monument downtown, which portrays a Black family huddled together in modern dress (the man in a suit and tie) with subtle chains draped around their feet. A quote on the pedestal by Maya Angelou originally referenced the horrific forced journey across the Atlantic for enslaved people but was eventually changed to a message of hope to be more palatable for tourist viewers." This issue of palatability and access deserves more attention than I can give it here. According to the write up in Spaces, Kimble created the work "to be accessible to neighborhood children so they may better understand the history of slavery and the horror faced by enslaved people," and it can be viewed in the alleyway behind his house. On the day that I visited the work, November 24th, 2023 it smelled strongly of paint, as if it had been recently given a new coat. I noticed light features in the sculpture work-- not illuminated-- that weren't present in previously seen photographs, so perhaps the work continues to evolve.  

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On the Nat Turner Bus Tour

I have just lately submitted two chapters and a proposal for my book project, "Monumental: Commemorations of Enslaved Resistance." Part of that material concerns Rick Francis's Nat Turner Bus Tour, which I attended this past February, the first time it has been run since the Covid pandemic. I'm going to save my substantive discussion of this tour and other commemorations in Southampton County, Virginia for the book, but below are a few images and some brief video from the tour. The video was taken as we sat parked near Cabin Pond, (where Nat and his allies met before the revolt) and we listened to Mr. Francis read from Thomas R. Gray's narrative of what Nat saw in the night sky on May 12, 1828 that led to his decision to rebel.

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In Brazil, the many historicizing myths of the enslaved Black woman Anastácia have cast her as saint, martyr, rebel, and heroine. Fro

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The Pregnant Angels of São Francisco

In Salvador, in the Bahia region of Brazil, the church dedicated to São Francisco is one of the highest examples of Baroque-Portuguese architecture, with gilded sculptures carved of wood to look like flowers, angels, birds, and scrollwork. As many have noted, the church is rich with irony because its namesake, Saint Francis, was devoted to the poor, yet it is said to be the most opulent church in all of Brazil, with nearly one ton of gold leaf covering its ornate wooden interiors. The gold was mined by African slaves in the region called Mina Gerais, in the Southeast. But there’s also a matter of some debate, at least among the various tour guides in Salvador — as to whether the church contains traces of an artistic rebellion committed by the enslaved craftsmen who did the intricate carving.   

The angels, I was told when I first visited the church in 2019, were purposefully made to look pregnant by the enslaved persons who did the labor of carrying out the vision of the artists.

One interpretation is that this was a subtle act of resistance to call into question the purity of the church. The portrait of pregnant cherubim materializes the paradox of the São Francisco church in grotesque form: giving glory to God (and to the Saint most associated at that time with the vow of poverty) with a visible display of the labor of enslaved persons, first in the mines, and then in the church itself.

An academic article by Mattijs van de Port confirms this detail about the pregnant angels, if only to trouble the legend:

“Are these angels really angels? Many offer their nakedness to the congregation as ever so many flashers. Some seem pregnant. Some have remarkably erect nipples. Some look at us as would a prostitute soliciting at a street corner. Most of them boast silly smiles and other rather idiotic facial expressions, so stupid that you can’t help thinking that the slaves who did the woodcarving must have had a good laugh mocking the facial expressions of their Portuguese masters (a point that is also stressed by the black tour guides who take tourists into the church and help them ‘read’ the interior).” (p. 69)

The author seems to suggest that the tour guides have invented the narrative of the pregnant angels.[1] Van de Port is more invested in reading the dizzying ocular play of the baroque of the church, and the angels’ undecidability becomes subsumed to this interpretation. The article would be useful to anyone interested in the problematic ways that art historians have discussed the church and especially the insulting characterization of the Brazilian baroque as more sexualized, fecund (as if this were somehow related to blackness and the tropical climate) than even typical Baroque overabundance.[2] I have not yet done substantial research to find out if others comment on the pregnant angels, but van de Port’s article provides a literature review of various takes on the church’s architecture. My next step in researching this will be to follow the sources that van de Port cites, including João Adolfo Hansen’s discussion of the São Francisco church.

But even among tour guides there is disagreement, and some have varying degrees of confidence in this interpretation of the pregnant angels. Some say it was a willful, artful, and subtle act of resistance, calculated to thread the needle of plausible deniability. Others say that the craftsmen had no understanding of what an angel should look like and took as their models for the human form prostitutes in the area, which accounts for the varying sizes of swollen bellies. Of course, there might have been other reasons that most, but not all, of the cherubs, have distended bellies—perhaps it’s malnutrition and not pregnancy that they meant to convey. 

Regardless, there is more overt sex in this church than most. My group was told that the cherubs were initially given sex characteristics by the craftsmen, but this was deemed inappropriate, and the sculptures were eventually castrated.[3] There are also adult female forms with bare breasts, which our tour guide said are meant to approximate “nymphs,” and which I found as surprising as the pregnant putti. There is a Greek tinge to the baroque architecture in the columns, the nymphs (or seraphim?) and cupid-inspired angels. The “Atlantic columns,” so called because they depict a human form at the base holding up the structure, like Atlantis, seem especially apt in this institute of national of historic and artistic heritage (declared as such in 1937). Whether or not the angels are meant to look pregnant, these columns, and the church’s display of colonial wealth, remind us that it was the enslaved body that was supporting the whole of Portuguese Brazil, with its labors.

Works Cited:

Salvador e a Bahia de todos os santos.  Junta de Andalucia, Brazil, 2012.

van de Port, Mattijs. “Golden Storm: The Ecstasy of the Igreja de São Francisco in Salvador da

Bahia, Brazil”in Religious Architecture Anthropological Perspectives; ed. by

Oskar Verkaaik, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam 2013,p. 63-82

[1] No mention of this detail is made in the entry on the church in the guidebook to Salvador’s architecture Salvador e a Bahia de todos os santos, but it is frequently referenced on travel blogs, presented alongside facts such as that construction was begun in 1708 and work on the church said to have taken 150 years; that ceiling paintings were done by noted artist Jose Joaquim de Rocha 1774; that another aspect of the church’s wealth is to be seen in the installation of 37 hand-painted tile murals imported from Portugal in the adjacent convent. For a sampling of such travel blogs, see https://www.bahia.ws/en/igreja-da-ordem-terceira-de-sao-francisco/; https://franks-travelbox.com/en/suedamerika/brasilien/bilder-igreja-de-sao-francisco-in-salvador-da-bahia/; and https://travelswithsheila.com/magnificent-st-francis-church-convent-salvador.html.

[2] See especially on this point discussion of Affonso Avila “hinting at the ‘semiotic exuberance’ of the interior and ‘the insertion of African elements and sensibilities’” and David Underwood, who claimed the Brazilian Baroque “delighted in the tumescence of carnal forms, in the provocative swelling of the flesh’” (qtd. In van de Port, 72).

Photo above by Donyel Hobbes Williams; all others by the author.

[3] This is confirmed by van de Port’s research: “Talento and Hollanda (2008: 79) tell us that many of the angels and cherubs originally had genitals, but these were at some point in time cut off by Franciscan friars, presumably trying to police the boundary between ecstatic worship and erotic stimulation. They were donned with little culottes, which – in a continuation of the striptease act – were taken off again in later stages..” (Page 70)

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Toussaint L'Ouverture is not in the Pantheon.

Somewhere along the way, I was misinformed. I had heard that France had relocated Toussaint L'Ouverture's remains to the Pantheon in Paris. But I couldn't find him in the crypt. In fact, the young steward of the gift shop didn't think that they had any display dedicated to Toussaint L'Ouverture at all. I was surprised and pleased, then, to come across the empty space where the man might have been enshrined, alongside some acknowledgement. What can be seen honoring the hero of the Haitian Revolution in the Pantheon is, importantly, an empty plinth where a tomb might lay.

In point of fact, the idea that Toussaint L'Ouverture be interred there was but a briefly entertained proposal-- see on this point Charles Forsdick's article "The Panthéon's empty plinth: commemorating slavery in contemporary France" (Atlantic Studies, 9:3, 279-297). Forsdick analyzes this absence as indicative of both France's inattention to the history of slavery, but also, symbolically, paradoxically, a gap that opens up a space of possibility (280). As Forsdick notes later in the article, in attending to various monuments devoted to slavery and abolition in France, Achille Mbembe (at a conference at the Quai Branly in Paris in May 2011) cautioned against the "museumification" of slavery, that "the entrance of the enslaved into the museum might be seen as a further act of re-enslavement" (292). Putting these two together, then, the empty plinth might be read as a sign of Toussaint L'Ouverture's marronage: a resistance to his re-incorporation into the glorious memory of French history.

For more on this issue, see not only the aforementioned article by Forsdick but also Nathan Dize's blog post, "MONUMENTAL LOUVERTURE: FRENCH/HAITIAN SITES OF MEMORY AND THE COMMEMORATION OF ABOLITION" from Age of Revolutions, April 9, 2018. https://ageofrevolutions.com/2018/04/09/monumental-louverture-french-haitian-sites-of-memory-and-the-commemoration-of-abolition/

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An illustration of the uses of opacity in commemoration.

I'm researching trends in abstraction within commemorative art and practice. In their very excellent essay (published in 2012 and republished in 2018 in the Journal of Architecture), Stevens, Franck, and Fazarkerley distinguish two different types of counter-monument, which they dub the “anti-monument” and the “dialogic counter-monument.” Along the way, they address trends in commemoration that lean towards “abstract form rather than figuration” (723), and helpfully sketch out what, following Brinda Sommer, they call the much larger category of “new monument art” (722), which includes: “coupled counter-monuments (Gegen-Denkmäler); temporary installations; abstract, decentralized, experiential and participatory memorials; spaces of communicative exchange; spaces where information is provided; and the artistic reconstruction of historical relics and sites” (722).

The formal preference for anti-monumental aspects includes works "that are patently impermanent [to] counter the aspiration to permanence of conventional monuments" (726). Anti-monuments may also include: "voids instead of solids, absence instead of presence … dark rather than light tones, and an emphasis on the horizontal rather than the vertical. Forms may be sunken rather than elevated… shifted off-axis, or dispersed or fragmented rather than unified in a single, orderly composition at a single location. They may be multiple rather than singular” (723).

I'm particularly interested in the ways that abstraction can be used to hold the visitor apart from a history that is very politically charged, as Stevens alludes to elsewhere, ‘the flatness, solidity and geometrical simplicity… prevent the viewer becoming psychologically absorbed in pictorial content and its illusory depth’ (166).

But to this list I want to add another feature to attend to in commemorative works, one that is especially apt for commemorations of resistance: that of opacity. Opacity here means an aspect of the work that renders itself unconsumable; it may involve so many redactions as to be unreadable, for example, or involve such low contrast that it can hardly be seen; it may involve misdirection or defy the user's expectations. And here I offer an illustration from my recent trip to use resources at the Schomburg library and research center in New York.

On the ground floor of the Schomburg Center in Harlem there was a very good exhibit on "Subversion and the art of slavery abolition," but I was struck by a detail that I choose to read as an instance of opacity rather than an oversight. In addition to the wall space of the circular gallery, there were four decorated columns that also showcased material relevant to the display. One of these four is plainly (to my eyes) a detail from an illustration of Nat Turner in the cave, an image that is featured as part of the exhibit in a frame among many other images, and much smaller. But the four columns are identified with a key, and, as is visible here, no column is correctly identified as this illustration related to Nat Turner.

I did make some initial efforts to contact the curator to inquire about this, but ultimately, I choose to read it as an instance of opacity that is in line with a much larger aspect of commemorations of slave resistance: one that may, for example, be about how a community protects its history from appropriation.

Sources mentioned:

Sommer, Brinda. Gesellschaftliches Erinern an den Nationalsozialismus (Berlin, 2007).

Stevens, Quentin. "Nothing More than Feelings: Abstract memorials" Architectural Theory Review 14(2), 156-72, 2009.

Stevens, Q., K.A. Franck & R. Fazakerley, 2012. Counter- monuments: the anti-monumental and the dialogic. Journal of Architecture 23(5), 718–39. 2018.

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Broken Windows

In 2016, an employee of Yale University named Corey Menafee reached up with a broomstick and shattered a pane of glass that depicted two enslaved persons carrying bales of cotton on their heads. The window was made to look older than it was. Created in 1932, the windows that would be installed in the new residential building named for John C. Calhoun were to be in keeping with the gothic-inspired architecture, yet feature scenes of the pastoral south. As John Stuart Gordon writes in The Politics of Glass, “The few panes that included people depicted a view of the South that pastoralized sustained racism under a gauze of nostalgia, in keeping with Lost Cause narratives about the Civil War” (299). Gordon provides a rich analysis of the original pane of glass in the last entry in his book—though the source of the image has yet to be determined, he writes that it “is probably from one of the many biographies of noted Southerners or books on Southern history published in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that…benignly presented slavery as part of the social landscape.” The original window, Gordon writes, was always “broken” (299), with simulated cracks that might have been purely aesthetic, approximating the “medieval windows that have survived centuries of both accidental and intentional damage” (300), a flourish gesturing towards the ersatz Gothic style of the Yale campus. But then again, Gordon proposes hopefully, perhaps the simulated cracks were the glassmaker’s way of providing a “subtle critique of the subject matter” (300).  

In 2021, the building has been renamed Grace Hopper and the windows are being replaced by artist Barbara Earl Thomas, who delivered a presentation called “The Past Holds the Present” at the 2021 Gilder Lehrman Center conference on Yale and Slavery about her artwork that will replace the windows in the newly renamed college. For example, one of these sketches, “What is broken is mended,” a papercut, emphasizes blank space in its construction. In her presentation, Thomas spoke about her intention in replacing the windows as deliberately trying not to erase history but to acknowledge the shift, which is concretized visibly in one medallion where a robin is removing a banner with Calhoun’s name on it, and a hummingbird carries a new banner with Hopper’s name, signifying the change. Her other plans for artwork emphasize our contemporary moment and their relation to our history, as with suppressed civil rights, gun violence, stereotyping. At present, the windows are blank, which to me are effective representations of this period of reckoning. In my book I plan to perform a longer reading of the action of Corey Menafee as a countermonument, the blank windows that replaced those which were marked for removal, and Barbara Earl Thomas’s replacement designs. The two images here are screenshots of this zoom conference recording. Those interested in this should see the recording of this session, available on Youtube, here: https://youtu.be/QIjuScT561g

(See John Stuart Gordon, American Glass and Brighenti, New Haven Independent, “Worker Smashes Racist Panel, Loses Job,” July 11 2016)

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Summer 2020. Much work has been done to chronicle the new monuments that were made by community during the BLM protests. I am particularly interested in attending to the ways that histories of slave resistance were honored in some of these and in ritual practices. For example, here are some images from Summer 2020, in order: pedestal of removed Stonewall Jackson monument and Dustin Klein’s projection of Harriet Tubman onto Robert E. Lee monument (Richmond, VA) (Images 1 & 2). Image 3: plastic flowers tied onto the Historical Marker for the Stono Rebellion (SC);  Image 4, 5: Candles are placed around the Denmark Vesey monument in Charleston, SC, with names of the victims of police brutality written on the sides of them. I also found evidence of multiple offerings and rituals made at the African burial ground near where Gabriel Prosser was hanged in Richmond, Virginia, but out of respect for the sacred, I am not posting these. Photos by myself and Christina Connor. 

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Notes on Alison Saar’s Swing Low

“Virtual Monuments and Memorials: Reimagining Public Monuments”

6/2/2021 Monuments talk sponsored by Art Table, in which Alison Saar shared the story of creating Swing Low’s installation 15 years ago (also featured on the panel was Marisa Williamson).   

Virginia Fields commissioned the piece in Nov 2008. Saar “didn’t want it to be stagnant, but rather interactive” and have a place in the community. She mentions that this came about around Obama’s presidency and a hopeful time. Saar worked with a landscape architect to make a “micro-park,” and wanted to depict Tubman as “an unstoppable train,” so her petticoat is evocative of the cattle-pusher on a train. She wanted the face to represent Tubman’s intensity and power. She also  wanted the work to be reflective of her own work, so the roots coming out of the back of her skirt are sort of in keeping with that, she says, in addition to playing upon imagery of “uprooting” and “root working.” The bronze faces in her skirts are meant to suggest the Spirits of her passengers. (They also remind me of some of the faces in the Amistad monument by Ed Hamilton). Around the base are images representing the ten stations of her life, pictorially, not in language, Saar emphasizes, since she herself was illiterate and they would be more accessible to all people in this form. There is a discussion of the imagery’s reference to quilt patterns as well, and “the debate about them.” But I’m not sure what debate they mean-- perhaps we don’t really know what the different patterns signified to enslaved persons, though I’ve heard it say many times that there was a symbolic code to the patterns. (I’ll have to look into this a bit more.) Saar says that she wanted to encourage people to do rubbings off of the sculpture, so the plates along the base are textured to facilitate that, but interactivity is something I worry about in monuments to slave resistance. Saar acknowledges the complexity of the project and the gentrification of the Harlem neighborhood. For example, she tells us that there were critiques of the fact that Tubman isn’t facing North but South, though she argues that we might read this as Tubman on a return voyage, because she made many journeys, and also emphasizes that she didn’t want Tubman to be facing the Harlem jail.  

The monument has become a space for a garden and for community protestors to meet. During the presentation, there is an image shown of the monument decorated with a pink pussy hat that Tubman was given by feminists: to this Saar responds on the “need to expand our idea of who these monuments are for and who they are not for.” 

These are my own photos from my trip to Harlem in September 2021. 

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Discovering Amistad

More than five years after I went to see the Amistad replica schooner in New Haven, CT, only to discover that the vessel was gone-- an experience that radically shaped my project and led me to attend to absence within commemorations of slave resistance-- I finally caught up with the boat. In Hartford this September, I attended a kind of tour/open house of the Amistad replica schooner as part of the kickoff of events surrounding its stay in Hartford at the Riverfront Recapture. Seeing the replica in person underlined for me that the boat wasn't meant for such a long journey; it is a coastal schooner and was only taking the captives from one side of Cuba to the other when the rebellion occurred. One of the docents, Bruce A. Trammel, Sr. (seen in the photo below) calls himself a “translator” of history, which I appreciated. Another guide referred to the boat as a “recreation rather than a replica” because it has all of the standardized safety features (lifeboats, etc), and even a kitchen and bunks below. I was very interested in the reactions of other people who had come out to see the boat that day (9/12/21). People seemed disappointed that the hold was inaccessible and that it wasn’t built to replicate the enslaved’s conditions, regardless. Another visitor I spoke to expressed disappointment that politicians had been holding events there earlier in the week; she seemed to feel that this was an abuse of its history. (These two details stand out to me because I am interested in people’s expectations for participatory experience in commemorations of slavery and appropriation of slave resistance, more broadly.)     

I also briefly visited the Amistad Center at the Wadsworth Atheneum museum in Hartford. In addition to a few placards about the revolt they have one of Jacob Lawrence’s seriographs, Revolt of the Amistad  (1989).

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Item from Schomburg, Cuban Fugitive Slave Register, 1854. Thinking of Monument Lab’s broad definition of monuments as “statements of power and presence in public” and wondering if we can consider this document’s life online (here) as a monument to the “cimarrones” who escaped from plantations.

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Among so many other things, the pandemic has made archival and in-person research that much harder to accomplish. I was finally able to complete a research trip to visit repositories and libraries in New York and Connecticut after its being deferred for a year and a half. I returned with the intention of doing a series of posts here to help me sort through all of my notes, pictures and discoveries, only to find that it had been so long since I posted that I could no longer remember my password to this website. Those posts will be forthcoming, but this only affirms for me the necessity of my project today. I'm taking a moment here straight off to thank all of the librarians, archivists, and workers at the various institutions who were so incredibly helpful to me. I don't want to forget their names by the time the book I am working on goes to print, whenever that may be.

These are in no particular order, and there are so many other personnel whose names I wish I would have had the presence of mind to collect.

My deep gratitude is due to Lena Newman, special collections librarian at Columbia University and to Rebecca Maguire, Genevieve Coyle, and Dika Goloweiko-Nussberg at Yale. Even though their repositories are not open to outside researchers at this point, they were extremely generous with their time and resources, providing me with digital copies and access and making helpful suggestions. I am very grateful to Yale undergraduate Nat Artz for sharing her photographs with me.

Makoroba Sow, librarian at the Millstein Division of NYPL, and Jay Vissers at the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Picture Collection, both housed in the Schwarzman building, were so kind and their helpful suggestions and problem-solving skills were much-appreciated. At the Billy Rose Performing Arts library, I was so lucky to find Jeremy Megraw, who loves a mystery and enthusiastically jumped into my quest to track down a mysterious playbill from 1843. At the Schomburg Rare Books collection Bridgett Pride, Serena Torres and Cheryl Beredo were incredibly accommodating to me, under the difficult circumstances of coordinating a reading room with limited capacity due to Covid protocols.

At the Jean Blackwell Hutson library in Schomburg, I owe a debt of gratitude to the entire staff, who paged countless books on my behalf every day for the week I kept turning up there. I am very grateful to Auburn Nelso, Troy Belle, Rhonda Evans and the whole staff, including the personnel at the front desk who had to check me in and out, over and over again.

I am very much in the debt of Ed Surato at the Whitney library of the New Haven historical society for his generous help, and to a security guard I'm not going to name, who bent the rules for me, at the New Haven City Hall.

I'm grateful to many others for sharing not just access but also their thoughts, like Bruce Trammell, "translator" at the Discovering Amistad monument that I got to see, finally, in Hartford; artist Dread Scott for his supportive comments on my work and for the helpful introduction to Nina Felshin, with whom I am glad to be connected. I am grateful for the time I spent chatting with the owners of Revolution Books in Harlem, and to artist Steven Montinar, my future collaborator (and I hope, friend) for sharing his worldview with me as we poured over a crumbling document together in NYPL's rare book collection.

My time spent at these various archives was funded by a RISE grant from the University of Tampa, and I'm thankful to the sponsored programs committee for funding it, and to their leadership for being flexible about timelines under Covid. Without the generosity of my home institution for that grant, and the sabbatical period during which I am conducting this research, this couldn't have been accomplished. I am keenly aware of my incredible privilege, and I feel badly that I'm only stating a few names here when there were so many other people without whom I couldn't have navigated these challenges.

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The Brazilian enslaved woman Anastácia was in the news this past week because of a protester’s sign that featured her image along with the caption “Muzzles are for dogs and slaves. I am a free human being.” A very useful thread on this topic was put together by Prof. Uju Anya on Twitter  (@ujuanya). In the spirit of celebrating Anastácia over and above this callous use of her image, I wanted to share this image of a set of zines I bought in Salvador, Brazil last summer. Each one is devoted to a different female freedom fighter and one book is devoted to Anastácia. I was able to buy 10 of the 15 books that comprise the series. It appears from my research that the author has since published these in a single volume. They each consist of a long poem the author, Jarid Arraes, composed about the woman’s life and struggle. Here is my rough translation of the first and third stanzas of Anastácia’s story:

The history of Anastácia

is one of great sadness

that shows without disguise

and also without subtlety

what slavery was

from racism to wickedness.

 ... 

There is no evidence available

Documents to show

But the little that is known

Is better to share

Because her great suffering

We must remember. 

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Harriet Tubman, on the $ and in the streets

Harriet Tubman is having a moment. And it is broader than the now Oscar-nominated film Harriet (2019, dir. Kasi Lemmons), and the recent publication of Erica Armstrong Dunbar’s illustrated biography She Came to Slay: The Life and Times of Harriet Tubman (2019). Various artists have responded to the current administration’s refusal to honor President Obama’s commitment to put Harriet Tubman on U.S. currency.

You might have had the good fortune to have received a DIY Tubman in circulation. After the artist Dano Wall gifted the world with instructions on how to 3D print an ink stamp that maintains the viability of the bill with instructions how to cover Jackson’s face with that of Tubman’s, diverse people began making their own Tubman stamps and bills; Two of the images included here feature this type of stamp. 

(See: https://garage.vice.com/en_us/article/j5wvey/harriet-tubman-stamp) 

But other artists are also responding.

I want to just briefly note here the contributions of street artist Captain Eyeliner (based in NYC), whose stickers and wheatpaste work amplify Tubman as “war hero,” “spy master,” and “epic badass.” Captain Eyeliner also celebrates RGB, Maxine Waters, and AOC in recent work. As you can see from the samples pictured here (kindly provided by the artist) Captain Eyeliner’s depictions of Tubman allude specifically to the Trump administration's refusal to feature her on currency. Other works by the artist discuss climate change, question our society’s tolerance of racism, and advise the smashing of the patriarchy. You can check out Captain Eyeliner’s work on Instagram, or in this recent Vice piece: https://video.vice.com/en_uk/video/pasting-up-with-anonymous-street-artist-captain-eyeliner/5e1771b258f9c132d63b4d72

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Return to the Whitney

I first went to the Whitney Plantation looking for monuments celebrating slave resistance, and I didn’t find any. As a result, most of my notes from that time (I believe, 2015) are about the 1811 Slave Rebellion exhibit at the Destrehan Plantation instead. (See my post on that below, called “A Bicentennial”.) I had some notes on the Whitney plantation’s haunting, empty-eyed statues of children, and some discomfort with the lanyards, which seemed to assign each patron a historical enslaved person. But leave that aside: it’s easy to criticize.

In Cuba in 2018 at the Caribbean Studies Association, I heard a panelist make reference to the 1811 slave revolt monument at the Whitney Plantation. How could I have missed that? Well, the presenter elaborated, in the Q&A, it’s kind of hidden.

In fact, my initial visit to the Whitney predated the monument’s unveiling in 2017: the presenter was referring to Woodrow Nash’s statue of 63 ceramic heads on pikes, which acknowledges the violent aftermath of the 1811 uprising. (See also: http://slaveryandremembrance.org/collections/object/?id=OB0102) In saying it was “hidden” he was referencing some controversy surrounding the installation. The official line from the Whitney staff is that this monument is not included on the official tour only because it was a late addition and there just isn’t enough time on a long walking tour that, for most of the year, occurs in hot weather (pers comm). Others might suspect that the fact that the monument is referenced by tour guides but not included as an official part of the tour is part of a plot to downplay the history of slave revolt. Less offensively, some surmise that its cloistering off the path is just meant to limit complaints from parents, as it is quite gruesome-- although the rest of the tour deals with other horrifying details of the slave trade, the director of operations gently reminded me. Another more generous interpretation might be that the monument is not hidden but shielded behind a high hedge, off the regular path, to create a quiet, solemn space for reflection on these martyrs’ sacrifice and the indignity of the treatment of their human remains by the slaveholders who executed them. 

Regardless, there is an effort made to treat the dead with respect. Yvonne Holden, director at the Whitney, told me that an annual blessing is performed by a local group, and that they have adorned the severed heads with talismans like cowrie shells. I’m doing further research on this aspect of the memorial and the way it renders the monument collaborative. But I should note, too, in closing, that I saw several installations at the Whitney upon my visit this time (in Nov. 2019) devoted to resistance: in the lobby, there were placards devoted to “Suppression and Resistance,” “The Haitian Revolution,” and “The German Coast Uprising.” Most likely these have been added since 2015, but it is possible that last time, I just missed them. 

My thanks to Yvonne Holder, director of operations at the Whitney. Photos are used here with permission of the Whitney Plantation. Photo credit to Christina Connor, my traveling companion.