Sullivan’s Island Pest Houses and the Corporeal Entanglements of the Slave Ship

• In Event: Anchored and Bound: Reading the Fixed and Movable Landscapes of Medical Isolation in the Nineteenth Century

Abstract

After surviving the deadly Middle Passage, half of all captured Africans brought directly to the New World came through Sullivan’s Island just outside of Charleston, South Carolina. Due to the material proximity of humans, animals, and diseases on board as well as a virulent fear of disease among colonists, black bodies were first housed in quarantine buildings called pest houses before being dispersed to plantations across the South. I argue that corporeal entanglements between enslaved Africans and pest animals coupled with forced stays in the pest houses proliferated metaphorical correlations between blackness and pestilence that continue into present-day America. The unwanted intimacies between rats, cockroaches, mosquitos, diseases, waste, and black bodies in the hold of the ship categorizes them all as “pests,” always “out of place,” and already disposable before reaching American soil. This paper utilizes a feminist new materialist approach to rethink the historical-ecological entanglements between black bodies, slave ships, and pest houses. I pair insect and rodent citations from 18th and 19th century slave narratives with present-day museum interpretation of experiences of the enslaved on Sullivan’s Island. Presently, the National Park on the site of the original pest houses, Fort Moultrie, serves as a monument to American wars since the Revolutionary War and only barely acknowledges the hundreds of thousands of Africans who were forced to cross the border in this specific location. This paper derives from a larger project that unpacks genealogies of marginalization and subjugation of humans and animals through textual, visual, and material culture.

Author

• Lindsay Garcia, College of William & Mary