Ideas on an Interpretive Framework for Understanding Sites of Convict Leasing

Summary

This is an abstract from the "*SE The State of Theory in Southeastern Archaeology" session, at the 89th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Convict leasing was an exploitative, capitalist-driven system that successfully replaced race-based chattel slavery with class-based rented forced labor in the American South. The system sits at the intersections of race, masculinity, labor, economics, and modernity. It reveals the ways that widely condemned historical practices, such as enslavement, can be repackaged and made palatable for a modern society. In this paper, I explore the ways that materialities from sites of convict leasing, including artifacts, landscapes, and documents, can be used to understand the deeper ideological roles of convict leasing in reifying and upholding institutions of white supremacy, entrenched class systems, and unfree labor into the modern day. I bring together theories on Black feminist archaeology, Black geographies, materiality, abolitionism, critical race theory, and difficult heritage to illuminate the layered social meanings of convict leasing’s material worlds. I apply these frameworks to the example of the Lone Rock Stockade, a late 19th century convict labor stockade in Tennessee, in order to examine how explicit engagement with theoretical frameworks can transform our understandings of historical archaeological sites and cultural processes.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 89th Annual Meeting, New Orleans, LA (2024)   •
• *SE The State of Theory in Southeastern Archaeology

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Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 37879.0