Travels in Search of the Slave Past: Monuments, Memorials, Sites of Slavery
by Renée Ater, Provost’s Visiting Professor of Africana Studies
Travels in Search of the Slave Past: Monuments, Memorials, Sites of Slavery is about the search for the visualized presence of the slave past in the United States through monument building and memorialization. This project grounds my travels through digital mapping, and it visualizes the monuments, memorials, and sites of slavery through photography and video. Through audio interviews, it includes artists’ reflections on the role of monument building in their practice and the function of representation in their sculpture. Travels in Search of the Slave Past highlights my travels as a form of secular pilgrimage and tourism, explores the role of representation and embodiment in relation to slavery and the black body, and considers the memory work that these objects both accomplish and fail to engage.
Learn more about the author.
My scholarship on contemporary monuments to the slave past lives at the intersection of so many different disciplines: history, art, politics, public humanities, Africana studies. My subject is equally multi-layered and complex. I couldn’t imagine telling a story about sites of slavery within the two-dimensional spaces of a conventional book. Thanks to interactive maps and other digital tools, I’ve been able to see more fully both local concerns and larger networks of visual and cartographic connections around remembering the slave past.
