Elucidating processes of objectification, contestation, and repair for African diasporic burial spaces

Summary

This is an abstract from the "Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies" session, at the 90th annual meeting of the Society for American Archaeology.

Human remains occupy a contested status both in bioarchaeology and culturally, wherein the same set of remains can be conceived of as a complex former person or as a disembodied object without depth. This paper explores the contested status of these remains in diasporic contexts by outlining a theoretical model called the “Black Postmortem Subject,” which adapts Martinican philosopher Frantz Fanon’s theories of alienation and spatial compartmentalization to historic Black Ancestors. This model outlines a process for how the objectification of Black Ancestors occurs, in which displacement of Black Ancestors in life and their continued displacement in death are key to their alienation, and the places these Ancestors are (un)buried are a reflection of their ascribed value. The model also emphasizes the importance of time; initial conceptions of the dead versus conceptions that occur long after reveal the tumultuous power dynamics that can alter outcomes for how we treat human remains. These considerations are applied to a case study of Rupert’s Valley, St. Helena, highlighting how fraught notions of identity and kinship, as well as evolving conceptions of value and urgency for the dead, have directly impacted the fates of these Ancestors.

This Resource is Part of the Following Collections

• Society for American Archaeology 90th Annual Meeting, Denver, CO (2025)   •
• Landscapes of Death: Placemaking and Postmortem Agencies

Keywords

Record Identifiers

Abstract Id(s): 50416