Racializing Surveillance and the (Re)Production of Blackness in Plantation Landscapes

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Black Studies and Archaeology" , at the 2021 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Studies of plantation landscapes often focus on how enslavers used panoptical lines of sight to control and discipline enslaved people. While this provides powerful ways of theorizing plantations, other aspects of plantation landscapes have gone understudied. More specifically, if we combine archaeological landscapes studies with Black studies’ focus on the ways race is created and maintained, we can begin to address how plantation landscapes (re)produced notions of Blackness that were integral to the institution of slavery. To talk about these processes in more detail, I draw on Simone Browne’s concept of racializing surveillance and Alexander Weheliye’s work on racializing assemblages to theorize how the landscape of Belle Grove Plantation (Frederick County, Virginia) racialized both enslaved and White people in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Black Studies and Archaeology   •
• Society for Historical Archaeology 2021

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology