Pandemic Parallels: The Black Feminist Necropolitics of Excavating Cholera in the Time of COVID

Summary

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

“The despair and deplorable conditions within which the black community continued into the realm of death and burial.” While Steven J. Richardson offered these words in 1989, their essence still rings true today. Over the past decade, skeletal remains of nearly thirty individuals have been discovered underneath the 3300 Block of Q Street in Washington, DC. Mortuary and documentary evidence place associate that these burials are likely associated with the cholera pandemic of 1832. In this paper, I argue that Black Studies frameworks offer alternative and innovative approaches that broaden the scope of bioarchaeological research. This paper seeks to explore the interventions that Black feminist articulations of necropolitics make within the studies of Black and otherwise marginalized burial grounds. In line with the conference theme, it is my hope that these interventions reveal the continuum of violence that renders black(ened) peoples most vulnerable amid past and current pandemic crises.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

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

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Contact(s): Society for Historical Archaeology