Violence and Remembrance on the Shore: Waterways and the Ecologies of Death and Memory

Session Submission Type: Roundtable

Description for Program

As formulated by Hughes and other Black writers, scholars, and artists, “rivers” and waterways have been places that Black diasporic subjects have developed relationships with and derived deep knowledge from in pursuit of life–sustenance, freedom, and survival. And yet, these same watery scapes and their adjacent shores have also been sites where Black living—in all of its dimensions—have been foreclosed upon. This roundtable interrogates the ways that water and its adjacent landscapes have been sites of corporeal violence and death, as well as remembrance. In examining water and landscapes connected to water—beaches, shores, and riverbanks—we ask, “how have Black people and communities made sense of the dualities of waterways as ecologies of death and sites of life?” We will examine how waterways were routes to freedom and resistance for those with knowledge of waterways in both life and death during the era of slavery, the historical and contemporary relationships between African American Southerners and waterways pre- and post-emancipation, the utilization of shorelines and harbors to examine the lives of enslaved people, and the role ships and shorelines played as sites of violence and containment during the slave rebellions in the Caribbean. In attending to these difficult questions, this roundtable does not seek to sensationalize or spectacularize Black death; rather it bears witness to the stakes of Black pursuits of freedom along the water, as well as the ways in which Black life has flourished in spite of the productions of ecologies of violence and death.

Sub Unit

• ASWAD

Chair

• Mary Amanda McNeil, Tufts University

Presenters

• Hannah Scruggs, National Museum of African American History & Culture

• Marley Lix-Jones, Harvard University

• Kyera Singleton, Tufts University