Performing Whiteness: Race, Class, and Ceramics in the Shenandoah Valley

Summary

This is an abstract from the session entitled "Critical Archaeologies of Whiteness", at the 2024 annual meeting of the Society for Historical Archaeology.

Archaeologists have studied race in Antebellum Virginia for decades. But these works have focused predominantly on Blackness, and to a lesser extent Indigeneity. Whiteness, however, has been largely ignored, and the few works that have addressed white racial identities have addressed notions of whiteness among local elites instead of the poor and middle-class households living at the margins of Virginia’s plantations. Put another way, we know relatively little about how poor and middle-class white Virginians understood whiteness or if/how they laid claim to this racialized identity. This paper uses data from seven early- to mid-19th-century sites to explore how poor white and middle-class household used ceramic tea and tablewares to performatively enact whiteness in Virginia’s Shenandoah Valley

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for Historical Archaeology 2024   •
• Critical Archaeologies of Whiteness

Keywords

Individual & Institutional Roles

Contact(s): Nicole Haddow